Finding the Time to Meditate
When I first began to explore the concept of meditation, sometime in college I think, I just couldn't get it. I could not quiet my brain for the life of me. Sitting still for fifteen minutes was like enduring the sound of someone repeatedly tapping a pencil against a table in a completely silent room, without cease. It's taken me a long time to come around to the traditional concept of meditation, that of quieting the mind and controlling the breath. I had to go through some seemingly non-traditional techniques to get to that point. I think the path I took helped me to understand the benefits of that sort of meditation, and understand that there are truly many ways to go about it.
I've always had problems with anxiety. I am very sensitive to the emotions of people I am engaging with, and have often had a hard time drawing the line between my feelings and someone else's feelings. Of course, something I have come to learn is that my own insecurities tend to only align me to the frequency of the negative emotions that others are projecting, not as much to the positive. My mother was especially bad about this, and it is really what I think led to her demise. It wasn't that I was imagining the person's negative emotions, it was that I was not drawing boundaries between my emotions and the other person's emotions, and was not able to see their negative emotions in the proper context, and was focusing on them too much, to my own detriment.
So, in first embarking upon meditation, simple things began to help me cope with my anxiety. I couldn't muster a full-blown meditation, but I would step back from what I was doing, take long deep breaths, close my eyes, and remind myself to pull away and put everything into context and not to take it so personally. "This is just one moment in time. You are feeling anxious and fearful. What is one thing you can do right now to make yourself feel better?" Most of the time anxiety would come up when I was feeling overwhelmed, and of course if I was feeling overwhelmed, I could not filter out other people's emotions well. It was usually all interconnected and led to a feeling of spiraling faster and faster out of control. So if I could just quiet myself and focus on one small task to accomplish, then one more, I slowly began to feel more in control and more positive.
Oh, the deep dark secret I hide... I think people generally see me as a very positive and happy-go-lucky sort, but I am actually really quite depressing and gloom and doom a lot of the time! More than I would like to be, that's for sure.
I was always interested in various "spiritual" endeavors and felt that there was some sort of underlying approach to life that would make life more joyful for me, and felt that there was something subtle or mystical involved. In my many explorations, I dabbled with yoga and meditation. It's funny to me now when I realize how little I really understood Eastern practices in body and energy work, and it of course makes sense that I wouldn't have gotten much from meditation at the time.
I think I came about understanding meditation in a backwards way to most people. I started through learning to understand the energy exchange within the body and without, and only then was I able to learn to quiet my mind enough for a simple meditation practice.
When I moved to Portland I eventually connected with my now friend and business partner, Liliana. She was teaching a class called "Psychic Kindergarten." It was a lot of fun, and her way of teaching was very open and not pushy at all. Basically you were encouraged to come, listen, and play, to stretch your imagination and see what you discovered and to only embrace what felt right to you. In that class I began to learn how to run my energy, to sense my energy and connect my energy field with the earth and with my higher self. While I have always had a problem with labels, I began to sense connections to energies and entities that, while I may not have labeled them the same thing as someone else might, they did indeed feel present and felt purposeful in specific ways.
In running the energy I would find myself slipping unwittingly into a place of quiet. It felt like a soft, warm, subtle channel flowing through me and out of me. It calmed my nerves and any feelings of anxiety. When I was focusing on the energy flow, I became naturally relaxed. The more I would do it, the closer I would get to what felt like a trance-like state. I would lose grasp on thoughts and would more easily be able to see flashes of imagery float through my mind, unbidden, almost like the images one sees before they begin to fall asleep.
After awhile, I realized I had stumbled upon a kind of meditation. It was easy for me to do, because I could feel the energy so palpably and could enjoy the sensation so immediately that I no longer spent any time feeling frustrated with myself for not being able to settle my mind down.
More recently I have been reading a book I had in my possession for a long time in which the author states that one of the first habits one has to establish on a path of enhancing one's intuitive abilities is to meditate. But the meditation the author describes is a more traditional type of meditation. Simply setting aside fifteen minutes to breathe purposefully and to quiet the mind. Her explanation is that we rarely quiet our mind long enough to open ourselves up to our more subtle intuitive gifts. And this is something I have come to understand more fully, just how subtle intuition and magic are. In my youth I was seeking out some dramatic "Force", a lightning bolt from heaven, a burning bush. But I finally learned that magic is quiet, subtle, and sits more on your peripheral vision. This is what makes it so easy for us to doubt it sometimes.
