Tag Archives: meditation

Renewing my sitting practice, massage self care, oil pulling, and a 21-day challenge: Byron Katie’s The Work

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I got away from my meditation practice. For many months.

It always seemed like a good idea when I thought about it, and I still didn’t actually do it more than occasionally. Committing to 20-30 minutes of doing nothing — well, it seemed like I didn’t have time. I had other things to do.

This is after years of meditating and a full year of daily sitting.

Hmmm. The mind plays tricks, takes itself way too seriously, makes excuses, avoids.

I missed it, and when a friend told me she gets out of bed and sits first thing every day, it inspired me to start again.

I was also inspired by the film The Dhamma Brothers, about a program in an Alabama prison where inmates did vipassana meditation, 10 days of silent sitting. It was profound to see peace on the faces of men who had committed terrible crimes.

One inmate said:

I thought my biggest fear was growing old and dying in prison. In truth, my biggest fear was growing old and not knowing myself.

Meditation has always been about facing my self, from the day I started, so tentatively, having realized that nothing else I had tried was taking my suffering away, so I might at least fully face it.

It didn’t take it away, but I quickly understood that my experience was larger than my suffering.

Aren’t we all in prisons of some kind? Fears, mindless behaviors, disconnections, denial, insane beliefs…

I want to know myself. And that in itself is such a koan, I felt inspired to sit with it.

Getting on the computer first thing in the morning is my worst distraction. I seem to have developed an affinity for my laptop, for Facebook, email, checking my blog stats, reading what interests me. Time can get away from me. It’s like an addiction.

So I realized that I need to sit first thing. Actually, I do a couple of sun salutations first. Otherwise, more of my attention goes to my aches and pains when I sit.

Yoga frees my mind to pay more attention to noticing my thoughts and sensing the subtle energies.

Today I experienced this:

Indeed, the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffability of awareness itself, and we should not be surprised that many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or ‘mind,’ not as a power that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with the other animals and the plants, the mountains and the clouds. ~ David Abram

Tom Best would love that quote. Living inside of awareness. Sweet. I miss him.

~~~

I’ve been giving 15-20 massages a week, and my body is feeling it. I like the honesty of physical work, and I’m learning about remedies like rosemary oil for achy thumbs, trigger points on the forearm, wrist stretches.

Immersing myself in the cold waters of Barton Springs and snorkeling a lap is very, very good for aches and pains. I sleep well.

I’ve also changed up my mouth care routine. I’m brushing with turmeric (if you try it, be careful because it stains towels and possibly porcelain, but it whitens teeth and reduces inflammation in gum pockets), tongue scraping, flossing, oil pulling with organic coconut oil (sometimes adding a drop of peppermint or clove oil).

I do the oil pulling for 20 minutes most days.

So far, my teeth are whiter, my mouth feels cleaner, and my breath smells good throughout the day.

I’ve done this about a week now. I want to do it for a couple of months and see if it makes a big difference. Some folks claim that oil pulling has huge unexpected health benefits; some say that’s because it reduces inflammation in the mouth and body.

I’ll let you know.

~~~

Finally, I am planning to start a new 21-day challenge on Sept. 1, ending on the fall equinox. I will be doing The Work of Byron Katie, starting with her Judge Your Neighbor worksheet.

I will do at least one worksheet online so people can see how The Work actually works.

I’m also re-reading her book, Loving What Is (which she autographed for me last time I saw her!), and will add insights from that and the workshops I’ve attended.

If you’d like to do it along with me, here’s a link to the worksheet online.

The simplest way to improve your posture

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If you’re at all familiar with this blog, I bet you think I’m going to say meditation. Guess what? Ha ha, I’m not!

It’s way simpler than that:

Whenever you’re doing something that does not require use of your hands, turn them so that they’re palm-side up (see the picture above). You also can do it while standing or walking, leaving your arms down at your sides and turning your palms so that they face outward in the direction you’re facing.

This palms-up position may be familiar to committed meditators and yogis who practice shavasana, but it’s foreign to those of us who spend a lot of time at a computer, behind the wheel of a car, holding babies, making lattes, or doing pretty much anything else that requires constant hand use. Even when we’re not using our hands, it’s just habit to sit, walk or stand with our hands facing down or behind us.

