life changes 7: meditiation

I’ve only been meditating regularly for a few weeks so, like most of my previous life changes posts, this one should definitely not be read by anyone expecting expert advice. This is about trying meditation. I thought it might be interesting to chronicle why I started, what has happened during that month as well as what I’ve learned, and some expectations I have for the future.

Meditation is one of those things I had wanted to try for a long time but never got around to. I had heard that meditating regularly could provide benefits such as improved health, emotional balance, relaxation, general life satisfaction etc. There have been times of high pressure and anxiety in the past where I wished I had something like this to turn to. Something to make life a bit easier to cope with and to provide greater equanimity with which to face difficult times; but for some reason I never bothered to follow up the wish with any actual action. In line with my recently-found open-mindedness and general drive to improve the way I’m living, I decided to try and find out something about it and go from there.

As usual, with things I know nothing about, I started by doing some research on the net. I looked at a lot of websites and read a bunch of stuff. Some of it was pretty new-agey, some of it mentioned God. Pretty-much anything like that has lost me from the start – that’s simply not a direction I’m heading in – but among the garbage were some good resources. Here’s two I found useful:

• Firstly, a simple two-page guide to meditating from a website called stopandbreathe.com. This guide is not aligned with any religion or philosophy. It simply sets out a particular approach on how to meditate. It’s easy to read, assumes you know nothing about starting to meditate, and sets out some directions anyone could follow.
• The second is a pdf from a site called zenguide.com, which seems to serve as something of a directory to zen groups worldwide, as well as a compendium of information about zen buddhism, books on zen etc. At 66 pages, this guide is significantly longer than the one above. It goes into great detail about some of the history, philosophy and practice of zen meditation (known as Zazen), but it’s readable, is written for beginners, and is quite interesting.

Zen sounded interesting though again, I knew pretty much nothing about it. In trying to discover more, I stumbled on this excellent introduction from the website of a Brisbane-based group called: Open Way Zen. Within this introduction I read the following:

it is important to understand what enlightenment means. Enlightenment is seeing clearly what is here, now – nothing more than that – without all the glosses or filters that our habitual mental processes usually bring.

To me this resonated strongly, as it sounds very much like moments of clarity I’ve experiencing while running. My interest was piqued and I wanted to explore the world of zen a bit further. As I mentioned earlier, a major roadblock presents itself to me with anything spiritual when God enters into it. This doesn’t happen in zen. In this respect, zen is not a religion in the way that, say Judaism, Christianity or Islam are religions. It might be more accurate to think of zen as a philosophy and guide to living.

The next logical step for my journey into zen was a book called “The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice and Enlightenment” by Philip Kapleau. First published in 1965 and never out of print since, this book is considered a seminal work in bringing legitimate information about zen to western audiences in easy-to-digest form. It is pretty much recommended everywhere as the place to go for anyone wanting a first look at zen, so I picked up a copy and am reading as I write this. So far it’s really good. It presents instruction on zazen in a very detailed and, what appears to be, highly authentic way.

You certainly don’t need to get into zen to start practicing and experiencing the benefits of meditation. The catalyst for me was actually an app for my iPhone called The Mindfulness App. Mindfulness, I have found, is what results when you make awareness and attention a priority above all else for a short period of time. This is basically what happens in meditation, or at least what has been happening for me. It’s about saying: “For the next 15 minutes I’m going to focus on one simple thing and remain totally attentive to that one thing to the exclusion of all else for that period.” The focus of attention is usually one’s breathing, at least for beginners.

This app is quite nice. If you search the app store you’ll find a number of apps that all do similar things, but this one hasn’t disappointed me. The main part of it I’ve used is the guided meditations, which are just recordings of spoken instructions that help get you into a state of mindfulness, and keep you there for a given period of time. There are three, five, fifteen and thirty-minute versions. The idea is to start with short meditations and work your way up as you feel you want to. Obviously the quality of these guided meditations is dependent on the person that recorded them. In this case the guide is Catherine Polan Orzech; a teacher of stress-reduction at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. In my view she’s done a good job. The recordings are very professionally made and work well.

So now I had some idea of how to meditate and a tool to help me do it. Where did I go next? How did I actually start doing it? Obviously the time and location you choose for your meditation is key. You need a time and place that is relatively peaceful, and one where you will not be disturbed half-way through. For me, living in a house with three busy females ranging from 11 to adult, this was not as easy as it might sound. I have meditated at home, but it’s proven difficult to arrange a regular time that works. In Kapleau’s book, the recommended times for meditation are first thing in the morning before breakfast, and/or last thing at night just before bed. So far these have been difficult for me.

The time that did work was lunchtime at work. I’m lucky enough to work a short walk from Brisbane River. That’s where I’d been having my lunch each day. Now I just started adding a 3-minute meditation to the start of my lunch ritual. Put the earphones on, closed my eyes and followed the guide. It’s a reasonably busy path alongside the river, and I must have looked a bit weird sitting there with my eyes closed, but I didn’t care and no-one ever intentionally disturbed me, and at least for the first couple of weeks I found the river a reasonably pleasant location. What eventually turned me off it was that after two weeks of meditating every day I had worked my way up to 15 minutes and for that duration, the noises of other pedestrians just became too distracting. By this time I’d really come to value the lunchtime sessions and didn’t want to end them, so I looked for a better location, and found one. I’m not going to divulge too much here because I want this sacred spot to remain as unknown and private as it currently is, but there does exist in Milton a magical place of tranquility and relative privacy that, for the past few weeks I’ve been very happily retreating to at lunchtimes to grab my 15 minutes of mindfulness.