So, now I am trying to get into a daily practice of fifteen minutes of traditional meditation. Fifteen minutes really isn't a long time at all, and now I can quiet my mind fairly easily... Well, mostly anyhow. If I am not focusing on energy flow, it is a bit harder for me to do, but I can do it. I have come to learn the value of breathing, of the controlling of the "Pranayama" as it is called in yoga. Getting the blood oxygenated, moving into a steady pattern of breathing that helps one relax the mind, and physically encouraging the movement of energy into the body as opposed to just moving the energy through visualization. But most importantly, quieting the inner voices just for the sake of experiencing that quiet connectedness. The importance of it is not in what I accomplish in that moment of meditation. It is in how it changes my baseline self, and how that changes how I interact with the world and how it in turn interacts with me.
I was reading up on David Lynch a year or two ago and his experiences with Trancendental Meditation. He uses meditation every day as a sort of personal check-in with himself and the universe. He claims that many of his ideas come out of this meditation time, that it is like slipping into an ocean of ideas and creativity. This resonates with me, because as long as I can remember, much of my creative drive comes from dreams, from bits of inspiration that come from "without". I have a harder time forcing an idea into reality from myself. However, if I have a dream that I can become immersed in, or an experience that seems amazingly tied to another experience that together form a great story, or... Well, basically, the notion is that I happen upon the creative coincidence and experience this creative notion in a personal way, then I more easily translate it into a creative work. Most of my creativity happens when I am in a state of flow with my unconscious mind. The most difficulty I have with that is forming my ideas into more concrete things (i.e. there is a natural flow and progression of things, but it doesn't always follow what is considered a good standard), which I don't feel like David Lynch even bothers with sometimes. He lets his work maintain that dreamlike quality, and you never really feel like you are fully understanding all there is to be understood, just as you might feel within a dream setting. I personally enjoy that about his work, though I know that many find it frustrating. There are certainly some areas of unity, or his movies would not work at all.
This of course brings me to the notion that meditation can be used as more than a quiet time, a sort of resetting of the internal clock to GMT. It can also be used as a tool to receive inspiration on a number of other fronts, be they creative or matters of decision-making. (And one could argue that every action in life is one of creation or creativity in action.) I have also found running energy and meditation useful for deliberately resetting my ideas about something, my relationships with others, my feelings about myself... as a sort of self-hypnosis. And I have no doubt that the two are very much interlinked.
There are other concepts regarding meditation, as well. The notion that we quiet ourselves down enough to begin to receive some of the better things we ask for in life. You of course have to see things in life as energetic vibrations rather than things that purely exist or happen in a physical/time-based world. We often ask for things by thinking about what we lack, and as a result are attracting more of that lack. When we meditate and quiet ourselves, we are no longer structuring our thoughts in terms of our limitations, and have more opportunity to receive the things we are truly asking for.
No matter how much I come to understand meditation and all of its incarnations and uses, I still have trouble making the time to meditate. Something so simple, and I don't have to do it for very long each day to reap the rewards. I always feel more peaceful, more in touch with myself, more joyfully in the world, more hopeful for what I am creating after I meditate. I no longer ever find myself finding it hard to sit still for fifteen minutes. (And in fact, if I do start meditating I find it difficult not to sit still for much longer.)
But starting my meditation for the day and finding what seems to be a good time to do it? That seems nearly impossible. It could just be as simple as my difficulty in setting a habit. I have a hard time having any specific morning habits, because I don't get up early enough to feel like I have the time before I go in to work. I have tried meditating at the office in the morning when I arrive, but at that point I am becoming anxious about getting some start to my day. At lunch, I am thinking about having lunch. When I get home in the evening, it's all about getting some dinner together. So far I have only found myself being consistent around or before bedtime. And by then I am already sleepy and relaxed, and it does me less good to meditate, or at least, I don't reap as many of the rewards.
