Vacany of Mind

["Martin Cosgrove" <martincosgrove@...>]

Dear Group,

I have been working on the Step One vacancy of mind exercise for a couple of
weeks now, and seeing how I have been on holiday (vacation for the
Americans! LOL), I have had a lot of time to practice. I would say that I
have attempted the exercise around 25 times with varying degrees of success.

My best result was around 9 minutes of 'semi vacancy of mind' i.e. some
thoughts did intrude from time to time but I managed to dismiss them. But
there doesn't seem to be any definite progression, as the last few days I
have had a really tough time with this exercise. I find it very frustrating
at times, and this morning I think I figured out why. As I wasn't having
much luck 'controlling' my thoughts, I decided to observe them as try to
sort out what was actually going on in this twisted little head of mine...
the main problem seems to be that many of my most intrusive thoughts are of
an auditory nature; I almost always think with an internal dialogue, which
in itself can be frustrating ('OK, vacant mind...damn, I just thought that,
ooops, I'm thinking again! Stop thinking... I can't!...') but even worse
than that is that I discovered today that there is this other strand of
auditory thought which seems to be totally random, is not 'my voice' and is
VERY difficult for me to control. The 'snippets' of voices can be male or
female (usually male) and can just be random phrases ('turn left',
'Australian Sports Association' etc....). Man, I hope my psychiatrist isn't
reading this! LOL... anyway, I also have random visualisations, but I find
those a little easier to control, it's these random voices and snippets of
thoughts that I am having a lot of difficulty with.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can deal with this? I was
thinking about moving back a step to focusing on one single thought, but I
am not sure if that is the right thing to do... is there any technique that
can aid me here?

I realize that I have already had great benefit from step one just through
realizing that my thoughts are so cluttered and this had made me more
determined to stick with it and to sort this brain of mine out! I just would
like a little help/advice.

Thanks,

Martin
I've always been a great believer in asking questions in order to
probe a new subject.

Thanks again,

Martin