Wait for it — there’s a meridian connection: 

In acupuncture, the meridians that run along the inside of the arm, from the chest/underarm to the palm, are Heart, Pericardium and Lung….

Here is just a smattering of the functions each meridian is involved in (there are many more):

  • Heart: breathing, cardiac function, sleep, emotional balance and heat regulation.
  • Pericardium: breathing, blood circulation and upper digestive function.
  • Lung: breathing, immune function, perspiration, body temperature and urination.

…our lifestyles force our hands and arms into an almost constant downward/backward position, creating a tendency to slouch forward. This causes us to cave our upper bodies inward, crunching the Heart, Pericardium and Lung meridians.

Allowing these meridians to flow more freely optimizes their ability to perform their respective functions.

These three meridians are all yin meridians, flowing from the torso to the fingertips.

This is a mudra (energetic gesture in Hinduism and Buddhism). The palms-up mudra, you might have guessed, has to do with receiving energy from spirit or the universe, with allowing. It has to do with being open and surrendering yourself to the Mystery.

Try it when you think about it. Let one or both palms rest facing up, or outward if you’re on your feet. Notice the subtle but significant changes in posture.

Then make it a habit.

Thanks to Sara Calabro for this article.

Meditation develops your brain

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Role of Meditation in Brain Development Gains Scientific Support – NYTimes.com.

This New York Times article reports on new research findings about the effects of long-term meditation on the brain.

The role that meditation plays in brain development has been the subject of several theories and a number of studies. One of them, conducted at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that long-term meditators like Ms. Splain had greater gyrification — a term that describes the folding of the cerebral cortex, the outermost part of the brain.

No one knows exactly what that means. “You could argue that more folds mean more neurons,” said Dr. Eileen Luders, the recent study’s lead author, who practices meditation herself. “These are the processing units of the brain, and so having more might mean that you have greater cognitive capacities.”

Previous studies found that the brains of long-term meditators had increased amounts of so-called gray and white matter (the former is believed to be involved in processing information; the latter is thought of as the “wiring” of the brain’s communication system.)

So basically, meditation, over time, creates more folds and creases in the brain, and your brain functions better through more gray and white matter for processing and communication with other parts of the brain.

What I really liked about this article is what one long-term meditator was able to accomplish.

Ms. Splain’s practice of meditation has, over the years, deepened into something far more than a way to flex her cognitive muscles…

In 2005, at age 57, she embarked on a rigorous graduate program in the interdisciplinary approach to schooling known as Waldorf education. Working full time and taking classes at night, she finished the program at Sunbridge Institute in Spring Valley, N.Y., in three years. She retired from her United Nations job in 2008 and teaches in the early childhood program at the Waldorf School of Garden City on Long Island. She credits the discipline developed through four decades of meditation for her ability to handle the intellectual workload of graduate school — and begin a second career at age 60.

“The mentor of our master’s program acknowledged the challenge of doing this while working full time,” she said. “But when I was able to hand in an 80-page thesis well ahead of the class, he attributed it to the fact that, quote, ‘She’s a meditator.’ ”

So…if you want to do something extraordinary, or even if you just want to live your “normal” life but to experience better brain functioning (and who wouldn’t want that?), it’s like planting a tree.

The best time to do it was 20 years ago. The second best time to start is now.

Regret, distortion, aging, what’s real, going forward

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This quote today from Tricycle Daily Dharma resonated with me fiercely today. I’ve been resuming my sitting practice:

One of the main things that happens when you meditate is that regret starts to surface and you start to think about your life. Meditation neutralizes denial after a while and opens up the circuits and things start to flow in, and then you begin to realize that regret is a distortion of what’s real. What’s real is that this is your life, and it happened, and there’s no going back. There’s only altering your attitude and perception about it so that you can go forward.

The author is Lewis Richmond in Aging as a Spiritual Practice.

Regret is about the past. There’s no going back. You can just be here now and move forward.

I would add that forgiving and accepting yourself are important for letting go of past regrets.

But if you talk candidly to older people, I think they have an intimation that there’s something precious and new about growing old. 

