saturday scribes august 9, 2008

A meditation session


Tania’s mind was always full of thoughts. She realized this when she first started meditating. As she tried to focus on quiet breathing, thoughts came to her unwarranted, unwanted, unwelcome. Initially she tried to drive these thoughts from her mind. A thought would come. I’ve got to finish cutting the potatoes for potato salad. I still have to take the recycle out. I wonder when Dave is going to call. What is he doing right now?

But driving the thoughts away didn’t seem to help. She would drive one thought away, and another cluster of thoughts would arrive to replace it. Again, Tania brought her mind back to her ingoing and outgoing breaths. In....out....in.....out........ That interview didn’t go as well as I wanted. I messed up those spec. ed questions.. ........Tania noticed that her mind had wandered. Again. If only she could catch her mind at the precise moment that it wandered from conscious awareness into an all-consuming thought in which she lost her awareness.

The best meditation book she’d tried suggested that during meditation you identify thoughts rather than try to drive them away. The second you became aware of a thought, you identified it as “thought,” and then you moved back to the breath. This was easier said then done. Tania kept missing that crucial moment when she lost track of her breath and became immersed in a thought. It was a difficult moment to pin down .

Tania again focused herself. In....out....in....out......in.....out.......she was doing well now. Three breaths. Uh-oh. Conscious awareness gone again in a moment of self-encouragement. kay. It was time to focus. Tania felt a need to glance quickly at her watch. What time was it anyway? She’d given herself 20 minutes to mediate, and probably ten had already passed. She wasn’t feeling peaceful yet. But the peace would come if she continued for months. She’d being meditation a few weeks now, and she’d noticed subtle changes in her everyday life. Nothing she could pin down easily. But she felt calmer, more centered.

Strangely, this calmness didn’t translate into her actually meditation sessions, which were regular times of uncomfortable mental discipline. And here she was again, thinking instead of meditating. Tania opened her eyes briefly and saw that only seven minutes had passed. She could never even count the number of thoughts she had in those seven minutes. They flew in as fast as fighter jets. Nasty little things. Or rather harmless things. If Tania could mentally transform those fighter jets into slow, passenger planes with enormous fuselages, then she might ultimately eliminate them. It would be easier to eliminate large planes, she thought logically, then speedy, potentially violent ones. Or would it? Did this really make sense?

Tania again tried to calm down the noise in her head. Where the heck did all these thoughts come from? Why wasn’t she in control of her thoughts? Could she ever control them? Then she reminded herself to stay calm. She again found her breath. In...out...in...out. Tania felt her heart slow down gradually. This time she was doing better. When a thought came, she mentally identified it. Thought. Sensation. Noise. The fan next to her was loud. Too loud. She kept having to identify it. Fan. Noise. Cool Air. Sensation. Tania suddenly wished that she hadn’t put on any lipstick that morning. Her lips were already dry, and the lipstick seemed to dry them out further. Lipstick wasn’t supposed to be good for you. You could pick up more natural stuff at the health store, but it cost more, and Tania didn’t have extra money to fool around with. And beside, this lipstick was supposed to be moisturizing.

Tania heard the timer go off. Twenty minutes was over. She opened her eyes. Her eyes were wet, and she felt like yawning. The hoped-for peacefulness hadn’t come, but she did feel more relaxed. Damn it. Meditation was probably the hardest thing she’d ever tried to do! How did the Dalai Lama do it?

Tomorrow, she’d try again, and maybe one day she’d have an answer to that one.