The effect of meditation is not miraculous. I can not levitate and I am not about to walk on hot coals or had my third eye suddenly activated. But there’s no doubt it brings more calm to one’s life, and I suspect over time other benefits may become clear. Right now I have to say the great appeal of meditation lies not in it’s effects, but in the practice itself. Those 15 minute intervals have come to represent little oases of pure peace, and that’s addictive. The other tangible effect is the ability to use the breath as an anchor. I’m quoting here directly from Catherine Polan Orzech in the guided meditations. She suggests that the state of objectivity and peace achieved during meditation can be quickly re-entered in general day-to-day life by simply breathing intentionally, as you do in meditation. This acts as a sort of trigger which can be prevailed on when needed. I have used this a number of times recently, with growing frequency actually, because it works. The next step for me is probably to move into unguided meditation. In this, Kapleau’s book offers plenty of good advice that I’m probably close to putting into practice.

That’s about it – so far. I’ll report any further progress when it happens.

life changes 5: becoming positive

Something else has changed, but this feels harder to write about. Why? Maybe because physical change is easy to see, easy to measure, easy to set goals for, while attitudinal change is more personal, more subjective. It’s a slippery subject and I’m not really used to talking about it – Plus I’m really aware and conscious of setting myself up to sound like I’m giving advice. I’m not. I’m just sharing what happened to me. I’ve been aware of my attitudinal change and lived with it for a while now. It has been profound to me. Like the physical changes, it is the start of something. There are further developments waiting ahead on the path, and no account of the changes I’ve been through over the past year would be complete without a discussion of how my mind-set has changed.

I also want to add that it is important to me, in discussing these changes, that I frame them properly in terms of my authenticity as a person. Put simply, nothing is ever going to make me want to stop being who I am. I am not in the business of becoming a less-authentic person, but I believe that making positive attitudinal changes does not change who you are – it just changes how you approach life.

There is plenty here to come back to at some later point, but for now I want to forge ahead and talk about what happened to me, and about the flow-on effect, or how the positive outcomes of one change are not necessarily limited to that one change.

The Flow-On Effect

Quitting smoking generated for me, a fantastic sense that I was more capable than I had previously realised. I basked in this feeling. I was, after all,  experiencing the normal cravings and discomfort associated with breaking a 30-year addiction. To balance this I needed as much positive reinforcement as I could get. You can harness this improvement in self-esteem to enable yourself to take on more new achievements, and with each new achievement, the self-esteem continues to grow, in turn enabling more, opening yourself up to trying new things. This is what happened to me and what led to me improving my fitness, improving my diet and taking up cycling.

The adage goes; “healthy body – healthy mind”, and as I became physically healthier, it became apparent that positive change was infiltrating my psyche. I was bounding about, facing the tasks in my life with new energy. Smiling more. Looking forward to things more. As the positive outcomes of trying new things became more apparent I became more open to trying new things. Amidst this new energy I considered trying to consciously adopt positivism, as a sort of new habit, a conscious change, in a similar way to how I had adopted new physical habits.

But how do you do it? How do you actually change your day-to-day attitudes to become more positive? Well, I expect there are a multitude of ways – probably an infinite variety of them, and I’m just getting started, but I decided to start by attempting to banish (as far as possible) the negative attitudes that I have known my whole life are a waste of my time; Those attitudes that produce nothing positive in my life and have no place within the better person I want to, and can actually be. Here’s two I’ve been thinking about:

• “I can’t do it” – Low self-esteem: not even trying something when I actually know I could succeed at it if I just stop using fear of failure as an excuse for my laziness (phew).
• “I hate you” – Bitterness and prejudice about other people. This is so instinctive. Even when I’ve decided to stop I keep doing it. Noticing it. Every day. I’m not the kind of guy that can just start loving every one of my fellow humans – not today anyway. But I don’t need to do that today. What I do need to start to do is stop acting like a baby and having negative, nasty thoughts about other people that are just like me, for no reason –  So when I have these thoughts I notice them and make a point of telling myself it’s stupid.

I have found a couple of secret weapons that make it easier to battle negative attitudes.

Secret Weapon 1: There is power in the things you say. When you say things to other people, you get used to being the kind of person that says those things and this helps you become that kind of person. I’ve been making a point of verbalising the kind of maturity and positivism I want to feel in myself. People have noticed this, especially some of the people closest to me. You see the ripple effect start to happen; the positive attitude jumps over to them, like electricity arcing between two conductors. And maybe they are able to carry this positivity, or some part of it, on into their encounters with other people during the day.

Secret Weapon 2: Meditation. I started this year. I will do another post just on meditation soon, but for the purpose of this discussion; In meditation you can learn to create an anchor for yourself, using breathing. When, during your day, you catch your thoughts heading in a direction you don’t want them to, you can throw out that anchor and create some space to become clear and re-align with reality. I’m sure this becomes much more effective over time and I’ve only just started, but already it works. I use this technique, at some point every day, and it makes a difference.

My last point about positivism: It feels good. It might seem dumb, but this is something of a revelation to me. I never expected it to feel good, but it does. I guess for most of my life I’ve habitually held a generally negative outlook, and the thing that doesn’t occur to you is that negativity actually feels bad. You may not realise it while you’re in the midst of it, but in retrospect …

A positive attitude is one of those self-reciprocating behaviours. The more you do it, the more you want to do it.

I’ve actually had this post in draft for a couple of weeks. I’ve been working away at it, trying to remove as much of the bullshit factor from it as possible. For some reason I’m quite self-conscious about that. This probably explains why it’s a bit more stripped-down than some of the other posts I’ve put up lately. Like I said at the start, I’m not used to talking about this kind of stuff, but now that I’ve made a start I’d like to think and write about it more. Anyway, in the spirit of being open to doing new kinds of things I’ve changed the “Save as Draft” button, over to “Publish Now”. Apprehension be damned!