It took me a long time to accept that despite a repeated nagging thought I should be doing it over many years. The marketing department have sold us on the idea that the modern human is supposed to be flat out 24/7 consuming products that have no soul but are intended to provide happiness. Meditation runs completely opposite to that sentiment.
One of the real joys of meditating is that it just gets better and better. Over a period of time you will deal with past trauma – which I’m not saying will be straight forward and easy. Layers of yourself seem to peel off and you relax into your true self – not the one that has been shoe horned into what society deems an acceptable human being. This in itself can be confronting. One thing is for sure it will change your life. People have been discovering this for over 5,000 years. Back then they didn’t have a fraction of the distractions we have now – we are all sorely in need of some inner peace!
There are plenty of ways to meditate and I wandered in the metaphorical dark wondering how it is done before I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat – no phone, no car, no talking, no leaving the retreat grounds – about six hours of meditative practise a day. This sounds a little confronting, and it is, but in the most unbelievably positive way. I recommend it to anyone and everyone. Find the time. There are centres dotted around the world facilitating this experience.
Some people use an app on their phone to have a guided meditation, some people run, some people walk and being on your knees in the garden removing unwanted plants is surprisingly calming. I’ve tried all these things, but they don’t come close to just sitting with myself in silence.
I have also realised that this is not a fad. I’m meditating for the rest of my life – it is something I can’t do without. I’m in the process of trying to find a different way to live, the neoliberal consumer society I was born into doesn’t really tick all my boxes. Meditation is helping me stay in touch with my intuition and keep me on my own trajectory.
When I was wondering in the dark I could find loads of articles on meditating, but none of them seemed to get to the nitty gritty of what is actually happening for people. I’ll relate my tips and thoughts on the process here hoping that it can help.
Releasing Trauma
I am not a trauma counsellor or meditation guru, but I realise that everyone has their own inner world and it is different for each individual. Some people are very in tune with their inner world naturally but most people I think have certain aspects of their past life that they repress, don’t like, and generally try and ignore. These repressed negative aspects create blockages within that find ways of expressing themselves somehow. Anger, alcohol and drugs are very common outlets. Life is all about cycles – not the two wheeled variety. Letting the cycles come around full circle is essential to a healthy mind. Blocking certain parts of yourself/ experiences interrupts the cycles. Blocking makes short term sense to people, but long term it can be damaging to you and all around you. It gives you the impression that your immediate problems are everyone else’s fault, when really the past buried within is the real issue. Meditation is one of the keys to allowing the negativity to move through you and finding some kind of peace. If you have had significant trauma in your life it could possibly be an experience you need professional guidance with, particularly at the beginning. Being with your true self is a pretty profound experience and not one that is advertised by the system because it doesn’t cost a cent and you will see life for what it really is.
Where to practise?
I try and find somewhere quiet. Outside in the garden is great – wildlife noise is welcome to me, the traffic from the freeway not so. Also early in the morning and late at night I’m hammered by mosquito’s which is one distraction I cannot ignore no matter how good the meditative experience! If you are after a distraction free location, inside when no-one else is home is perfect. I commonly practise when the rest of the family is getting ready for work, which is annoying but just about doable. The teacher from my meditation course used to duck into the storage cupboard at work for his lunch hour and meditate there. There are no hard and fast rules – take the opportunity when you can.
When?
A useful point is that first thing in the morning the mind is almost in a meditative state already, before the decisions and distractions kick in. This is the prime time for me to have a great experience. It also feels good just before bed, but usually I’m nodding off whilst trying to meditate which gets frustrating. Any time you can do it is beneficial, the key is to keep it up day after day.
For how long?
Lou and I did a twenty minute guided meditation for eighty days straight which was supposed to be scientifically proven to change your life. Start with five minutes a day whenever you are able, and increase it as you can. Ideally I would be doing an hour at a time every day but this is pretty difficult. On the meditation course this is what we did at least four times a day. Now I aim for forty five minutes, but I’m not hanging onto that. Ten minutes, twenty minutes is all good. I don’t set an alarm when time is up, which some people do. I just accept that sometimes I’m in the mindset that I will sit there and work at it for ages, but some days I’m just not in the mood. Experience has told me that calming the mind is often quite difficult and it does pay to stick with it more than 10 minutes if I can.
