I have been interested in meditation for a long time. Calmness. Focus. More energy. Relaxation. Sign me up!

I read the books. I took some classes. I even did one of those guided audiobooks. Meditation didn’t work for me.

I thought it was because I was just bad at meditation. Yet another thing that I couldn’t do — like being tone deaf. The distractions in my head never got calm enough for that sphere of light to come into my mind’s eye.

It wasn’t until recently that I had my “aha” moment. All the exercises involve some sort of visualization: imagine a sphere of light, visualize your chakras. Except I cannot visualize.

Part of my neurodivergence is that I have Aphantasia, the lack of a “mind’s eye.” I don’t consciously visualize things. My mind doesn’t think in images. No matter how quiet or calm I am, I cannot picture a candle, a ball of light, or a night sky.

Visualizations give you something to focus on. It is an easy assignment to give the meditator. Visualize something. Keep counting or chanting in your mind. It is a task you can quickly pick up and return to. As your mind wanders, as thoughts pop in, the point isn’t to silence them or drown them out, but to let them leave as unobtrusively as they entered.

Meditation is partially the habit of being able to keep returning to a repetitive mental task. If you do it long enough, the rush of random other thoughts becomes less intrusive. You build a habit of letting them go and staying on task.

Not a strength for ADHD, but hey, neurodivergent challenges usually travel in packs.

There are other ways beyond visualization: whirling dervishes whirl, monks chant mantras aloud, and wellness retreats play sound bowls. I needed something more personal and portable than trying to do tai chi while on the London tube.

Also nix the mental counting. Like a lot of people with aphantasia, I also have anendophasia, so I don’t “hear” sounds in my mind either. I needed some mental task I could return to that didn’t involve visualizing or an inner monologue.

Did I mention I have a dog? She is great. She is a little cuddle monster who loves to nap on me while I pet her. I stroke her fuzzy tummy while her chest slowly rises and falls with her lazy breathing. There is a faint rumble of her snores. A calmness as her weight presses into me, my breathing drifting to match hers.

She is a natural meditator and a furry guru.

I can hold the thought of petting her in my mind. I can mentally examine the sensations, the connections, the properties. I find her endlessly fascinating and can bring up these thoughts and daydream about her anywhere. Petting my dog is my mantra. Not the image, but all the other thoughts: her weight, her texture, her favorite spots to nap, and that she likes to play keep-away. She is a very dense bundle of thoughts that I can hold on to.

The thoughts and interruptions still come, but I have a habit of returning to the task of daydreaming about my dog. It fills me with calmness, focus, more energy, and even relaxation.

I think about the things I need to get done and the things I want to happen, with my dog by my side.

Visualizing goals and how to get to them is tricky if you cannot visualize. If you ask a neurotypical person for a sandwich, the standard response is for them to imagine a sandwich. The neurotypical mental pattern is being able to jump to the end point.

With aphantasia, visualizing the end point isn’t possible. I have to assemble it like an IKEA flat pack. I think of questions. How many steps? Each step is broken down into subtasks, until Zeno’s paradox makes the endpoint impossibly distant across a gulf of infinitely small details.

Each step has branches, side quests, its own anxieties and failure modes. I am not procrastinating; I am trying to reverse engineer reality to build a compiler so I can bootstrap a language for cookbooks so I can code a sandwich.

Meditation helps. I think of my dog with a sandwich. I can now let the questions and sub-tasks come into my mind and float out. I return to my dog and the sandwich. It takes some practice, but the habit turns out to allow me to conceptualize the end goal. Like a good thesis statement, it helps me pick out which questions move the story along and which are just distractions or filler.

Meditation has turned out to be a very practical skill, once I figured out what works for me. It gives me a tool to create that mental space and focus that other people seem to get by imagining a ball of light. But it also gets me and my dog to the sandwich.