Keep Calm & Commute On – Meditating In Your Car

If you commute by car then you’ll be all too familiar with this stressful time-consuming fight to work. Competitors don their boxing gloves for battle and sit in gridlock with grim expressions and occasional cursing outbursts.

You know, there are people out there that will risk a crash for the sake of saving a few minutes of their precious time. They usually end up costing you hours in a traffic jam.

No doubt you encountered one of these assholes this morning and it raised your blood pressure to critical limits.

Either that or you’re bored to death and not concentrating on the road.

It’s common to arrive at work without any recollection of the drive, especially if you’ve taken the same route for years. It's like our minds are on auto-pilot during the drive.

And best of all? You get to do it twice a day.

Oh, the commute - how we detest you.

You may have heard the expression "If you don’t curse when you’re driving then you aren’t paying attention" and that’s because traveling is a royal pain in the ass. We all know it.

The whole process of commuting feels like a frustrating waste of time.

That’s why we would all looooove to have flex-time and/or work from home days. But, for most of us, that isn’t an option offered by our employers.

The daily commute is a huge factor in our lives. In fact, commuting time is one of the first things we look at when job hunting or moving to a new home.

Let’s take a moment of silence and pray for those still stuck in gridlock at this very moment.

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Be strong brothers and sisters. Amen.

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So what can you do to make the commute better?

Yes, you’ve got tons of emails in your inbox, your house is a mess, and there are overlapping project deadlines at work.

But, guess what?

You can’t do shit about any of those things while you’re driving. You can’t read and reply to emails, you can’t clean the house, and you certainly can’t be working on any projects.

So, why fret and stress about those things?

There’s nothing you can do about it while you’re behind the wheel, so be okay with letting it go - for now.

This is your forced time to be alone. Your reserved “Me-Time” where you can escape from all the bullshit and chaos in life for an hour or so a day.

Seriously, where else can you legitimately spend half an hour or more in your jam-packed crazy day sitting comfortably without harassment, nagging, bugging, etc? Right?

This is a gift!

On average we spend about 50 minutes a day commuting, and that’s without getting caught up in traffic jams. It’s way too much time to spend feeling anxious, stressed, and near-fatally enraged at the stupidity of others.

So it’s “Me-Time”’ you’ve got - but what can you do when you’re driving that actually benefits your well-being and makes you feel good?

You’re quite right to ask “How can I meditate in the car because driving at 70 mph with my eyes closed thinking about Buddha seems utterly stupid.”

And you’d be totally right if you’re thinking about traditional mindful meditation.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

This is all about “external awareness” meditation. Nobody really talks about this kind of meditation because “mindful” meditation gets all the glory and limelight.

The term “mindful” is tossed around a lot, especially when it’s related to meditation.

But do you know what the word actually means?

It simply means being alert or aware.

And, when it comes to driving a car, being alert and aware is priority number one.

So, external mindfulness meditation and driving are perfectly suited for each other.

You are fully and actively involved in driving - “mindfully” driving versus “mindlessly” driving like so many other idiots on the road.

In other words, this kind of in-car meditation is not meant to de-focus you from safe driving. It’s actually quite the opposite.

Author and meditation practitioner, Solan McClean, sums it up quite nicely in this 28 second clip below. We’ll talk more about Solan down further in the article.

VIDEO: Mindfulness Mode Podcast
YOUTUBE: Solan McClean
LENGTH: 0:28

The emphasis is on being fully aware of everything going on outside and around the car while driving, so you don’t think about other stressful things.

When you’re 100% physically and mentally focused on a particular task and not thinking about anything else, your mind isn’t wandering. It can’t and won’t. It’s busy.

It’s like when you’re playing a very close match in tennis, basketball or any sporting activity. You’re in “the zone” and fully present, not thinking about anything else.

It happens to us at work too.

Remember that last big project deadline? The one that was a real pressure-cooker?

There were other tasks that needed attention, but you were singularly focused on the big project - ‘cause you had no choice.

And, when you finally did get it all done, it felt good right?

Here’s another short clip that will help you realize that mindfulness is a really useful tool in the car and a great way to enjoy some me time.

VIDEO: Why Mindfulness Is a Superpower: An Animation
YOUTUBE: Happify
LENGTH: 2:43

External awareness meditation in the car isn’t very widely discussed, so it’s not understood by most people.

Here’s the biggest and main point to doing this: the act of driving with your full attention is a form of meditation!

Read that again.

Commuting in your car is just another way to practice the core fundamental meditation skill of “being in the now”, just in an alternative format.

Think of it this way. Top professional athletes don’t just practice their core skills in just one way. They build and strengthen their skills with a variety of exercises.

Fundamentally, it’s no different with meditation.

In addition to that main point, here are several specific supporting reasons. 

With all the traffic on the roads these days being a safe driver is so important.

It only takes a few seconds to veer off the road, rear-end another vehicle, or run over something on the road.

All sorts of shit happens when you’re not paying attention. Being externally aware of what’s going on at all times avoids these situations and the consequences they trigger.

It’s the safest way to drive.

You’ve got stresses, we totally understand. Often work and family are the core stresses and those types of close-to-home issues can get overwhelming.

