This post aims to explore how mediation helps me when I’m anxious about MS symptoms or fatigue has taken hold. But the intro has grown a bit long. If you want to skip straight to the stuff about meditation, it’s about halfway down the post.

By the end of the morning yesterday, I’d pulled up the ivy from around the base of the old apple tree, picked up the windfalls, mowed the lawn, picked the crab apples and set them draining their pinkish, yellow juice ready for me to turn them into jelly.

A productive morning. All the way through I felt fine, normal even, like I was pre-MS. And then, I guess it won’t surprise you to know, I crashed. The fatigue took hold, I had that feeling of my mind constricting and the absolute certainty that if I did anything else I’d be in bed for the rest of the day and probably the next too.

So I sat on the sofa and scrolled through twitter, did a sudoku, scrolled though twitter, looked at the news headlines and felt useless, bored and without purpose. It had been a busy morning sure, productive even. But pre-MS I’d not have noticed it.

After a couple of hours of aimless staring at my phone and getting increasingly depressed, I reminded myself of how much mediation can help. And so I did just that, meditated, doing a simple breathing exercise for 10 minutes.

Mediation isn’t a miraculous cure, but yesterday it had the effect of bringing clarity back to my mind and pushing the physical fatigue to the background. The fatigue was still there, shifted into the background, but I knew that if I was careful and conserved my energy, I’d still be able to cook supper and be a functioning member of the family – although it didn’t help me win the game we played after supper.

It was an important reminder; about a year ago I’d been getting very anxious at work – miscommunication with someone we were working with was really causing me stress. One afternoon, I could feel the fatigue descending as a result of my body being on heightened alert. I knew the afternoon was lost and I’d be in bed for the next 2-3 hours.

I decided that, as the rest of the day was a write-off anyway, I had nothing to lose. So I meditated for 20 minutes, a simple body scan, lying on the floor covered by a blanket. At the time the effect felt almost miraculous; the load lifted. The fatigue, though still there had shifted enough for me to carry on for the rest of the day.

The effect of this on my self-esteem can’t be underestimated. Yesterday afternoon that feeling of not being able to do anything, be productive, be part of the family was so disempowering and depressing, just as it would have been if I’d had to give up work that day a year ago. Both times, meditation helped me feel like life could be somewhat normal. I couldn’t live at full pelt; I’d still have to be careful, but I could do things I wanted to do and contribute.

Getting into meditation hasn’t been easy. I started after I emerged from my post-covid, first relapse state and have been doing it for over 2 years now. At first it was a bit on and off, but as I’ve slowly got into it, it has become part of my routine and I now meditate for at least 10 minutes every morning, sometimes longer and sometimes more than once a day.

It’s really difficult to know where to start with meditation though. There are lots of mediation apps, thousands of YouTube episodes and even a fairly significant number of Spotify podcasts and tracks. Having been part of a conversation on Twitter about whether meditation can be useful for dealing with MS, I thought I’d share my recommendations for starting and sustaining meditation.

My journey as a mediation beginner

I didn’t know where to start and the first place I stumbled across was Sam Harris’s Waking Up app. I’m not sure I would have been able to start without his beginners course. The app is uncluttered and the course taught me the basics and gave me confidence that I could actually meditate. I graduated to his daily meditation, but became increasingly frustrated with his approach. It feels dogmatic and keeps pushing me to experience something that I don’t even understand.

So then I tried Insight Timer* which is probably the largest collection of free mediation courses, tracks and teachers around. For this reason there will be something for everyone. Most of my mediation time is spent on here and if I was going to recommend ways in I’d suggest various courses:

Mindfulness Daily by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach is a course for beginners and I found it useful to go back over the basics and lose some of the Sam Harris focus on one type of meditation.

Andrea Wachter’s Anxiety Toolkit was an incredibly important part of helping me through my diagnosis and fears about the worst case MS scenarios. There are lots of reasons I feel less anxious about every new or recurring symptom, and this course really helped me cope on a day-to-day basis as I learnt to live with the uncertainty and understand that a steep decline isn’t inevitable.

One of my symptoms has been sometimes intense, sometimes background pain in my back. Vidyamala Burch’s Methods for Living with Pain and Illness both helped me come to terms with it, and has taught me breathing techniques I’ve not heard any other teachers use. These often infuse my practice when I’m meditating with a timer rather than being led by a teacher

I now have a set of teachers I regularly go back to, cycling between their meditation tracks using two main playlists I’ve created for the purpose:

I also strongly recommend finding people who mediate as well, who can suggest new teachers and tracks.

None of this is to say that it’s easy. While I can now sit with a 20 minute meditation and be happy to be physically still, my mind is still active. I suspect it’s a rare 30 seconds where intrusive thoughts don’t appear. I also still regularly miss a teacher’s instructions because my mind has headed off on a train of thought taking me miles from the meditation.

But I can see the difference, both in managing both fatigue and anxiety, but also in my daily life. I am more likely to catch negative thoughts and more able to sit in the moment.

I’m now really keen to take it deeper. I’m finding Insight Timer’s busyness really unhelpful. I really want to engage with one teacher on a regular basis, but I’ve no idea where to start. Any suggestions would be really welcome.

* all the links take you to their website, but I recommend using their app and searching for the courses if you want to try them.