Have you taught yourself to meditate? How?

[brainz]

I have no problem going to sleep at bedtime, but often wake in the early hours with a busy brain, and can't go back to sleep. I want to learn how to empty it.

I know people use meditation for this, but I don't want to fiddle with devices and earbuds to do guided meditation, because the overall process makes me more wakeful, not less (especially if I find the speaker irritating, or if the earbuds fall out or become uncomfortable, or if the meditation ends and something else starts to autoplay, etc, etc).

If you can self-meditate, how did you learn?

(p.s. Counting sheep etc doesn't work for me - I have too many memories of trying and failing with that as a child).

I have two tricks to help with this..

1. The black hammock. I read that this was apparently how special forces train themselves to sleep in war zones (probably not true). You imagine your self lying on a hammock, black as night, part of the black void that surrounds you. All there is around you is darkness and the black hammock. Every time your mind strays return to picturing the black hammock and the void and the darkness. up, down, left, right all stretches into the darkness. There is no end and no beginning just the void and the hammock and you. Eventually I fall asleep.

2. word-to-word I think of a word like ‘ears’ then follow with a word that starts with that words end letter like ‘snake’ then ‘elephant’ ‘twig’ ‘giant’ ‘twix’. Any word, no rules, any language, brand names, doesn’t matter, just keep going and I eventually fall asleep. Yahtzee comes up at least once every night for some reason 😂

Learn body scanning from a recording, then do it yourself at night.

Another one apparently used by the forces is a bit like body scanning: you start by tensing and then relaxing parts of your body starting from your big toe, going in turn through each toe and slowly upwards. I never as yet got to my knees...

I’m Catholic. I say the Rosary.

Applied tension! I use this to stop myself fainting at blood tests lol