Tag: Meditation

I have to say, I go around and around on whether to post my thoughts and experiences/discoveries about meditation at this blog. Because, oh, you know…it can feel, at least from this side, a little preachy/soap-boxy, and that’s not what I want. (Because, hey, I NEVER preach at you to do anything with your writing or critiquing, OH, NO, I DON’T. Ha.) And then I think, well, I’m pretty sure this meditation stuff is helping my writing life, so it’s PART of my writing life, so it’s PART of this blog. (Rationalization is a beautiful thing.) And then I have two other thoughts: 1) Oh, so the alternative is you’re going to start ANOTHER blog, because you already are so good at posting at THIS one? and 2) Hey, really, nobody else cares either way!

So, yeah, you may find a few meditation moment posts coming to you. Or you may not. Except today.

I have reached the point where, on some mornings, I can pick a Meditation (versus meditation) to do while I sit for my ten minutes. Yesterday, after a scattered weekend and facing a scattered week, I just tried for a slow, solid body scan–just to bring myself back to the physical and away from the more chaotic cerebral. It pulled me out of the chaos just enough and made a big difference on how I moved into my day.

This morning I went with one that I read about in one of the books I’ve had open recently–probably one of Sylvia Boorstein’s, but possibly Pema Chodron’s Comfortable with Uncertainty. Basically, you start by focusing on your body–it’s position, it’s aches, it’s distractions…the norm. Then, when you’re grounded, you take a look at something you are feeling really averse toward, that thing you just want to go away. And while you sit with it, you observe how that thing feels in your body. Then you go back to just sitting with your body. Then, grounded again, you look at something you really, really want (anybody just send another query off to an agent? Hmm?). You observe how your body feels. And you return to just the physical and get grounded again. You basically go back and forth through those places. The first time I tried this, I did it just as a lets-try-it exercise with some random aversions and wants. This morning, I picked some specifics that have been pulling at me from both directions.

Here’s one of my favorite things about mindfulness meditation: I get to observe AND relax, all at the same time. Yes, this is a duh!, but in the act of observation, just observation, the tension in my body is less important, it eases, and it goes away–at least for a few minutes. And, yes, it becomes crystal clear that the aversion and the want BOTH create the tensions–they’re not identical tensions, but I can so feel both in my jaw, in my throat, in my head. And when I come back to observing my body–noting that the sore hip is a little less sore, that the itch I was sure I had to scratch has disappeared, when I bring my concentration to the physical being sitting on the bolster, the tension has eased.

Obviously, this was a good “sitting.” This past weekend, for the first time since I started my ten minutes, I was unable to finish the 10 minutes. I found myself checking the clock with a minute and a half to go and, I swear, with 20 seconds left, I had to stand up and get off the bolster. Twenty seconds. And that’s okay. That sitting brought me back to yesterday’s sitting which brought me back to today’s sitting.

And all together, they’re adding up to something.

I took my second meditation class today. For some, that might not seem like a big deal, but for me–pretty big. Meditation is something I’ve been moving toward for a while, but I’m good at stretching those “for a whiles” out for a good long time. Kind of like taking a piece of string and cutting it in half, then in half again, then again…there’s always another cut you can make without actually getting there.

This class was a pretty obvious choice for me to make–it’s been offered at my yoga studio at least since I started taking yoga classes there. It’s taught on a Sunday morning, at a time when I don’t have to get out of bed too early, but which leaves me plenty of time for the rest of my day. Yoga has been, for me, the best time for getting into some kind of meditative state, and the teachers at our studio are, in my classes at least, calm and easily-paced and not overly spiritual for my pretty non-spiritual taste. So, yes, I should have known that the meditation class and teacher would be a fit for me, too.

Still…I put it off. I found reasons (okay, excuses) not to go. For pretty much all the reasons meditation is supposed to help–the what-ifs, the it-won’t-works, the it’ll-be-this-ways or it’ll-be-that-ways. The taking of the future, which we can’t know for sure, and making a decision about it in the present.

Can I tell you how happy I am that I was wrong?

I like the teacher. Like my favorite yoga teachers, her pacing is just right, her voice suits my ears and my brain, and she approaches the practice with intelligence, imagination, and humor. The times she does talk, the guidance helps me get grounded, and I find that–for the good stretches of time where she’s silent–I’m able to continue. Sure, yeah, my knees are stiff. Yes, my feet fall asleep. I have to shift my body into new positions. My mind is still for brief moments, not so still for a lot of other moments. I have gotten to a mental place that I cant’ quite define–somewhere between a dream state, actual sleep, and…something else? Still trying to figure out whether it qualifies as mindful, not mindful, or–guess what, it doesn’t matter!

But the bottom line is that it’s working.

Step 1, yes. Out of an innumerable number of steps toward…something. A few of which I might make it to, or maybe I’ll just stay happily at Step 1. Right now, though, I’m feeling like I took that first step onto the rocks that lead you across the river, and it didn’t shift under me, I didn’t cut my foot on a sharp edge, and I didn’t fall…splash!…into the water. It’s a nice place to be standing.