We need a break from non-stop stress. If you don’t get a break, you’ll fill up with pressure, explode, get ill and things just go downhill from there.

Driving with external awareness gives you space to breathe and lets the pressure cooker simmer down - because it gives you something else to think about.

A change is as good as a rest. Granny was right after all. 

When stresses are pushed out of your mind by external mindful meditation, it leaves room for the creative stuff to rise to the top.

You won't have to purposely force yourself to think creatively, our minds have a way of coming up with the answer on their own if we just give them room.

It’s like those revelations that we sometimes get while showering.

When you drive with external awareness, you’re giving that creative side space to do its thing subconsciously.

By the time you arrive at work, you’ll have the answer to that all-consuming difficulty you’ve been struggling with. 

Are you right here, right now? Or are you half thinking about the hundreds of other things running through your head?

Being “right here, right now” is the core principle of meditation. The past and future are put to one side as you think about what is happening now.

Focused driving on the commute gives you an opportunity to practice this skill in a way that benefits your mental health and your driving safety.

The little acts of driving mindfully like checking your rear view mirror and paying proper attention to what’s happening on the road trains your mind to be present “right here, right now." 

It’s a win/win situation. External mindful awareness should be part of the driving exam. 

Being externally aware while driving helps you respond to piss poor driving in a mindful way.

Yes, you’ve been cut-off by an a-hole driver but how your mind handles this makes all the difference.

If you allow your mind to instantly “react” negatively, it will kickstart a vicious stress cycle that will only get worse with each subsequent idiot on the road.

On the flipside, if your mind “responds” in a neutral way to what just happened and just observes it like a random thing, then your stress never gets the chance to take-off.

It’d be like a squirrel darting across the sidewalk as you’re walking by. Yes, it probably surprised you and you didn’t expect it, but you don’t get all pissed-off about it, right?

Your solo driving commute is the ideal time and place to practice the “respond not react” method.

But, we’re gonna be straight-up with you.

It’s gonna be tough as shit for the first few weeks, but as you stick with it and eventually master it, all the clueless and reckless drivers on the road won’t phase you one bit.

It’ll be like water off a duck’s back.

Once you’ve got it down pat in your commute, you may notice its positive influence expanding to other areas of your life - like when the work jerks get to be too much or when family members pump up the pressure.

Responding mindfully is one of the best ways to keep your stress levels low and not make an absolute ass of yourself in front of others.

You’ll develop presence of mind, and the more you practice it the more likely you are to respond well in difficult situations. 

An externally aware commute builds your resilience to stress and that ‘grown-up’ way of dealing with life’s shitty situations.

Remember the old saying "count to ten before you react"?

Letting go means you don't even get to that stage because the wind-up won't affect you so badly.

Give other drivers the benefit of the doubt, let them go first, you don’t know what might be going on in their lives.

Maybe, that guy that ran the orange light (that’s the phase between red and yellow) is rushing to the emergency room hospital to get to his kid. Or the lady that wouldn’t let you merge in is just bawling her eyes out to some bad news and wasn’t paying attention.

These are all things out of your control.

And meditating on your commute means you can let go of what can’t be controlled, and really there's so much of that in life that this is an absolutely necessary skill.

Road rage? What road rage? 

There’s a lot of us here that want and need stress relief but we just can’t do the “sit down, think about nothing and breathe” meditation.

It’s waaay too far on the other side of the spectrum of mental quietness.

We need more of a middle ground to transition to first.

For a lot of us, our minds simply can’t go from thinking about a million things to thinking of nothing. It’s straight-up impossible to do.

And this is where external awareness meditation while driving comes into play.

It’s not as “singular” as a breathing-only meditation but it’s an ideal way to settle our racing minds to a more present situation by allowing it to latch onto what’s happening around our car.

External mindfulness is more lively and it’s easier to master because you aren’t training your brain to think about nothing, you’re training it to think about the here and now of driving safely.

External mindfulness is real meditation, and it’ll do you a world of good. 

Most every car now has got an automatic transmission. We’re all very familiar with the letters: P-R-N-D on the gear shifter/changer.

It’s how we control and select the transmission.

P = Park
R = Reverse
N = Neutral
D = Drive

There’s a cool little idea that we want to share with you that uses these transmission letters to help you meditate with external awareness while driving.

We can’t take credit for this awesome idea. It’s actually from author and meditation practitioner Solan McClean.

His book, “Learning to Drive into the Now: PRND” uses the letters to provide guidance for his version of in-car meditations, called “Current Awareness Meditation” which is essentially the same thing as external mindful meditation.

Here’s our variation on the idea that we’d like to share with you.

You can use your gear position letters as reminders for a step-by-step guide for external awareness meditations while driving.

Here’s our breakdown for each letter:

P = Get Ready to PRACTICE

R = RELAX your min and body

N = Bring your attention to NOW

D = DRIVE with full awareness

For some of you with zippy sports cars, you might also have an option for “S” for Sport. If that’s the case, let’s use that for “Don’t give a SHIT anymore” or “So long, Stress” 😉

Okay, now we’re going to explain each one in a bit more detail.