Meditation

Last week I had the great good fortune to attend a meditation retreat in the high country of northern New Mexico. For three days I sat for many hours on a cushion, silently bringing my attention back to my breath over and over again, or walked slowly upon the earth, soles alert to every pebble on the path. During the breaks I savored delicious food, wandered flower-bedecked meadows, and immersed my senses in fresh air, stars and running water. There was no phone service, no internet connection, no television. By the end of the retreat I felt a depth of rejuvenation and calm that still sustains me.

Why am I telling you this? Beyond wanting to share my joy, I thought you would be interested to know that meditation is actually good for you. For starters, it can improve your GPA. Meditators have more gray matter. This has been measured. Gray matter is what does your homework for you, so presumably more is better. More specifically, the gray matter growth that has been observed in mediators occurs in areas associated with learning and memory, sense of self, empathy and stress management. Further, long-term meditators have more folds in their cerebral cortex, which allows for faster information processing. “Sitting” makes you smarter.

Meditation is also good for your health, both physical and mental. Scientists have studied this, in typical scientist fashion, by plastering electrodes all over the heads of meditating Buddhist monks, surveying thousands of people with a smart phone app, and of course using more conventional methods like basic lab measurements. Meditation can lower blood pressure and pulse rates, improve your immune system and decrease your experience of pain. People who meditate have less anxiety, depression, and insomnia, and respond better to stress. If you have a chronic illness like AIDS or cancer, meditation can help manage the physical and emotional symptoms. Meditation and exercise are the only two activities proven to prolong brain function in old age. And perhaps most importantly, meditators are happier and more resilient in times of stress.

What is meditation anyway? In the simplest sense, it is the practice of relaxing the body and clearing the mind. Another way to describe meditation is focused attention on the present moment with awareness and without judgment. There are different kinds of meditation, but they all have the same goals. Mindfulness meditation uses awareness of the body and mind to bring the attention to the here and now. Other traditions use an object or an image for focus, and some use a prayer, a mantra, or a wish for widespread happiness. Yoga was traditionally a way to prepare the body for sitting meditation, and can be used as a kind of movement meditation. There are many choices. The concept of meditation is simple, but that doesn’t make it easy. The nature of the mind is wild and wandering, and getting to even a few moments of calm, present-moment awareness can take years of practice.

Sakyong Mipham, a great Shambala Buddhist teacher, likens the mind to a wild horse that gallops off at every opportunity. Jack Kornfield, an internationally renowned meditation teacher, writes that meditation is like training a puppy to sit and stay. The puppy always gets up and runs away, and you just pick it up and put it back down over and over again. If you have never tried it, meditation might sound mysterious at best, useless at worst. But more and more people are trying it, liking it, and keeping it up. It is sweeping the globe. In fact, just last weekend people in over 100 cities around the world held a special meditation for peace. This included 100,000 meditators in Buenos Aires alone.

If you think you might be interested in meditation, you could start with some reading. In addition to the teachers mentioned above, I recommend Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, The Dalai Lama, or Jon Kabat-Zinn. These are just my personal favorites: there are many others. You could also check out a DVD, find a meditation center near you, or take a class.

Amy Gross, former editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine, retired from her highly successful career to become a full time meditation instructor and practitioner. She writes, “As you meditate, the grip of your history loosens and you get a little saner, lighter, less entangled.” Maybe that is what I was feeling up in the mountains last week. It’s somewhat indefinable for me at this moment. All I know is that it felt good, and right, and if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my cushion.

Practicing Meditation for Life

In my last post I wrote about practicing meditation as an end in itself. But that isn't all there is to it. The practice in meditation is practice for life. By this I mean that the skill you learn "on the cushion" can be applied in everyday life. It isn't just about sitting on the cushion and bringing your mind back to the breath over and over. It is about refining that skill for the rest of your life, life off the cushion.

Why? Why bother? What is the point?

As a beginning meditator I'll offer my thoughts. The main reason to carry the present-moment awareness skill into daily life is so that you can live this life -- as it happens -- to the max. If you are really right here, right now ALL the time (good luck with that, but it's worth trying) then you will have the full, real experience of your life. You won't be distracted from whatever is going on by ruminating over the past or worrying about the future. You'll HAVE this moment in all its glory. Or sorrow, pain, joy, whatever it is. You'll be right there, rather than some-where else or some-when else, like most of us usually are.

Another reason I have found for meditating is that the skill of bringing my mind back to the present serves me in relationships. During an interchange, if I am able to hear the other person, to see them as they are right here, right now, without past baggage or future fear getting in the way, things between us go much better. Talk about challenges! But on the rare occasion when I get a glimpse of this, I see the value.

Beyond these, there are the health benefits of meditation, which are becoming more documented with each passing day.

I'm sure I'll find more of my own personal reasons to continue meditating as time goes on. For now, this is enough to get me onto the cushion for 20 minutes each morning.

Practicing Medicine and Meditation

I have been practicing medicine for about twenty years. I have always thought it a little odd that we call it "practicing." When I was a kid, that word always meant getting out my cello, rosining the bow, and playing my scales and assigned pieces. When I practiced the cello, I was aiming for a concert, or a recital. Preparing for the big event. Practice was a means to a specific end.

In medicine, there is no big event for which we're preparing. We just practice every day. There are the usual jokes, like "someday maybe I'll get it right" and so forth. But for the most part, "I practice medicine" is just another way of saying "I'm a doctor." I don't know any other profession that uses that term. Do you? A mechanic doesn't say, "I'm practicing auto mechanics." Imagine your chagrin if he did! A teacher doesn't say, "I practice education." He better not; not with my kid in his class! But nobody seems to mind that their doctors are practicing.

About a month ago I began another kind of practice: meditation. Here again is an activity for which the practice is the activity, is the point. Sure, some people say or think, "I'm meditating now" but I think most or many experienced meditators refer to it as "practicing meditation." I really like that. If I thought I were practicing for some big meditation performance, which I had to pull off without a false note, I'd have given up after the first five minutes!

Meditation is practicing. Every time I bring my attention back to my breath it is like playing a note in tune just for a moment, before my unruly mind goes stumbling all over the neck of the cello again.

Meditation Pearls

I'm taking a class called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Based on the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts, it is basically a meditation class. This is the beginning of the 5th week out of 8 weeks. Over the course of the course, as it were, the teacher has offered up some good one-liners to help us. Here they are, so far.

• The mind can only be in one place at a time.
  
• You can only change in the present.
  
• Every thought is accompanied by a physiological response.
• Consciousness is contagious.
• Bring it back, baby! (the mind to the breath)

Meditation is simple and difficult. If you've ever tried it you know. Bringing my attention back to the feeling of my breath, over and over and over and over again. And again. Each time my focus comes back to the breath, thoughts roll off like water off a duck's back. For a fleeting moment I am in the present moment. Right here, right now. Then before you know it I'm off on a trail of thought again and I don't even notice it until I'm halfway to tomorrow. Oops, there I go again! Bring it back, baby!

Do that about a thousand times in ten minutes, and that's a meditation practice.