It all comes back down to giving to myself and making the time and space to give to myself. It's very interesting just how hard that can be at times. But all in all, I think I am improving my ability to give to myself and find time for myself all the time. And the fact that I have made so much progress with meditation to date is inspiring to me. I have found quite a lot of good in it, and I feel very much as if it has transformed my life dramatically. And for this reason, I am dedicated to keep gently bringing myself back to the goal of making it a habit, even if I have to try again and again. After all, ultimately, that is how I learned to meditate in the first place.
I've always had problems with anxiety. I am very sensitive to the emotions of people I am engaging with, and have often had a hard time drawing the line between my feelings and someone else's feelings. Of course, something I have come to learn is that my own insecurities tend to only align me to the frequency of the negative emotions that others are projecting, not as much to the positive. My mother was especially bad about this, and it is really what I think led to her demise. It wasn't that I was imagining the person's negative emotions, it was that I was not drawing boundaries between my emotions and the other person's emotions, and was not able to see their negative emotions in the proper context, and was focusing on them too much, to my own detriment.
So, in first embarking upon meditation, simple things began to help me cope with my anxiety. I couldn't muster a full-blown meditation, but I would step back from what I was doing, take long deep breaths, close my eyes, and remind myself to pull away and put everything into context and not to take it so personally. "This is just one moment in time. You are feeling anxious and fearful. What is one thing you can do right now to make yourself feel better?" Most of the time anxiety would come up when I was feeling overwhelmed, and of course if I was feeling overwhelmed, I could not filter out other people's emotions well. It was usually all interconnected and led to a feeling of spiraling faster and faster out of control. So if I could just quiet myself and focus on one small task to accomplish, then one more, I slowly began to feel more in control and more positive.
Oh, the deep dark secret I hide... I think people generally see me as a very positive and happy-go-lucky sort, but I am actually really quite depressing and gloom and doom a lot of the time! More than I would like to be, that's for sure.
I was always interested in various "spiritual" endeavors and felt that there was some sort of underlying approach to life that would make life more joyful for me, and felt that there was something subtle or mystical involved. In my many explorations, I dabbled with yoga and meditation. It's funny to me now when I realize how little I really understood Eastern practices in body and energy work, and it of course makes sense that I wouldn't have gotten much from meditation at the time.
I think I came about understanding meditation in a backwards way to most people. I started through learning to understand the energy exchange within the body and without, and only then was I able to learn to quiet my mind enough for a simple meditation practice.
When I moved to Portland I eventually connected with my now friend and business partner, Liliana. She was teaching a class called "Psychic Kindergarten." It was a lot of fun, and her way of teaching was very open and not pushy at all. Basically you were encouraged to come, listen, and play, to stretch your imagination and see what you discovered and to only embrace what felt right to you. In that class I began to learn how to run my energy, to sense my energy and connect my energy field with the earth and with my higher self. While I have always had a problem with labels, I began to sense connections to energies and entities that, while I may not have labeled them the same thing as someone else might, they did indeed feel present and felt purposeful in specific ways.
In running the energy I would find myself slipping unwittingly into a place of quiet. It felt like a soft, warm, subtle channel flowing through me and out of me. It calmed my nerves and any feelings of anxiety. When I was focusing on the energy flow, I became naturally relaxed. The more I would do it, the closer I would get to what felt like a trance-like state. I would lose grasp on thoughts and would more easily be able to see flashes of imagery float through my mind, unbidden, almost like the images one sees before they begin to fall asleep.
After awhile, I realized I had stumbled upon a kind of meditation. It was easy for me to do, because I could feel the energy so palpably and could enjoy the sensation so immediately that I no longer spent any time feeling frustrated with myself for not being able to settle my mind down.
More recently I have been reading a book I had in my possession for a long time in which the author states that one of the first habits one has to establish on a path of enhancing one's intuitive abilities is to meditate. But the meditation the author describes is a more traditional type of meditation. Simply setting aside fifteen minutes to breathe purposefully and to quiet the mind. Her explanation is that we rarely quiet our mind long enough to open ourselves up to our more subtle intuitive gifts. And this is something I have come to understand more fully, just how subtle intuition and magic are. In my youth I was seeking out some dramatic "Force", a lightning bolt from heaven, a burning bush. But I finally learned that magic is quiet, subtle, and sits more on your peripheral vision. This is what makes it so easy for us to doubt it sometimes.
