how not to meditate part 2

There was somewhere I was going with these meditation posts, and as is often the case, I can no longer remember where it was. Maybe it will come back to me later. But at the moment, I need a post for tomorrow and this one is already half-written, so here you go.

- Along the lines of mixing up my meditation practice a little, once or twice a week I do a guided meditation--i.e., someone has recorded meditation instructions, sometimes general, sometimes on a specific topic like reducing stress or dealing with anger, that you can play back while you're meditating. I have a couple I've downloaded from Audible, and there are thousands out there on YouTube (the Honest Guys have a bunch). If you want something specifically Christian, search for Guided Prayer.

- I have an app on my phone (go ahead and laugh) called the Insight Timer. There's a free version that just uses really nice bell/chime tones to start and end your session. I use it enough that I went ahead and paid for the full version, which gives you a wider variety of sounds and also allows sounds that play at an interval--say every two minutes. I like the interval sound, because if my mind has started to wander (and it always does), that reminds me to come back.

- When I first started, I would have a pen and paper next to me. If there was a thought I just couldn't let go of, I'd stop and write it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you hear you're supposed to sit utterly still and not move a muscle, but that's way less important than being able to let go of the hamster wheel. If your nose itches, scratch it. If your foot starts to fall asleep, move it. If there's something you're afraid you'll forget while you're relaxing, write it down.

- The Buddhists say that that the mind is innately spacious. All we need to do to experience that sense of spacious, calm ease is to clear away our thoughts. I'm not sure I agree with that. In my experience, that sense of inner spacious ease is something that has to be cultivated, there's nothing inborn about it. If it were innate, that would mean that there was some pre-ordained reason we should all be meditating to reach this pre-existing state. But if it's something that has to be cultivated, it's just another possible function of the human mind. It deepens and enriches my experience, so I think it's worth doing. But I don't know that there's any pre-existing significance to a meditation practice.

- The mental whirlpool that I sometimes experience--what I've been calling the hamster wheel--sometimes takes on a life of it's own. Sometimes when I get really stressed, the whirlpool starts looking for things to obsess about. There's no longer any connection to something real in my life that I really can do something about, it becomes all about the need to feed the brain spins. In grad school, I'd be frantically worrying about a paper that was due, and when it was finally finished and turned in, instead of getting a break from the mental stress, my brain would just grab onto the next thing it could obsess about. Meditation is the one of the few things I've found that breaks that cycle. (vacation is another, but vacations aren't always an option, darn it.)

I told you last week about one of my analogies for meditation--the blinking, flashing, busy helmet that you remove so that you can spend a few minutes away from all that mental chatter. I have a new analogy. I remember when I was a kid, one time when I was swimming with my sisters I got stuck with one of those plastic inflatable rings under my armpits. It was just a little bit too small, so I was flailing around trying to push myself up out of it and getting a little panicky, because I just kept feeling more and more stuck. My older sister called out to me to put my arms straight up over my head and let myself sink down through the middle. It worked perfectly.

Meditation is sort of like that. Your brain is flailing around with all kinds of pointless activity, but if you just relax and let yourself sink down in, you free yourself from the mental trap of the whatever you're stuck in, and down you go into the cool silence of the water. Nice analogy, right?

So give it try sometime this week, and eventually I'll remember where I was going with these posts. Maybe it will be something interesting.