Advice for Buddhist meditation for OCD

Question

So first I'd like to say I have permission from a therapist to ask this question, so this is not "asking for medical advice".

So I have OCD. It affects me all the time, I feel this constant stress, discomfort. Thoughts and stressors bother me a lot, and tons of things cause this emotional pain.

My therapist has suggested a long meditation is the way to do it. Sitting for several hours every day until it's dead. So this is what I'm doing and want to continue to do, but I'd like some help doing it more effectively.

So I've been studying Buddhism and meditation and very unsystematic way. I think I'm starting to understand alot of it now. But ultimatelly I dont fully understand what exactly I'm supposed to be doing/not doing in meditation. I've been doing some guided mediation on vedananupassana and so far I've been feeling better. But once again, I don't exactly know how to do it... Im supposed to look at the feelings but I dont know what im supposed to do?

If I wasnt so sick right now (fatigue, acid reflux) Id probably just study buddhism formally and just practice meditation until I start feeling better. But thats not feasible right now.

So what would your advice be for me to go about this? Are there any good online courses or something?

Also an important note: Several times now, in the midst of all this stress and discomfort all over my whole body I suddenly get these pretty short lived moments of bliss. My body glows with comfort and bliss and then after a while kind of fades out. This has happened several times now and it's pretty interesting. This is what fascinates me. What do you think is causing this? My guess is I must be doing something in those moments correctly, letting go and not resisting the pain or something

Thanks.

Answer 1

A lot of therapists out there are well-versed in both the mechanisms of OCD and mindfulness today, especially those working with methods like CBT, unified protocol, CFT or ACT.

Regardless whether you get the help from a clinician, or someone knowledgeable in meditation practices, i recommend proceeding with the aid from someone guiding you through the mindfulness practice initially. Until you find your own way of applying mindfulness, it can be a lot to deal with on your own.

Also an important note: Several times now, in the midst of all this stress and discomfort all over my whole body I suddenly get these pretty short lived moments of bliss. My body glows with comfort and bliss and then after a while kind of fades out. This has happened several times now and it's pretty interesting. This is what fascinates me. What do you think is causing this? My guess is I must be doing something in those moments correctly, letting go and not resisting the pain or something

Yeah, you've seem to have picked up on something important. It may be what's called sukha within buddhist meditation, a common emotion associated with the initial stages of meditation. Consider it a bread crumb trail for you to follow.

Answer 2

I can speak from personal experience on both fronts here. I suffer from OCD, and how I experience it is as an assault of mental images and intrusive thoughts that cause me great pain (more or less how everyone experiences it I guess). For example, I will experience a stream of, vivid, mental pictures of me dropping my child to his death, or images of me tilting my chair back and crushing my dog’s skull. These images are associated with the type of emotional pain that I would feel if they really happened. I share so vividly in order to convey that I have a strong sense of how unpleasant OCD can be.

I’ve practiced mindfulness meditation with great success here. One of the compounding problems with OCD is that it tends to gain strength the more you fight it. Resisting, suppressing, or in any other manner attempting to “defeat” the thoughts almost always causes an increase in the severity and duration of those thoughts.

I’ve found that meditation is primarily about letting go and letting things be as they are and also letting things be as they’re not. When I sit and practice, what will happen almost at once is that a stream of unpleasant thoughts will rush across my mind. The immediate impulse is to respond in the same sort of way I always do in order to avoid the pain of the obsessions. But instead, when practicing, I let the thoughts be. There is no need to fix or change or suppress the thoughts in any way. There’s no need to get pulled along with them either.

Then I notice that I got hooked by a thought, and I gently bring myself back to the present and let my thoughts be as they were. Here I am - having thoughts - just thoughts and it’s okay. And I practice letting go, and getting stuck, and letting go over and over and over again, and then, here I am. And over time, I learn to let the thoughts be, and as I learned to let “it” be, “it” let me be.

Fundamentally the struggle against the monkey mind is the same whether you have OCD or not, but with OCD there is some trigger that gets stuck on autofire, so at it’s worst, the struggle can be much greater.

This is definitely a disorder brought about by differences in the way the brain of someone with OCD functions, but that said, no one really understands why.

My dad once said to me, “We’re all just chemical sacks. Maybe somethings we do can bring about changes to those chemicals.”

In my experience, there has been an exponential lessening on the grip this disorder has had on my life, and much I attribute to meditation.

I know this has been anecdotal, but I hope it is of use to you.

Answer 3

May I ask you what kind of intrusive thoughts run through your mind with your OCD?

Generally, Buddhism is never a bad thing & can alleviate a lot of problem, and at the same time, give you a lot of long lasting happiness, however you must expose yourself to certain stimuli in order to desensitize & to foster attitudinal change.

Meditation in & of itself won't do it because in-vivo exposure must occur. So if you have OCD which compells you to wash your hand 5 times after touching the bin for example, you must prevent the usual pattern & abstain from it as far as possible & do not seek any safety seeking maneuvers if possible.

Otherwise, use the principle "Challenging, but not overwhelming".

Patient endurance (khanti) is for OCD effective to circumvent a lot of those intrusive thoughts, but also equanimity, perhaps in day-to-day language called acceptance & willingness (?)

Answer 4

Meditation can be done by most of the people-the reason it is not happening because they are not interested to it. So it is true that for some people dealing with thoughts, emotions and feelings is harder than others I don't think that it is a useful thing to judge yourself and say that "I have this disorder", "this is my sickness" etc.

I think that it is true to say that meditation can't be done by psychopaths, sociopaths or by the people who have serious narcissistic personality disorder and with illnesses like schizophrenia,or maybe mythomania etc.. but most people can go for it. Meditation is hard for everyone, and almost everyone is in the edge of the illnesses that I mentioned above(they are just don't aware of it or can't accept it) Also having serious emotional problems can be a fuel for a person to put more effort in meditation and s/he can potentially realize Nibbana in a very short period of time.

But whatever meditation you're doing it is important to expand it all the day, which means you're doing it all day long. Maybe in the beginning you would do it less but gradually-and even after few days or weeks-you can expand it and can do it all day long.

Mindfulness have the power to cure all kinds of mental sickness and can lead a person to permanent freedom from suffering. But is important to know that the habitual patterns of a person lasts for a long time, and solving the mental problems completely happens with two steps. First, you recognize and partially clear your mind from these patterns and then you start to clean it from the subconscious mind which leads to permanent freedom from these patterns and mind states. So the people who have these hard mental ilnesses must be patient and mustn't seek immediate results. But becoming completely free from these mind states and even going further is certainly possible with mindfulness.