But I don’t think anybody would trade their mind. I think that life is cumulative, and if I look at who I was at 35, it’s clear I know more now. I’m a deeper person. I have a deeper appreciation of other people. I’ve just lived a life—a full life. 

There’s some point in your life, early or late, when it hits you that you and everybody else that you care about and love are not going to be here eventually, so now what? That’s the gate. And when you’re at that gate, life changes on you. It has a different coloration. It’s more precious. It’s more serious. You feel a loss of innocence.

A lot of us nowadays will live to be 90, so part of the gate is, “Yeah, I’m getting old and I’ve got a lot of time left, so what am I going to do?” Play golf?

It’s [meditation is] good for knowing what’s real and what isn’t, and that takes time to emerge. There’s a tremendous actual liberation in knowing what’s real, and increasingly you can discern that in situations, through your meditation, “Well, this is just my stuff.” Or, “This is solid. This is real.”

Regret is the ego trying to distort what is unchangeable, and we have various words for how that happens. One of them is denial, which is very powerful. Research shows that it is largely neurological. The neural circuits simply don’t fire. The brain arranges to protect you from the pain; it’s like you literally can’t get there, and you arrange not to get there in terms of remembering, but I think transforming regret into appreciation is one of the main values of meditation.

The Biology of Meditation. | elephant journal

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The Biology of Meditation. | elephant journal.

Lisa Wimberger provides a Cliff’s Notes version of the book Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment, by David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo.

Excerpt:

Stress, trauma and the health perils associated with those states all begin and get perpetuated in the limbic brain, which is comprised of the hippocampus, hypothalamus and amygdala. These are responsible for making our emotional connections outside of logic, taking snapshots of life, creating our dream state experiences, turning on our fight-or-flight response, and storing and delivering emotional information independent of time. The limbic system cannot discern past, present, or future — each “picture” it accesses is experienced by the body as though it’s current.

Fasting and/or a low-calorie diet, antioxidants, voluntary exercise, and meditation are key ways to turn down the limbic brain.

About meditation, she says…

…it is found that those who meditate or enter states of trance have increased blood flow to their pre-frontal cortex (PFC). This area of the brain is the executive decision maker, but is not quite the same as the neo-cortex “logic” mind. The PFC is activated on EKGs during states of compassion, inspiration, motivation and love. It has the ability to project and envision a future reward. It is the part of the brain responsible for motivating us to attain our goals and dreams. Blood flow to the PFC decreases when blood flow to the limbic brain increases.

What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really? | NeuroTribes

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What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really? | NeuroTribes.

Great article by Steve Silberman (I have subscribed to his blog and follow him on Twitter — great find). I like reading about Steve Jobs, but even better is this simple, clear description of why we meditate:

Why would a former phone phreak who perseverated over the design of motherboards be interested in doing that? Using the mind to watch the mind, and ultimately to change how the mind works, is known in cognitive psychology as metacognition. Beneath the poetic cultural trappings of Buddhism, what intensive meditation offers to long-term practitioners is a kind of metacognitive hack of the human operating system (a metaphor that probably crossed Jobs’ mind at some point.) Sitting zazen offered Jobs a practical technique for upgrading the motherboard in his head.

The classic Buddhist image of this hack is that thoughts are like clouds passing through a spacious blue sky. All your life, you’ve been convinced that this succession of clouds comprises a stable, enduring identity — a “self.” But Buddhists believe this self this is an illusion that causes unnecessary suffering as you inevitably face change, loss, disease, old age, and death. One aim of practice is to reveal the gaps or discontinuities — the glimpses of blue sky —between the thoughts, so you’re not so taken in by the illusion, but instead learn to identify with the panoramic awareness in which the clouds arise and disappear.

Lovely sweet rain, a morning meditation, and MONEY!

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I am adoring my experience of a lengthy, soaking RAIN here in drought-stricken Austin, Texas — off and on yesterday, seemingly all night, and most of this Sunday morning. I’m guessing maybe two inches of precious rain has fallen. Feels like such a blessing.

We (people, air, plants, wildlife, soil, streams, lakes, roads) need this so badly. There are cracks an inch wide in the soil under my trailer and under the dead grass. The only green grass around is under trees that got watered in an effort to keep them alive, and around the new trees I planted starting in late August. They’re drinking it up.

