Transcript

Okay, welcome to my channel being integrated. I'm Jude, and this video is about meditation practices for ADHD that actually work. So I have ADHD, and I also teach meditation, and I quickly learned that a lot of meditation practices do not work for me, and specifically, the types of practices that you most encounter as a beginner are the ones that most don't work for me. So if you're just beginning in meditation, the practices are typically about bringing your attention back to your breath over and over, these very simple practices, and those don't work that well for me. And I have been able to do those practices well at times in my life, but at other times I have not been able to do them well at all.

Most times I can't do them that well actually. But there is a whole other category of practices called the pastana practice or mindfulness practice or insight practice that really does work for me and might work for you. I know other ADHD people who have very much taken to these practices and found them a lot more helpful than more focused or concentration based practices. Now the question is, why? Why do some practices work and others don't? And to understand this, we have to understand what ADHD is. So while ADHD presents differently in different people, there are some pretty common symptoms, and for me, the simplest way to express it is it's a restlessness in my body. It actually took me a long time to realize this, because I thought ADHD was in the mind. I thought, Oh, my mind's just crazy and going after things. But then I realized my mind was so active because my body was restless and uncomfortable. It was actually the discomfort in my body that my mind was working really hard to escape. Another way of looking at ADHD is as a dopamine deficiency.