As a meditation teacher who is formally diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, many people ask how I do it. How do I control my BPD with mindfulness and meditation?
The truth is, it is quite a complex problem. But I have managed to create a successful strategy to keep in control of my BPD.
This strategy involves:
To help you to learn these same strategies, I’ve created the following video.
Managing BPD With Mindfulness & Meditation Video)
Transcript
Hey friends, in this episode I’m going to reveal how you can control borderline personality disorder BPD using just mindfulness and meditation. First, let me introduce myself. My name is Paul Harrison and I am a meditation teacher with BPD. That is correct. I myself do have BPD. Indeed, when I first started meditating over 25 years ago, I did it in order to help myself with borderline personality disorder. Through my experience, I’ve learned that there are very many different types of meditation that can help with BPD, and now 25 years After I started meditating I am now a meditation teacher and I primarily help people with BPD.
So let’s discuss exactly what meditation is. You probably think that meditation is just focusing on breathing, and indeed that is one form of meditation technically called anapanasati, as named by our good friend right here. However, and a panel, slightly mindful breathing is just one form of meditation, and through my experience as both a meditation teacher and as somebody with BPD, there are many different forms of meditation which will help you with your BPD. Some of these forms of meditation will be familiar to you if you have. Have been doing DBT? That is dialectical behavioral therapy. The number one form of treatment for BPD. However, many of the meditations that I’m going to discuss in this episode will be brand new to you. You might not have ever heard them before, but I promise you they can do wonders for helping you to control. BPD. So let’s begin.
First of all, the very first meditation technique that I do want to mention, and I only want to mention it briefly, is indeed anapanasati and mindful breathing. So mindful breathing is the sort of. Quintessential meditation technique, the meditation technique that all people know. The reason we do mindful breathing, as stated by our friend. Is that it creates equanimity of mind by closing the eyes and focusing on breathing for just 15 or 20 minutes will calm the mind reduce. All those thoughts and those feelings that we’ve been experiencing and overall with my full breathing, we are going to create a foundation of calmness with which we can build on. So that is the 1st and also the most obvious. Form of meditation for BPD. Mindful breathing and using mindful breathing, we can create a general sense of calmness. But let’s move on. One of the most commonly experienced symptoms of borderline personality disorder is extreme emotions and trust me, I myself used to have such extreme emotions. I would cry out, though I’m pretty sure that I’ve cried more than any other man. Who’s ever lived? I used to have anger as well. I’d be a lot of anger and resentment and all different kinds of terribly overblown emotions. And again, this is something that I managed to learn to control with meditation and the best meditation technique for reducing your emotions and getting in control of of your feelings is Vipassana. So Vipassana is a meditation technique that is similar to mindful breathing but with a couple of really important differences. So when we do for we pass in a meditation, we are meditating on the breath. And then we notice anytime that mind wanders. For instance, let’s say you’re meditating on your breath, but because the human mind is imperfect, your mind gets drawn to to a thought or to a painful emotion. You know, if we persona what we do when that happens is we label what is occurring. We’re saying my mind is being drawn to a thought and this is just a thought. It’s nothing more. And so we’re labeling, saying this is just the thought we’re reminding our mind, this this thing that I’m seeing happening in my mind, it’s not real. It’s just a thought. And similarly with an emotion. Let’s say you experience a symptom of anxiety. Let’s say tension in the chest. You’re gonna train your mind to say this is just a sensation in my chest. That’s all. Now, what that does is it prevents your mind from being reactive to thoughts and to emotions. Oftentimes when we experience a negative thought or a painful emotion, we get stuck in it and I’m sure you know what I mean. If you’ve had a traumatic thought, you get stuck in it. It’s as though you’re there, you’re living in that thought. And of course it’s really just something that’s occurring in your mind. And so we’re we pass enough with that process of meditating on the breath and then labeling, hey, this is just a thought. This is just a feeling and so on. We train the mind to be less reactive to to stimuli and this helps to reduce our emotional volatility. And so that is the second meditation that I would want to mention.