How do you sit?
If you aren’t used to sitting cross legged it is pure physical agony to stay in that posture for an hour. I could probably do it now – two years of practise later, but the truth is I haven’t sat for a whole hour for over year. On the course I pushed through the pain barrier and after about six days it started to get better. They do have chairs I could have used, but I was hell bent on meditating ‘properly’ – one of my little blockages to inner peace as it turns out…. So, sit on a cushion on the floor cross legged or use a chair but try not to lean back. Stay upright, the key is to be completely conscious but completely relaxed. Lying down or reclining into a comfy chair is more conducive to nodding off, which isn’t a bad thing if you intend a decent nights sleep, but not exactly purist meditation. It is all horses for courses. Hands should just be relaxed in your lap however feels appropriate. Some people sit with their hands in various postures or with palms up, but my advice is don’t get hung up on this.
So what exactly do you do?
The short answer is ‘clear the mind whilst breathing in and out slowly through the nose’. In practise this is a huge challenge. The more I strive, the less benefit I receive. This is all about accepting anything and everything that comes along for what it is, without trying to change it or bend it to my will. Immensely liberating.
Another aspect is becoming the watcher of my mind. This might sound odd, but there are at least two of me in my head. There is a voice that is constantly chattering and reacts to everything. The other is my conscience. I have heard that some people don’t accept this as being true, there is only one voice. The point that made me realise there are two voices was whenever I judge people there is a quieter voice that reminds me that what I just thought probably isn’t that nice or respectful. When I thought about it and paid attention to what I was thinking, particularly in stressful, reactive situations, I could really see the two voices at work. So, the watcher of the mind is the quiet voice that tries to catch the impulsive, reactive mind before the impulses become spiralling negative, depressive thought, or a reality through speech, action or deed.
Having just sat down, there is a kind of transition period as I settle into getting comfortable and slowing the breath down. Some people deep breathe for 30 breaths, which I sometimes do if I’ve been either stressed or active just before meditating. This deep breathing kind of clears the slate and gets me into a relaxed frame of mind. Most often though I’m focussing on tension and I’ve realised the tension in the face is the hardest for me to release, particularly the eyes, bottom jaw and neck.
Once I’ve managed to relax, a common way to try and clear the mind is to focus on a single point. This single point is the skin between the top lip and the nose. As I breathe, I can feel the air move over this part of my face. Cooler on the in breath, and warmer on the out breath. As I relax the breath becomes so light the actual physical sensation of air moving across this point disappears, but I try and keep focussed on it. That sounds straight forward enough, but the mind is more cunning than that.
The whole time the conscious watcher is trying to keep me focussed on my top lip, the impulsive mind is busy with a million thoughts popping in about everything imaginable. All the time the watcher tells me that these thoughts can wait, just gently brushing them aside and concentrating on my top lip again. Sometimes I get lost on a train of thought for ten minutes at a time, no problem, just as soon as I realise I’ve been lost, I come back again to the top lip.
Importantly for me, every time I think of something else, the tension in my eyes, bottom jaw and neck comes back. I go through them one by one and relax them again and concentrate on the top lip. On repeat as much as my mind wanders.
Is that all there is to it?
Well, this is where meditation is mysterious. You gain a sort of trust in the universe that science can’t really put a finger on. Life looks a lot more rosy and I’ve greatly reduced analysing things that annoy me, which used to result in much animation and expletives. What you get out of meditation is completely personal, it is not a competition with others. And although it is a completely personal thing it radiates out of you with other people and your outlook on life. When Lou did the 80-day meditation I could tell she was a different person after only a few days, and tellingly, so could her business partner – and he had no idea she was meditating.
There are a couple of other great positives for me.
The immediate benefit as soon as I started to meditate is clarity of thought. Sometimes the train of thought I get lost on is about something really useful, so I have to write it down. Sometimes if I’ve been particularly relaxed, when I come around again my thoughts all just line up and things that seemed really complex all of a sudden become suspiciously simple.
I’m nervous about writing about the following benefit because if I tell you about it, your mind might invent the feeling without them being true sensations, therefore giving you a false belief. However the other part of me is saying, if I tell you all about it then you will be able to know and trust yourself and your conscience rather than your impulsive mind.
