Assignment #4: Snapshot of My Practice

            I approached my first meditation session with some trepidation.  In the past, I had tried, to varying degrees, the following three major subsets of eastern meditation: 1. “mantra” meditation, which requires you chant one or several mantras, 2. “yantra” meditation, a silent meditation-type when the meditator focuses on a type of elaborate picture – a yantra, and silent breathing-focused meditation.  The only one I had ever found viable to do was mantra meditation, specifically “chain mantra” meditation, where I chanted a series, a “chain,” of mantras.  The mental effort it took to remember the mantra chain, the oral effort to speak these foreign words for a sustained period, as well as the aural distraction provided by hearing them, occupied my mind and body enough to prevent the feeling of experiencing a mental and physical vacuum.  My past attempts to engage in meditation that required me to just focus of my breath with my eyes open or closed had neutral to agitating results.  This form of meditation simply left my mind too empty, and that emptiness tended to be filled with distraction, boredom and irritability.  All of the articles I found regarding evidence-based studies on the value of meditation on stress were about studies that used mindfulness meditation.  Mindfulness mediation, it turned out, was the very type of meditation I had so much trouble with in the place.  To engage in the practice, you must complete the following steps.

1.     Find a quiet, comfortable place and then sit in a chair or on the floor with your head, neck and back straight, but not stiff.

2.     Push aside all thoughts of the past and the future and instead remain in the present.

3.     Become aware of your breathing, focusing on the feeling of the air moving in and out of your body as you breathe, specifically the sensation of your stomach rising and falling and the air entering your nostrils and leaving your mouth.   You must pay close attention to the way each breath changes and feels different.

4.     Notice the coming and going of each thought, merely acknowledging theses thoughts non-judgmentally.  Once they enter your mind, however, gently push them aside to return to focusing your thoughts on your breathing.  If there are certain thoughts you cannot push away so easily, observe what they are, once again non-judgmentally, and return to your breathing.

5.     After completing your meditation, remain sitting for a minute or two and then proceed to slowly rise (Kabat-Zinn as cited in Wong, 2007).

The day and time I chose for my first mediation session was around 7:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, approximately an hour before I had to leave for school.  My plan was to do five minutes, which, as I mentioned in my last blog posting, I knew from past meditation experiences was far longer than it might sound.  I knew that, for me at least, five minutes could feel more like fifty.  

      I chose to meditate in my bedroom, on a lightly padded faux- Louis XV chair.  This is a type of chair that one gets for looks, not comfort.  I had a comfortable couch and chair in my living room, but I felt this chair would be just comfortable enough to be appropriate for my meditation.  (You will see why I am mentioning this imminently.) 

As I sat down, I considered my concern that I had inferred from the mindfulness meditation instructions I had read that you were supposed to keep your eyes open.  This worried me because I fell it would provide visual distraction, keep me too grounded in my current non-meditative reality and make it harder for me to “turn off” and enter meditation mode. 

I recalled, however, taking a Shambala mediation class years earlier that was basically identical to the mindfulness meditation I was about to begin.  At that class, the instructor had told the students to visually focus on something during our mediation, something naturally within our field of vision.  I decided to do this for my current session and chose as a visual focal point a vase of magenta hyacinths that was directly opposite me.  Its’ location was not the only reason I chose this focal point, however.  Its’ background was an antique gold-edged mirror that partly reflected the flowers, and the wall covered in celery-green faux-more-silk wallpaper.  I found the sight especially pleasing.  I always have flowers in the vase in that exact location, and always color-coordinate the flowers to look good with the green wallpaper because I love the way they look at exactly that spot in my bedroom, where they sit on a faux-Louis XV antique dresser that holds a somewhat ornate collection of perfume bottles on it.  I always make sure there are flowers in the space because it creates a sense of the room being a happy, relaxing, even clean place and this tends to life my mood and make me feel both more relaxed and energetic.  This is particularly true when I can get hyacinths, the rare flower that actually smells and is perhaps my favorite flower for both this reason and the fact that they smell to me like the start of spring, which is my favorite smell.  

I started my mediation session at 7:02 a.m..  I started breathing in and out in an exaggerated fashion.  I immediately began to wonder if I was not instead supposed to just breathe naturally.  I considered how the instructions I had read as to how to do this form of meditation had not specifically instructed me to breathe in such a manner.  Was I just supposed to breathe naturally?  I tried breathing naturally, but it was hard “following” my breaths this way and I quickly involuntarily reverted to my previous exaggerated breathing.  After a minute, my eyes wandered over to the nearby digital clock and I realized what I only half-consciously been aware of before: the reason I chosen this particular room and chair for my meditation.  Here, I was almost within eye-line of a digital clock, which would enable me to track how far through the meditation session I was.  I castigated myself for a moment for this.  I also felt frustrated and disappointed that only a minute had passed.  I closed my eyes, only to open them a moment later.  The instructions had read nothing about closing one’s eyes and I wanted to follow them precisely.     

I soon involuntarily began chanting in my head the chanting chain I used to use when I briefly, for about a week or two, began meditating almost daily this summer: tatwan asi – ram nan – ohm.  (I forget specifically what each mantra means.)  I caught myself after a white and my eyes shifted to the clock again.  Only another minute had passed.  I started focusing more intently on my breathing.  I started thinking of what I had to that day in terms of schoolwork, classes and errands, and then what I had to do in those areas for the week.  I was able to stop myself by breathing harder and re-focusing on my breathing. 

A piece of music soon came into my head.  I was not even fully conscious that this was happening at first in the sense that I was not acknowledging it.  It was piece of music I had listened to during relaxation exercises I had done years earlier, one called “The Feeling Begins” by Peter Gabriel, from the soundtrack from the film The Last Temptation of Christ.  A very long purely instrumental piece with a Middle Eastern flavor, I had discovered the soundtrack in high school and both it and particularly this piece of music, was something over the years that I would sporadically listen to when I wanted to relax.  It was not so surprising then when I became fully conscious that it was going through my head while I was meditating.  When I did recognize its presence in my mind, my first instinct was to “turn it off,” but then I decided not to.  I had a sense it would make my meditation easier and it did.  Therefore, there ended up being two “soundtracks” in my head, that of the music and my breathing, and the next time I looked at the clock, it turned out my meditation had already reached, not the five, but the six minute mark.  The music continued to play in my head during the minute I continued to sit in the chair before rising.  I noticed I did feel more relaxed and felt refreshed, almost as if I had just stepped out of the shower.              

                                                Reference List

Kabat-Zinn, J..  (1993).   Mindfulness Meditation: Health Benefits of Ancient Buddhist

Practice.  Eds. Goleman, D. and Gurin, R..  Mind/Body Medicine. 259-275.  New York: Consumer Reports Books.

Wong, C..  (0ctober 25, 2007).  Mindfulness Meditation. About.com.  Retrieved on

March 5, 2011 from

http://altmedicine.about.com/cs/mindbody.a.meditation.htm.