I love being inside my trailer in the rain. The sound of rain on the roof is divine.

And it’s Sunday. Sleeping in (well, to 8 am) to the sound of rain feels wonderfully precious. I’m undecided whether to go out to ecstatic dance, the farmer’s market, the Austin Yoga Festival, or to stay blissfully inside on this wet fall day — I have reading to catch up on, videos to watch, a cat to play with, food to cook, or maybe I’ll mix it up spontaneously.

~~

I just did a 35-minute meditation session. When my attention was focused, it went to body awareness and to hearing. My body awareness has deepened since I started massage school in June, of course. Understanding my hands as antennas, feeling layers of tissues down to the bone, and experiencing others touching me with various levels of connection, compassion, and presence have been quite an education.

Hearing while on the cushion a mockingbird and other birds, rain noises, traffic on wet pavement, my cat rustling in a cabinet, I notice I’m accustomed to picking out single sounds. It’s a nice stretch to take it all in, and like a symphony, to go back and forth between individual sounds and the whole cacophony, like zooming in and out with a camera, only with my sense of hearing. That reminds me, I’m leading my adventurous Fourth Way book group through the 12 states of attention on Tuesday.

~~

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a workshop, Metaphors of Money, taught by Charles Faulkner, an NLP trainer, trader, writer, and researcher. Given that metaphors, conscious and unconscious, underlie our experience (the map is not the territory; a map is a metaphor for metaphors), we examined our metaphors around money.

I personify money. I like it, and I want it to like me. I know money likes me when people write checks out to me and give/mail them to me or hand me cash! Also, when I look at my bank balance and it feels good, I know money likes me. When it doesn’t feel good, I feel pressed, and I take steps to bring more in.

I noticed that as the workshop progressed, every time I heard the word “money,” its visual representation in my mind (cash, dollar sign, checks, bank balance) looked brighter and more vivid. By the end, “money” was glowing with white light!

If this workshop is offered again, you can find out by subscribing to NLP Resources Austin‘s email list. (You don’t have to be trained in NLP to participate.) They have a lot of other cool stuff coming up too.

There is a crack in everything

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Today I’m acknowledging the crack, still waiting for the light to get in.

I don’t know what’s going on astrologically, but since a couple of days ago I’ve felt a disturbance in my equanimity.

Anyone else feeling that way?

I hate naming names and casting blame, so I’ll just say that unknowingly, innocently, I subjected myself yesterday to an experience with another person that I never want to repeat. It threw me off, rattled me, and I’m still not centered.

A couple of other incidents before and after that have piled it on, that feeling of being uncentered.

One of them that I feel okay writing about here was listening to part of Fresh Air with Terry Gross this afternoon while running errands in my car. She was interviewing a writer on economics who said that Goldman Sachs helped Greece hide its debt in order to be admitted to the European Union.

Once admitted, Greece had access to very low interest rates and proceeded to borrow lots of money and do things like raise salaries without any accompanying rise in income.

Now Greece has no way of repaying its debt, and it could affect the European Union and the world economy, which as we know is already not in good shape.

“This was not a one-off situation,” he says. “You look at the financial crisis in Europe, and the fingerprints of American investment bankers are everywhere. The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior. At the same time they were making bad loans in the United States, they were encouraging the same sort of behavior at the government level in Europe. The basic problem was, historically the role of the financier was to vet risk and make sure risk was evaluated. That got perverted in recent times, and instead the financier helped disguise risk.”

I’m feeling a lot of empathy for the OccupyWallStreet movement. Most of us feel it, that “things aren’t right.” Corporations are not people. Best bumper-sticker I’ve seen recently:

I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.

I’ve felt for a while that I want to live sustainably on something close to a cash basis, with no mortgage and as little debt as possible.

I want to grow some of the fresh produce I eat, and I want to grow it organically from non-GMO seeds.

I want a skill I can barter.

Because I don’t know what’s coming, and it may get worse before it gets better.

That said, I’m going to meditate for a spell and get myself recentered.

What got you started meditating? Here’s my story. What’s yours?

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Clare commented on my recent post about meditation that she enjoys becoming still and present but wonders how to convince others.

