Meditation

In the context of Ger's post on feeling tired, and the previous post here on enjoyment vs pleasure, I'd like to talk about a little tool I stumbled across around junior high. Took me years to learn how to use it; but in my early 20s, with a little guidance from those who handled it well, it became a potent ally.

If you'd like to try it, I'd be honored to help you get off on the right foot; I've been around the block a few times on the wrong one and it's not nearly as much fun. In fact, it's kind of worthless. Done right, it's awesome. This flies in the face of our modern PC, anything goes, do it your way zeitgeist; but there are specific ways to do this right and innumerable ways to do it wrong and the difference is in the results.

The good news is, it's not hard to do right; 90% of which is knowing what it's not.

• Meditation is not sitting and thinking about stuff. Unfortunately, people sometimes make it synonymous with "thinking", like "I'll meditate on it" Meditation is not about thinking.
• Meditation is not about sitting around trying to make your mind blank. Doesn't work, and you find quickly when you meditate for real that you don't *make* your mind do anything.
• Meditation is not a skill or an art, it's a knack. Just like swimming, we seem to innately know how to do it if given conditions to bring it out (like being thrown in the deep end.)
  
  

So, what is it then? Meditation is simply sitting still (usually), observing our thoughts, emotions and sensations that arise without attaching ourselves to them. Attaching means:

• Getting pulled into a stream of thought or feelings rather than just watching them go by.
• Judging a thought or feeling with another thought or feeling
  
  

In meditation, for a brief period of time, you cultivate an awareness where any thought or feeling is equally valid; you identify with none of them, you are not pulled into them nor do you evaluate them with anything other than pure awareness. It's useful, starting out, to focus awareness on something that is happening here and now, like your breathing, purely as a tether to realize when you have been sucked into the thought-stream. You'll find, when you start, that you will "blink out", sometimes for the whole session, following thoughts. This is how the mind normally "thinks" with long streams where our experience is absorbed in thoughts rather than the present. So much so that we don't even "see" these streams that absorb us. Gradually you'll experience more and more spots in meditation where you lift above this and discover that a more real part of you is neither your thoughts nor your feelings.

Oddly enough, doing this regularly benefits energy, stress-relief and even adds gray matter to yer noggin. Give it a spin sometime.