When I can truly relax and get into it, I get tingles and goose bumps all over. Bear in mind that this didn’t happen at all on the meditation retreat, although I felt I was on the precipice of something groundbreaking. I couldn’t wait to come home and continue to practise to find out what it was. These sensations are almost the definition of pleasure. The key to meditation for me at the moment is to try and prolong these sensations for as long as possible. Paradoxically, as soon as these sensations arise the mind kicks in with ‘woo hoo you did it, now hold onto it!’ Precisely what I don’t want, more thoughts. I once got into a state hinting at what is beyond this but is really difficult to put into words apart from even more pleasurable. Almost like a feeling of falling backwards off a cliff knowing that a cloud will catch me. Weird, but like I was able to completely trust in the way of things to take care of me no matter what happened. Becoming at one with the universe perhaps, I don’t know, but I’m going to find out!!
This next benefit is absolutely a work in progress, but I see life increasingly for what it really is, not what I believe it should be. Things happen, some of them good, some of them bad, but with a decent meditation practise the bad ones are not as mentally challenging somehow. Essentially I can accept a lot more without trying to force or control the outcomes. By trying to control everything, or having expectations things should happen in a certain way I created stress for myself. The stress associated with control is about having unrealistic visions for the future, and acceptance is about dealing with what happens in real time, right now to the best of your ability. It is amazing how many serendipitous moments arise when you can trust in life and the moment a lot more. Bad things seems to happen a lot less often.
More Advanced Meditation
The ten day retreat was split into five days of Anapana meditation, which is what I just described above, and then five days of Vipasana meditation. Vipasana meditation is a slightly different technique where you focus on all the parts of the body one by one starting with the head and down to the feet. When you return to the head you get great sensations. The process takes time, and so to be really beneficial it is for longer meditations of at least twenty minutes, but more like forty to an hour. Again though, I didn’t experience any sensations at the retreat, only sometime later when I’d learned to relax and release my mind some more. When I got back home, as I was a complete novice, I didn’t feel I had given enough attention to Anapana meditation and so I’ve just continued with that ever since. Once in a blue moon I might try Vipasana but I’m still really enjoying Anapana, so that is what I have stuck with. Interestingly though, just writing about Vipasana now has made me think I should give it a go more often….
The Future
As I’ve mentioned there are layers and layers of meditation – it is not a destination The more you do it, the more there is to it, but the more you want something to happen, the less it happens. All you have to do is sit there and not think!
I’ve only been really concentrating on it for two years and there have been only maybe 20 or 30 days in that time where I haven’t meditated. It is the gift that keep giving and is completely within yourself wherever you are. I actually enjoy the challenge of sitting on the train into the city and try and meditate for an hour without being distracted by other passengers. Very difficult!
Resources
I’ve managed to write that piece without explicitly mentioning Buddhist philosophy or spirituality once. If either of these terms puts you off like it did for me for years, don’t let it. The culture we live in has conditioned us to be very skeptical of things that the powers that be can’t tax, control or sell.
Buddhism is not a prescriptive religion with rules to follow, it is just a few suggestions on how to live your best life, and it is the ‘home of meditation’. Whether you choose to follow those suggestions to the letter is up to you, but no-one will send you to purgatory if you don’t.
Spirituality is just following your conscience rather than accepting the brand of straight jacket society fits you with from birth. It has nothing to do with which God you believe in or not. The real you knows the truth already, that quiet voice is just drowning under layers of social conditioning.
Now that I listen to the watcher within, I know fundamentally whether something is the right or wrong thing to do and I’m trusting my intuition a lot more. When I get an impulse to purchase the latest and greatest piece of clutter I can discern whether that is what I really need, or if it is yet another want. I don’t study Buddhist philosophy or attend ongoing rituals, I just practise meditation at home and try to do the right thing, that’s it.
Most of my guidance has come from the following:
International Meditation Centre – Sunshine, NSW. 10 day meditation centre. (http://www.imcnsw.com/)
The Michael Singer Podcast, Series 1 – on Spotify and other outlets.
Books
- The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle
- The Engaged Spiritual Life – Donald Rothbury
- No Bad Parts – Richard Schwartz.
- The Master and His Emissary – Iain McGilchrist
