Squirrel! or Why I Meditate

Did I remember to buy tomato sauce for the dinner I’m making tomorrow?

OMG, I haven’t thought about my junior high basketball team in years!

It’s crazy that I’ve still got that stupid dream from last week on my brain.

You’d never know it, but that’s what my brain does when I’m meditating. The thoughts may vary, but they pop up like clockwork. Some days are better than others, but never does a session go by without some weird or boring or entertaining distraction coming up.

And with that, let me dispel the first myth of meditation — it is NOT about clearing your mind of all thoughts. Maybe the professional or Olympic-level meditators can claim that skill, but I can assure that normal humans cannot. The practice of meditation is building the skill of noticing when your mind has wandered and then bringing it back. Seriously.

That’s kind of a relief to hear, isn’t it? Until I started researching and then practicing, meditation seemed positively daunting; I’m a pretty low-key sort of person, but I couldn’t fathom being able to keep my mind and body still for 30 minutes or an hour. When I started to understand that a blank mind wasn’t the goal, I thought, hey, maybe even a mere mortal like me could do this?

Oh, and there — did you notice a second myth? That you have to sit down and do this for 30 minutes or longer every time? Yea, that’s not true either. While the benefits might accrue at a faster pace the more you practice, there’s nothing wrong (and a lot of things right) about starting out with a ridiculously low bar, say, one minute a day (not to pat myself on the back, but that’s my goal for the year). There are a lot of programs out there that will start out with 1 to 5 minute sessions, and that’s a great way to begin — it’s easy to fit into any schedule and will help build the habit.

And a meditation habit can change your life. I have just anecdotal, n=1 evidence, but I’m consistently surprised at the impact the practice has had on my day to day existence. It doesn’t show up in huge ways — I don’t go around wearing a monk’s robe and you won’t find me carrying around a meditation pillow so I can get in a quick session in the produce section of the grocery store — but I can see its subtle influence when reacting to the everyday crap that happens around me.

Imagine this: I’m driving on the highway and a random jerkwad cuts me off. My first instinct? Yell. Perhaps raise a finger. But now? More often than not? I’ll take a breath. Take a moment to consider those immediate thoughts that popped into my brain. Understand that I may have had no control over those initial hot reactions, but I do control what I do with them. Maybe Mr. Jerkwad is just having a bad day, or he’s rushing to his wife’s side as she gives birth to their first child. The point being, meditation has given me the ability to take a breath and think — you never know what someone else might be going through and being kind (even to someone who actually IS a jerkwad) is better for me, and maybe even better for the world, if I can make that sort of decision often enough. See? Meditation can save the world!

The biggest benefit that meditation has given me is the gift of the breath. The ability to take a breath before reacting. The understanding of how to use the breath to calm myself. Even knowing how to bring my focus back to the breath, back to the moment and allow me to be fully present.

I know, sounds pretty cerebral, eh? I promise it’s not, really.

My own practice, while it’s gotten more consistent, is a little haphazard and a lot lazy. I most often meditate before I go to sleep. And do I sit up like I should? No, I lay down so I can transition seamlessly to zzzz’s. Seems more efficient, right? In the beginning, I was using it to help me fall asleep, but now I get to the end almost all the time. Go, me!

[for what it’s worth, I often practice in the afternoon after work, too, so I don’t cheat ALL the time]

[and even if I did “cheat”, it would be okay… in my mind, it’s better to be doing it at all, instead of striving for perfection… the best meditation practice is the one you do regularly!]

I began with doing just 3 or 5 minute sessions. Headspace puts you through a 10-day starter pack and it took me a really long time to do that — it was easy to skip, ya know? And I had this off and on relationship with meditation for a long time — probably for almost a year? I’d have stretches of consistency, but I’d miss one day and boom! — I’d be done for a month or two. Obviously, I wasn’t terribly convinced that it was doing me any good.

But then I hit a really consistent streak — we’re talking 6 months of daily 5-10 minute sessions — and I started to notice little bits of it bleeding into my daily life. On my commutes to and from work, I’d do deep breathing or box breathing (not invented by Brene Brown, but she introduced me to the concept). During the day, at increasingly frequent intervals, I’d check in with myself — are my shoulders up around my ears? Relax. Is my jaw clenched? Again – relax. It was like mindfulness was starting to infiltrate all the corners of my daily life.

I think that’s when I started to realize that while I might not get anything like a runner’s high while meditating (a meditator’s high?), the practice was still somehow teaching me things that were proving beneficial in navigating the big, bad world out there.

Now, not that I would ever tell you what to do, but you should totally try meditation if you never have. I have friends who say they’re too ADD for it, or just dismiss it without a good reason, which is their prerogative (I guess), but I do have a bit of an evangelical bent about this, so I’m apt to go on about it. And yes, I know I’ve just caused a certain percentage of you to NEVER try meditation just because you’re stubborn.

Remember, it’s not about sitting in silence and struggling to keep your mind free of thoughts. Meditation is all about the idea of simply practicing the skill of noticing distraction and returning to focus. That’s it. What do you have to lose by giving it a try? And you never know, you just might save the world while you’re at it.

Resources

• Headspace app (iOS or Android) and the TED talk that got me to try the app.
• Dan Harris, the ABC news correspondent, is a meditation evangelist. He’s written two really excellent books (10% Happier and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics) that take on a beginner’s mind and skeptic’s point of view. He also has a podcast where he interviews folks who have some sort of meditation connection. He also has a meditation app (he’s really all-in on this meditation thing!) that’s really good — if I didn’t use Headspace, I’d be all over it.
• Box breathing is a Navy Seal thing (see, even tough guys do breath work!) and it was explained to me by Brene Brown (she learned it from Navy Seal types) that you imagine a box and inhale for a count of 4 (imagine drawing the left side of the box from bottom to top), then hold your breath for 4 (imagine drawing from top left to top right), then exhale for 4 (top right to bottom right), and hold for 4 (bottom right to bottom left). And repeat. The link up there takes you to an animation that (very annoyingly) uses a circle, but it is a great demonstration.
• Not mentioned above, I will occasionally meditate while on an Accupressure Mat (think: mat with little spikes on it) which adds a dimension to my meditation that I rather enjoy.
• And a basic book by the father of westernized meditation, Jon Kabat-Zinn: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Note: all Amazon links are affiliate links and generate a (very) (really) small kickback to me if you make a purchase.