thinking about meditation (again)

Things have been a bit stressful around here recently. It's odd to me that the moments when it would be most useful to meditate, when I am most in need of calmness and serenity, are the exact moments when it doesn't occur to me to meditate. At all. As in, days will go by while I am wound so tightly I can barely sleep before it occurs to me-- huh. Maybe I should try meditating.

Last week when things were finally starting to slow down a bit, then I started meditating again. I've told you before that I'm terrible at the actual act of meditating. I'm lucky if I can quiet my brain for 30 seconds, let alone five or ten minutes.

But there are two reasons I keep doing it: one is because even though meditating feels like a fail while I'm doing it, I often feel the effects later. It seems pointless at the time, but if I can just sit there and let whatever thoughts and feelings I have wash over me, later on in the day, I will feel a perceptible drop in my stress level.

And the other reason is that meditating has taught me the trick of stepping off the hamster wheel in my brain. I may not be able to get my brain to stop, but I can create a little bit of space between me and the non-stop activity. I can back away from it and watch. Wow, look at that thing go.

Because go it does, all the time. (That's one of the reasons I read-- I know I've heard other readers say this, too. A really absorbing book distracts my brain, tricks it into resting.) And that trick, that ability to step off the hamster wheel, has been a lifesaver for me. The more I do it, the more I practice, the easier it becomes.

Except, apparently not when I'm really stressed. Then I forget all about it.

Anyway. Thinking about this got me back into investigating meditation again, so I've been listening to podcasts and reading Mark Epstein and Pema Chodron, and as sometimes happens, I heard/read several times in the space of a week different meditation teachers reminding me that we are all human animals. And as animals, we are first and foremost, before anything else, creatures-- the same way that a giraffe or a spider or a trout is a creature.

One morning as I read something along those lines, I happened to look up and see our dog, who can be the most irritatingly manic canine on the planet when she has a tennis ball in her mouth, looking calm and alert as something caught her attention out the window. 

Calmly alert: Sadie, meditation teacher extraordinaire

She sat there, in that same pose, for five minutes or so, completely calm, but also completely focused on whatever she was looking at. I'm not sure I could do that. #goals