Ommmm my god, this is boring

Dr. G., my doctor, not the Orlando medical examiner, believes that my body is in a state of neural windup. I already knew this, I just didn't realize it had a name.

Central nervous system windup occurs when nerve damage combines with external stressors (good old-fashioned stress), keeping the nervous system in a hyperstimulated state. After reading about this, I've learned a lot about the central, peripheral, autonomic, and sympathetic nervous systems. They chat a lot amongst themselves and they are prone to spreading false information and then acting on it. Sort of like the people who forward urban legend emails before they've checked out whether the story is actually true. The more wrong information they send, the more overstimulated the nerve impulses become.

My bipolar disorder has been part of this campaign of neural excitability, simply because its etiology is deep inside the central nervous system. The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone...Dem bones are OK, but the nerves are running amok. My mood is caught in the crossfire. At least I'm aware enough to know where the BP flare-up is coming from.

Medications aren't helping much. The BP ones are hanging on, but the things that have been prescribed to reign in the nervous system's firestorm aren't very effective at all. The problem is stress. The stress is aggravated by a brain that can't slow down and hasn't been processing electrical signals correctly for quite some time now. The production of mast cells could very well make the pain permanent. The question, then, is: How do you slow down a brain that can't differentiate between alarming news and normal sensory input?

The answer is: Meditation. Mindfulness. Breathing. Quiet centerdness. Shinzen Young.

Shinzen Young is a meditation master who also happens to have done a lot of work in the area of psychologically based pain management (He is not Asian but might want to be). The idea is to become aware of the pain in a more conscious way and then learn to acknowledge the body in order to talk it down off of the precarious nervous-system window ledge.

Whether my mind goes to my happy place, my safe place, or no place in particular, I am skeptical that examining my pain will make it go away. Stopping over at PsychCentral, my research turned up this information:

One way to practice mindfulness is to use the breath as an object of awareness. You can place attention at the tip of the nose or the belly and as you breathe in, just acknowledge the breath coming in and as you breathing out just acknowledge the breathe going out. As if you were greeting and saying goodbye to an old friend. When the mind wanders, as it will always do, just say to yourself “wandering” and then gently bring your attention back to the breath just noticing it coming in and going out. Most of us catch the mind wandering and gently bring it back billions of times, so know that it is normal for the mind to wander often. You can do this for as little as 1 minute or as much as 30 minutes or more.

I am a loud breather. It distracts me when I use my iPod. My nose is in a permanent state of quasi-congestion and inflammation, bot of which are exacerbated by the dry climate here. I was encouraged by PsychCentral's assurance that we all have wandering minds to rein in, so I bought the Shinzen Young book, the CDs, and the companion materials. I read, I studied, and I set about centering myself in search of serenity. I learned something:

I am a failure at meditation. My mind can't focus on only one thing nor can it find a mantra that doesn't eventually sound idiotic. As I sit in a state of pseudo-calm and concentration, I find my mind sneaking off to make a little to-do list on the side. Or to design a piece of jewelry. Or to solve a household problem...I can't sit still. It feels like time leaking down the cosmic drain. I have things to do. No, May, this is your thing. Sit still. Be.

I... am. I am falling asleep. I am bored. I am obviously missing the point. How do people do this and find therapeutic value? It seems like a bit of a scam. I know this is supposed to help me, but no matter how hard I try to embrace the Zen, I always find I'd rather be doing something else.

Meditation bores the crap out of me. Perhaps a nice Mai Tai on a tropical beach would sooth my nerves...

ॐ