I have been sitting silently for, on average, 16 minutes a day for a little over a year. To get this silence, I have to get up by 5:30 am at the latest and find a room in my house that no one is likely to walk in to (often the master bedroom closet). Silence is hard to come by in a house with several little children, but it can be found.
A three year old is only slightly more reactive than elemental cesium and having access to an internal low-pass filter is like your own emotional class D fire extinguisher.
Fig. 1. An actual picture of my 3 year old on realizing that she would prefer her sister’s green lollipop over her yellow one.
Mindfulness meditation, aside from having been practiced for several thousand years, has been studied fairly extensively over the past few decades in controlled, academic settings. It has been shown to be effective in a range of applications from treating chronic pain to improving cognition. More immediately to my point however, I have anecdotally found it to be extremely effective for keeping my behavior at the adult level when my children desperately try to bring out my inner toddler for an argument. At first, I just became aware of when I was reacting in a less than grown-up way. The more I practice training the mind, however, the better I am becoming at recognizing my own childish behaviors before they occur, and (sometimes) avoiding them.
But you’re saying, “Adam! I tried to meditate once and after two minutes all I could think was CRUSH! KILL! DESTROY!” Well, yeah, me too! I think that’s a pretty common reaction. It’s hard to sit there with that snakepit under your skull and nothing to distract you, but it’s not like those feelings and thoughts aren’t there just because you don’t notice them. Training the mind helps to clear all that shit out and let you simply be you. Plus, if you find that, like most people at first, sitting in silence is just untenable, there are many excellent resources for guided meditation. Andy Puddicombe‘s Headspace website/app is outstanding, but there are many free options out there as well. Or you could just start by counting your breaths to 10 (1 in, 2 out, 3 in, …) until your time is up. The key is to do it everyday, preferably for at least 10 minutes, but 1 minute is better than no minutes.
Sitting like this, training my mind not to get caught up in the constant tar-pit stream of worries and curiosities floating through my mind, has been invaluable in helping me deal with my little girls. It also (hopefully) has made me a better, more present husband. The best silence, it turns out, is the silence you find between your ears.
Scientific Dadding 