So, now I am trying to get into a daily practice of fifteen minutes of traditional meditation. Fifteen minutes really isn't a long time at all, and now I can quiet my mind fairly easily... Well, mostly anyhow. If I am not focusing on energy flow, it is a bit harder for me to do, but I can do it. I have come to learn the value of breathing, of the controlling of the "Pranayama" as it is called in yoga. Getting the blood oxygenated, moving into a steady pattern of breathing that helps one relax the mind, and physically encouraging the movement of energy into the body as opposed to just moving the energy through visualization. But most importantly, quieting the inner voices just for the sake of experiencing that quiet connectedness. The importance of it is not in what I accomplish in that moment of meditation. It is in how it changes my baseline self, and how that changes how I interact with the world and how it in turn interacts with me.
I was reading up on David Lynch a year or two ago and his experiences with Trancendental Meditation. He uses meditation every day as a sort of personal check-in with himself and the universe. He claims that many of his ideas come out of this meditation time, that it is like slipping into an ocean of ideas and creativity. This resonates with me, because as long as I can remember, much of my creative drive comes from dreams, from bits of inspiration that come from "without". I have a harder time forcing an idea into reality from myself. However, if I have a dream that I can become immersed in, or an experience that seems amazingly tied to another experience that together form a great story, or... Well, basically, the notion is that I happen upon the creative coincidence and experience this creative notion in a personal way, then I more easily translate it into a creative work. Most of my creativity happens when I am in a state of flow with my unconscious mind. The most difficulty I have with that is forming my ideas into more concrete things (i.e. there is a natural flow and progression of things, but it doesn't always follow what is considered a good standard), which I don't feel like David Lynch even bothers with sometimes. He lets his work maintain that dreamlike quality, and you never really feel like you are fully understanding all there is to be understood, just as you might feel within a dream setting. I personally enjoy that about his work, though I know that many find it frustrating. There are certainly some areas of unity, or his movies would not work at all.
This of course brings me to the notion that meditation can be used as more than a quiet time, a sort of resetting of the internal clock to GMT. It can also be used as a tool to receive inspiration on a number of other fronts, be they creative or matters of decision-making. (And one could argue that every action in life is one of creation or creativity in action.) I have also found running energy and meditation useful for deliberately resetting my ideas about something, my relationships with others, my feelings about myself... as a sort of self-hypnosis. And I have no doubt that the two are very much interlinked.
There are other concepts regarding meditation, as well. The notion that we quiet ourselves down enough to begin to receive some of the better things we ask for in life. You of course have to see things in life as energetic vibrations rather than things that purely exist or happen in a physical/time-based world. We often ask for things by thinking about what we lack, and as a result are attracting more of that lack. When we meditate and quiet ourselves, we are no longer structuring our thoughts in terms of our limitations, and have more opportunity to receive the things we are truly asking for.
No matter how much I come to understand meditation and all of its incarnations and uses, I still have trouble making the time to meditate. Something so simple, and I don't have to do it for very long each day to reap the rewards. I always feel more peaceful, more in touch with myself, more joyfully in the world, more hopeful for what I am creating after I meditate. I no longer ever find myself finding it hard to sit still for fifteen minutes. (And in fact, if I do start meditating I find it difficult not to sit still for much longer.)
But starting my meditation for the day and finding what seems to be a good time to do it? That seems nearly impossible. It could just be as simple as my difficulty in setting a habit. I have a hard time having any specific morning habits, because I don't get up early enough to feel like I have the time before I go in to work. I have tried meditating at the office in the morning when I arrive, but at that point I am becoming anxious about getting some start to my day. At lunch, I am thinking about having lunch. When I get home in the evening, it's all about getting some dinner together. So far I have only found myself being consistent around or before bedtime. And by then I am already sleepy and relaxed, and it does me less good to meditate, or at least, I don't reap as many of the rewards.
It all comes back down to giving to myself and making the time and space to give to myself. It's very interesting just how hard that can be at times. But all in all, I think I am improving my ability to give to myself and find time for myself all the time. And the fact that I have made so much progress with meditation to date is inspiring to me. I have found quite a lot of good in it, and I feel very much as if it has transformed my life dramatically. And for this reason, I am dedicated to keep gently bringing myself back to the goal of making it a habit, even if I have to try again and again. After all, ultimately, that is how I learned to meditate in the first place.