Growing up, meditation was something hippies and Hari Krishnas did. Even the name, Transcendental Meditation made it sound like it was something for the fringe of society. Today it is mainstream and cool. There are many famous practitioners – Rupert Murdoch, Clint Eastwood & Martin Scorsese to name a few – and a lot of evidence about the benefits of meditation. We should all be doing it as automatically as we brush our teeth every day. Some schools are starting to teach it to their students. I think that’s great.
But most of us don’t find it that easy. We have busy minds that are hard to quiet. And we have busy lives; we think we don’t have the time. But this is why meditation is often called a ‘practice’. We are told that we have to strengthen our meditation muscle…when our mind wanders, we are to gently pull our focus back. I know it’s good for me, but so is cutting out sugar in my diet. And faced with the choice to take something off my long to-do list or sit still for 20 minutes, well, the list often wins.
Deepak Chopra had this to say about the nature of your mind and the process of meditation:
“Think of your mind like a flowing river. On the surface, a river flows the fastest and is broken up by waves and currents. But if you dive deeper, the waves disappear and the current is slower. Finally, at the bottom, where the water meets the riverbed, the current may be nearly motionless. The mind is like that, yet we identify only with its active, fast-moving surface. What lies deeper can’t be accessed by thought. You must allow your mind to seek its own quiet, to return to its own source.”
I love that – the idea that meditating is getting to the deeper currents of the mind. So I try to meditate – sitting still in a chair or in the hot tub, but I also work at being mindful while driving and running. You don’t think that’s possible? Years ago at a museum they had a way to test stress from the electrical current in your fingertips. My ‘stress’ actually went down when they played the sound of traffic!
But most of us don’t find it that easy. We have busy minds that are hard to quiet. And we have busy lives; we think we don’t have the time. But this is why meditation is often called a ‘practice’. We are told that we have to strengthen our meditation muscle…when our mind wanders, we are to gently pull our focus back. I know it’s good for me, but so is cutting out sugar in my diet. And faced with the choice to take something off my long to-do list or sit still for 20 minutes, well, the list often wins.
Deepak Chopra had this to say about the nature of your mind and the process of meditation:
“Think of your mind like a flowing river. On the surface, a river flows the fastest and is broken up by waves and currents. But if you dive deeper, the waves disappear and the current is slower. Finally, at the bottom, where the water meets the riverbed, the current may be nearly motionless. The mind is like that, yet we identify only with its active, fast-moving surface. What lies deeper can’t be accessed by thought. You must allow your mind to seek its own quiet, to return to its own source.”
I love that – the idea that meditating is getting to the deeper currents of the mind. So I try to meditate – sitting still in a chair or in the hot tub, but I also work at being mindful while driving and running. You don’t think that’s possible? Years ago at a museum they had a way to test stress from the electrical current in your fingertips. My ‘stress’ actually went down when they played the sound of traffic!