Next, let’s discuss Ghost syndrome, which is kind of like dissociation. You know that feeling that a lot of us with BP do do suffer from Ghost syndrome? It’s that feeling that you’re not. You’re not there. You don’t really exist like the world is going on around you, but you’re completely disconnected to it. You’re not a real part of. A real part of reality goodness. That’s a terrible way of saying that I really need to work on my wordsmith thing. Anyway, so Ghost syndrome is that feeling that you don’t really exist. Now what I have found, and this is my own meditation training that I’ve created for myself and for my students with BPD on thedailymeditation.com is third person. Meditation really helps with this.
Now let me explain. So when we’re lost in our Ghost syndrome, when we feel like we don’t exist, what I’ve found and the technique that I prescribed to my students is to just zoom out and take a good look at yourself. See yourself in third person, for instance. Let’s say I’m sitting here and I’m just, you know, I’ve been depressed and. Like if you ever done that when you just sitting there and you kind of fade away into nothing. At these times you can catch yourself and just imagine pulling your mind outside. You’re zooming out and then seeing yourself from third person. So seeing yourself from a distance. So for instance, for me to do this right now, I would simply zoom out and see myself sitting in this chair. And I’d. Beware of my body. I’m looking at my body from afar. And essentially that trains the mind to say Ohh I do exist. I’m right there. So when you’re lost in like Ghost syndrome and you’re. Staring into space because we have BPD and we experience Ghost syndrome. And pull your mind out and observe yourself and say, oh, that’s me right there. I can see myself sitting in this chair and I can feel these sensations and that helps you to to kind of pull you back into the present moment and to remind yourself that actually.
You do exist.
Next, and I am going to give through many things in this video, excuse me for coughing. I do apologise next, I’m going to discuss splitting so in BPD. Splitting is. Focusing entirely on the negative or the positive, it’s that inability to think dialectically it’s the inability to perceive both the positive and the negatives of something, and you tend to, you know, see things that either either all good or bad. This has probably affected your relationship.
Yes.
If you have BBD, you’ve properly experienced moments with your favorite person. Uh, when they suddenly go from being the best person in the world who you put on a Pettis bookstore because they’re Angel? It’s just so perfect and then suddenly wait a minute. They’re not the best person in the world. They’re the worst person in the world. That’s basic. What splitting is? Now, thankfully, we can help ourselves to overcome splitting by doing a little bit of sort of mindful cognitive behavioral therapy. Now what I like to do to train my mind to no longer do that splitting is I’ll deliberately bring something to mind. So for instance, I’ll deliberately bring to mind my favorite. And and then I’ll force myself to think of both the positives and the negatives so that I get a broader, more realistic, you know, perspective of this person. And you can do the same with anything that you split on, maybe sometimes you split. On your job, sometimes it feels like your job is the best thing since sliced bread. Bizarre saying cause sliced bread isn’t that amazing? But sometimes, you know, maybe your job seems absolutely perfect and sometimes it seems absolutely terrible. And so you’re splitting on that again. Bring to mind during your meditation when you’ve calmed your mind. Bring to mind that thing. Bring to mind your job. Or your favorite person. And then consider how their a full and complete person or a full and complete experience that encompasses both the good and the bad that change your mind to not separate and avoid to not split the good from the bad, but to perceive both the good and the bad. As integral parts of the same thing and that will help you to reduce your splitting. Now I mentioned that splitting is. It can be a terrible burden for relationships, let’s say. And most of us with BPD have experienced that. But not only can we reduce splitting in relationships with meditation, we can also help our relationships in other ways.
