Do You Mind?

I recently attended an 8-week course on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, which I have noticed since the course began is becoming pretty popular around the country.

Several compelling studies are arriving that show that focused meditation improves our minds in a myriad of ways. (Don’tcha love that word, “myriad”?) Once thought to be the sole bastion of “woo-woo” New-Age practitioners, meditation is now “hip,” and even buttoned-up workplaces are adopting it as a way to reduce stress and improve functionality and creativity. Doctors are prescribing it to treat ADD and ADHD in children and adults.  They are also prescribing it for chronic pain, high blood pressure, IBS, and other ailments. What about therapists? More and more, therapists and psychiatrists are recommending mindfulness as a treatment for depression.

Mindfulness Meditation, as it is also called, could apparently be the Thing That Saves Humanity From All Evil. (Then again, probably not. But does it hurt to try?)

Meditation itself comes in several forms. It can be religious, spiritual, or entirely secular. It can range from simply sitting with oneself in silence, or even contemplative silence, for a few minutes a day to 3-day retreats full of little but eating, sleeping and purposeful meditating. It often conjures up a vision of patchouli-soaked rooms full of hipsters chanting and bending their bodies into various painful poses, but that shouldn’t define it.

MBSR isn’t just any meditation. The key is mindfulness, and if you think it’s a simple thing to turn off your brain for 10, 20, or 45 minutes at a stretch and focus solely on your breath, you will find out soon enough that It. Is. Not . That. Simple.

And that, my friends, is what makes it awesome.

Yes, one of the greatest things about Mindfulness Meditation is that the idea—turning off distractions and focusing on one thing—is simple, but the practice is deliciously difficult.

The first night of class, I fell asleep. And snored. And I wasn’t the only one.

C’mon, give me a break. It was evening, it was winter, and it was very, very cold outside, so the heat was up higher than I’m used to in a room that was slightly too small for the number of students present. Also, the meditation part came at the end of a 2-hour lecture, and we were instructed to lie on the floor.

You’d have sawed some logs, too.

(Thinking back on it, I am reminded of the scene in the movie G.I. Jane—an oddly entertaining/eye-rollingly bad flick mostly due to the acting chops of Anne Bancroft and Viggo Mortensen—wherein our Navy S.E.A.L. trainees have been awake for almost 24 hours and are given a “break” from their nonstop physical travails in the form of a sit-down in a classroom. They are dog-tired, starving, chafing in wet, sandy clothes, and nearly beaten down, and Mortensen tells them to “write an essay, no less than 500 words, on ‘Why I Love the U.S. Navy.’” The heat is turned up, the lights are dimmed, classical music begins playing, and it’s pouring rain outside--and they are ordered not to fall asleep.)

The MBSR presenters are savvy, though, and they knew this would happen, and warned us about it playfully. It takes time to train your brain to do this, they said. You will fail at it constantly, but you will get better over time. And I did. And I still am.

Oh, it’s a journey. I get slack. I don’t make time for it like I should (45 minutes a day, 6 days a week, is the prescription). The trick is not to start judging yourself for skipping it, though. That’s difficult, seeing as we humans spend a great deal of time judging ourselves harshly.

Stay tuned. I need to go meditate now.