by Joelle Marlow
Here we examine two approaches which support the introduction of meditation to your life, and together which support healing. Part two looks at four more: kindness, letting go, patience and enjoyment.
Stopping
For those on the move: finding ‘now’
The pace of life today is often overwhelming. There is so much information, so much activity, and constant demands on our senses. If our lives are too full, our minds are too full. Meditation practice demands (as well as creates) space. It requires us to stop.
If, despite poor health, you remain habitually busy, be prepared for a process of adapting to a new way of relating to time and to your body. If you take regular pauses throughout your day and slow down, you can be more aware of how ‘full’ your life feels, and ‘full’ your mind feels. This is just as important as the time spent meditating.
Darlene Cohen calls this finding ‘the one who is not busy’. It is vital to give ourselves permission to stop in order to look at the bigger picture. Many people are ‘running on empty’, ignoring stress related health symptoms, hoping they will go away. If we don’t allow time to pause and be aware of how we feel, then it’s not possible to know where the limits to our physical or mental energy are, never mind recognise when we’ve crossed them.
When Joanna struggled to face up to a diagnosis of ME/CFS after years of a successful career, she discovered she’d forgotten how to relax. “There was no way I could sit and meditate. I realised I’d become completely caught up in a habit of being on the move, all my time being accounted for in some sort of useful activity. I started to allow myself ‘wasted time’ time with no intended outcome. Also, I realised there were situations presented to me daily that were an opportunity to learn how to sit still and rest my mind. I had always carried a book or walkman when I went out, but I started leaving them at home: I’d experiment with bringing my attention inwards quietly whilst sitting at a bus stop, queuing in shops or sitting in the doctors surgery. It was the beginning for me. It paved the way for my meditation practice because I began to make some space in my head.”
Bringing a more pure attention to the present, when it becomes a habit, eventually affects our whole life. It makes our choices more connected to our needs: whether trivial day to day decisions, or more serious decisions such as relationship or employment commitments. Where we need to simplify, how can we give ourselves some breathing space?
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Recommended:
- Dr David Kundtz, Stopping: How to be still when you want to keep going, 1998, ISBN 1573241091. Suppliers include Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
- The Curly Pyjama Letters, by Michael Leunig. "It is worth doing nothing and having a rest; in spite of all the difficulty it may cause, you must rest, Vasco — otherwise you will become RESTLESS! I believe the world is sick with exhaustion and dying of restlessness."
Embracing stillness within illness
If you lead a life adapted to chronic illness - unable to work or confined at home or hospital - you may have found it isn’t necessarily any easier to meditate if you have time on your hands. It can be a challenge as a beginner learning in social isolation with no teacher.
The same strategies described above are needed. What matters is how our life is being experienced moment to moment from within the body/mind. We can still be ‘running’ in our head, and we can still be tense and overactive when not doing a great deal. Pain and uncomfortable symptoms dominate our attention… or we fill our minds with distraction so we don’t feel them so fully. Add to this the strain of our relations with carers, family, employers and medical professionals now we are incapacitated, and we can inhabit an inner world in which there is no peace.
Regularly pausing and connecting to our body and mind in the present moment is the beginning of enabling healing. It is also a necessary habit for managing finite energy levels. We start to rest more deeply and more frequently, and monitor more accurately how much energy is in the ‘bank’ for today. Relating to our health with mindfulness - as opposed to defensiveness or a sort of ‘survival’ mode - brings more perspective. We judge more objectively which treatment interventions are helpful and what exacerbates our symptom pattern.
Ricky Buchanan, author of a well known letter to non CFS sufferers also wrote about her difficulties with meditation. She noted however that even if meditation seemed too difficult, it was a breakthrough in itself for her to have complete mental and physical rest. "I might not do much physically but I do tend to fill up my time nonetheless, unless I'm really too sick I tend to be listening to the radio, or reading, or whatever, almost all the time." She realised she needed to introduce more total 'stimulation-free' time to rest more fully. This is a lesson for all of us. Before worrying about ‘whether we are meditating right’, learn what true rest is. How much of our environment (TV, radio, phone) usually drains our mental energy? How often do we enjoy silence, either in solitude or shared with others?
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Recommended:
- Eckhart Tolle The power of Now: a guide to Spiritual enlightenment, 1999 ISBN 0340733500. Try Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
- On Being Still... The tale of the Buddha and the king
Mindfulness is about noticing: observing what is happening in your body, and what is happening in your mind. Judgement of it isn’t helpful, and changing it isn’t necessary. Strengthening the ‘witness’ in us involves developing our concentration and awareness. What happens naturally as this habit grows in us, is we develop a greater ability to actually make choices about what we hold our attention to. We gain more control over our minds.
Inhabit the body. Listen to it. As soon as he came back from a day at his job as an IT manager, Jonathan’s approach was to lie down and - as he put it - ‘find the tiredness.’ This describes perfectly what the aim is - to spend time going towards the sensations of the body with an enquiring, curious spirit rather than avoiding them.
By paying closer attention, we become an expert on our own healing, and an agent in it. “By the time I was so ill I was rarely able to get out of the house, I felt powerless and scared,” remembers Jade. “One day I met a woman at a New Age centre when we ate a shared lunch. I noticed how she seemed to know a lot about what diet suited her. When I asked about this she simply said, ‘you have to be like a detective investigating your own body.’ I saw the sense in this. Slowly I began to observe the effect different things were having on me by noticing reactions and all the different physical sensations. I made important changes after that - changed my diet, and started being careful about the people and places I spent time with that were not going to help me heal.”
What’s happening in our minds? Noticing the subject and nature of our thinking is another adventure in observation. It’s noticing this that most shocks beginners in meditation. We learn just how much our mind grips and returns to thoughts, fantasies, stories, and self-talk. It turns out, to our astonishment, that we spend much of our lives lost in thoughts which, looked at objectively, are simply replays of events in the past (perhaps regrets), or imagined outcomes which may happen in the future (perhaps fears). We learn how we’re controlled by these thoughts rather than vice versa. From time to time in our daily life, as a support to a mindful and calmer life, we can bring in our ‘witness’ to see the nature of our thoughts - catch our mind in the act of creating illusions - then gently come back to the present again.
Recommended: Darlene Cohen, Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach to Living with Physical and Emotional Pain, 2000. ISBN 1570628173. Try Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Exercise: take a 5 minute break, sitting or lying comfortably wherever you are, and choose one of your senses to be with for that time. All you will do is be with one of your senses...sight, smell, hearing, touch… whichever sense you choose to focus on, don’t judge or try to change what it’s telling you. Simply receive what it brings and sit passively letting it wash over you.
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