I’m not sure what convinces people that meditation is a good thing. Plenty of people do meditate, and now I’m curious about the initial catalyst. (Because none of this have been doing this our entire lives, I’ll bet!)

I’ll share my story, and I invite you to share yours, either in the comments or via email. If you email me (mareynolds27 at gmail dot com), be sure to let me know what name or initials you want me to use if I get enough responses to summarize in a future post.

I started five years ago after a relationship ended. Even though I knew it was right to end the relationship — the other person had stopped relating to me in a way I enjoyed and had become someone I no longer knew (either that, or my eyes fully opened for the first time) — I still wanted to escape from the emotional pain of ending a relationship I had put a lot of myself into.

I couldn’t find a way to escape. Alcohol, smoking, busy-ness, socializing, travel — none of that helped. Each morning I woke up with a heart that felt raw and vulnerable.

After a few weeks of this, it occurred to me one day that I had nothing to lose if I just sat with the pain, fully facing it. I didn’t believe it could have gotten worse.

I  sat myself down cross-legged on a pillow on the floor and surrendered to what I was feeling. I brought my attention to my heart center and felt into it. I let the pain just be what it was, not wanting to be in denial about it, not wanting to make it into anything else. I actually had some curiosity about moving toward it instead of away from it.

I wasn’t swallowed up, overwhelmed, decimated, annihilated, or engulfed. I felt hurt and vulnerable in my heart center, yes. And I realized that there was more to me than that. I was bigger than the pain. But who was I?

That was the hook. Who actually was I? I began sitting to find an answer to that question.

What set you on this path?

Why meditators are happier

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A very interesting article that fits in well with this blog, Eat, Smoke, Meditate: Why Your Brain Cares How You Cope was published recently in Forbes, the business magazine — an unlikely place for an article about meditation but a good sign, meaning that this kind of information is reaching the conservative mainstream business audience.

The article, by health writer Alice G. Walton, states that for millenia people have turned to different activities to cope with life’s stresses: going for a walk, taking a deep breath, eating, drinking, smoking, praying, taking drugs, running, meditating.

She adds that most people would agree that the mind’s annoying chatter is a major source of unhappiness. It’s the obsessing, worrying, drifting, fearful mind that creates feelings of unhappiness. (We meditators know it as monkey mind.)

This internal chatter and the unpleasant emotions that accompany its thoughts are really what people are trying to get away from. A Harvard study done last year confirmed that mind wandering and unhappiness are clearly connected. That study found that when people are awake, their minds are wandering about half the time.

Another study found that mind wandering is linked to a network of brain cells called the default mode network (DMN for short). This network is only active when we are flitting from one life-worry to the next.

Meditation is about quieting the mind, facing, and then relinquishing those unhappy, stress-inducing thoughts.

New research from Yale has found that the DMN in experienced meditators is markedly less linked to other regions of the brain. And…when the brain’s “me centers” (areas governing thoughts about the self, such as the DMN) are activated, meditators also activated brain areas for self-monitoring and cognitive control.

They did this automatically, even when not being told to do anything in particular.

This implies that experienced meditators habitually monitor their thoughts and control them — a skill learned during meditation. When the mind wanders — when meditating and at other times — experienced meditators bring it back to the present moment.

Could this be the primary benefit of meditation, that you learn to monitor and control your thoughts, and therefore you feel happier?

The article suggests that meditators actually create a new default mode that is more present-centered and less “me”-centered.

The writer wonders whether happiness is really about shifting our tendency away from focusing on ourselves. Another study found that in praying nuns and meditating monks, brain areas for concentration and attention became activated, while areas that govern how a person relates to the world deactivated.

The author states that this suggests that the focus becomes less on the person being a distinct entity from the external world and more on the connection between the person and the external world.

Separation and oneness, away from and toward. Aha!

The article continues, stating that other tools to relieve stress like cigarettes, food, or alcohol actually end up making the users unhappier. Addictions create negative feedback loops that include craving and relief, followed by craving and relief, et cetera.

She concludes:

 Addressing the process itself with other methods (like meditation), which allow you to ride out the craving/unhappiness by attending to it and accepting it, and then letting it go, has been more successful, because it actually breaks the cycle rather than masks it.