There are many forms of meditation that will help you to improve your relationships. Many of you, if you have meditated before, you would have heard. Of loving kindness. Thank you again. Where is he there? There he is. Thank you again. Otherwise called Meta bravana. Now loving kindness is a wonderful way of cultivating benevolence, not compassion. That’s a misconception. Many people think that love and kindness is for compassion. It’s not. It’s poor for benevolence, which is. General goodwill. So when we practice loving kindness, we bring somebody to mind. We see them smiling and we extend love and kindness to them and that will help with our benevolence, with our good will towards this person. But we can also do things like Karuna, which is the sister of loving kindness, and yet somehow. Nobody knows, Karuna, where everybody loves, knows, loving kindness anyway, anti grass. So Karuna in essence is. Compassion. It’s about bringing to mind a person and recognising that the the struggles in their life, the challenges that they face, and that’s really important because it gives us a more realistic perspective of other people. Oftentimes we forget that other people go through challenges just as we do. And because of that, we can lack compassion. So Karuna bringing to mind another person and bring into mind the challenges that they face. This can really help us to be more compassionate. And then there’s other relationship meditations, such as forgiveness and tonguing, and honestly, all of this is on my YouTube channel, so there’s far too much for me to cover in this one episode. Suffice to say, there are very many meditation techniques that can help people with BPD, TB, PPD with their relationships. Which do include loving kindness, Karuna Tonglen and other such techniques. Finally, I’m going to share with you the biggest issue that I personally have have suffered from with my BPD. My biggest issue has always been identity disturbance. My identity shapes shifts so badly. All the time it’s been a problem throughout my life. Because I have extreme empathy and I also have identity disturbance, I tend to adopt the personalities of people that I’m around and that’s not very helpful. It’s not very healthy. Thankfully, I have devised a meditation that I’ve talked to myself and to many of my students. That helps to to create and to let’s say, solidify our sense of identity and it’s another tenant that you can see on my YouTube channel. YouTube forward Slash the daily meditation. And that technique is what I call the personal values meditation. So all we do for this personal value? Meditations again, we’re focusing on breathing. And then we remind ourselves what is my personal value. What is the value that represents who I am as a person? And so for me, just for example, one of my values that I absolutely believe in is compassion. And so over my myself, my value is compassion. This is drawing my meditation. My value is compassion and then I bring to mind the times in my life. Historically, when I’ve acted in accordance with that belief. So I’m I’m bringing to my times in my life when I’ve acted with compassion. So I’m recreating out those events in my mind and bring to mind a personal value that matters to me and reminding myself of times when I’ve lived by that and that helps to re reconstitute re you know to to solidify. Identity. And so that has been a bit of an overview of. How you can use meditation for BPD? I’ve gone through a lot in this episode. UM. So I’m going to recount most of it. Firstly, use anapanasati mindful breathing to calm your mind. Secondly, you sweep Pastner. That’s when we’re labelling what’s occurring and saying, oh, this is just a thought and this is just a feeling is we pass enough to gain emotion or control. If you experience Ghost syndrome, just imagine pulling yourself away from your body and just seeing yourself. So you’re saying ohh here I am. I’m I can. I can see my form and I can feel these sensations in my body. And that will help to pull you back into the present moment if you’re splitting. Let’s say, for instance, you tend to split on your favorite person during a meditation practice, deliberately bring your favorite person to mind and consider both their positive and their negative qualities as part of their overall person. This will help you to stop splitting to stop separating the good from the bad and to see that the good and the bad are all part integral parts of the same thing for your relationships, you can practice compassion, meditations, loving kindness and also forgiveness, meditations and Tongling and things like that.
And finally, for identity disturbance, use my personal values meditation which when you bring to mind a personal value and then recall the times in your life when you’ve lived in accordance with it. And that is a very broad overview of how to use meditation and mindfulness for BPD. I do invite you to join me for a private meditation session on thedailymeditation.com. I’ve been able to help many people with BPD to regain control of their life and I will be able to do the same for you. So why not join me for a private meditation lesson on thedailymeditation.com? Thank you.