Day 75: Meditation for Dummies
No, exactly NOT like this. Photo by Daniel Mingook Kim on Unsplash
One day this summer, I randomly clicked on an interview with Light Watkins on the 3 Books podcast. I’d never heard of Watkins. I suck at sticking to a meditation routine. But whatever.
Watkins was immediately riveting. Not at all guru-y, he seemed like a regular guy who might hang out with my pizza-and-baseball-loving brother.
I ended up buying Watkins’ book on meditation, Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation without Really Trying. I read it cover to cover on a flight from Pittsburgh to Wyoming.
Watkins made meditation so easy, so accessible — I started meditating in the Grand Tetons (okay, in my hotel room) and have continued twice daily since.
The Easier, the Better
People sometimes confess to Watkins that they struggle to meditate, often found themselves just ruminating instead. What do you do when your mind just keeps wandering?
Let it, is Watkins’ answer. Resisting anything will only make your mind cling to it more strongly.
And if you tend to fall asleep? Then sleep, Watkins said — you probably need it.
Ten to twenty minutes, twice a day, in a comfortable seated position with plenty of back support. Propped up on your bed might be good (I do that a lot). Think a “settling sound” aaaah-mmmm to yourself. Then sit. When you notice you’re meditating, think the settling sound again. Peek at a clock once in a while. Get up after twenty minutes. That’s it.
Sure, there are other meditation techniques, and they have their purposes. But most come to us from advanced meditation practitioners. For someone who struggles even to meditate at all in a busy life, that’s usually too much of a good thing.
If you’re a beginner and you want to learn tennis, you could enter the U.S. Open — or you could just find a find a racquet and a friend and hit a few balls back and forth. Which is more likely to advance your skills?
Results
I realized I was very much at the hit-a-few-tennis-balls-against-the-garage kind of stage when it comes to meditation.
In his book, Watkins explains how deceptively impactful even the most simple meditation practice can be, when done consistently. It made sense. And it seemed easy. Because, well, it is easy.
I don’t know if it “works” for me. I just know it’s restful and peaceful — and if I tell myself I can’t find ten minutes twice a day to sit quietly, then I know I’m lying. My morning meditations are usually kind of ruminate-y (kind of an automatic to-do list in my head, but okay). Evenings I often sit down drained and stand up refreshed.
And this morning, a funny thing happened. I couldn’t sleep and started my day very, very early — hours of work on my to-do list before teaching my 10:30 a.m. class.
Fortunately I’d prepared for the class yesterday. I spent a long time setting up the slide presentation to be clear but concise, and to visually signal with each slide where I wanted the students’ attention to go.
But early this morning, when I logged on to my home computer and checked the cloud — the PowerPoint was gone. I opened PowerPoint and checked recent documents — nothing. I logged in to the web version and accessed my document files there — still no.
Re-doing the file would have cost me at least an hour I needed to spend on other tasks.
The old me would probably have overreacted. I probably would have gotten dressed in a hurry, driven to work long before daylight, just to make sure the file was there.
But today, there was no reaction. I looked in the place in my solar plexis where the butterflies usually start, and there was nothing. Just calm. I’m probably just not connected properly to the server, I thought. The file will be there when I get to the office. I finished my morning tasks without giving it another thought. (And yes, when I got to work a few hours later, the file was there.)
I can’t say for sure that my mediation practice is the reason for my calm this morning. But it got my attention.