by Sicco | Nov 12, 2014 | General, meditation, mini-meditation
1. Being Aware of Shallow Breath
Our breath has a tendency in our lives to go higher and more shallow. It is easy to test this. While you’re doing something, like working, or sitting, or standing in the middle of the day, close your eyes, and simply take 10 breaths consciously. You’ll notice right away that your breath and body relax a little more, the breath then naturally wants to go down to your belly or abdomen, where there is more spaciousness. In other words, it does not feel right breathing from high in your chest. It may take a few times to notice, but you’ll soon discover that you want to breathe more deeply.
2. Body Posture
If you have an office job, it means lots of sitting. If you can occasionally get away with closing your eyes or taking 10 breaths, you can become aware of posture issues. if you were staring at a computer screen or smart phone, notice if your neck or head is extending. This happens often over time, where the longer we sit behind a computer screen, the more we start, “leaning into the screen”. This pause and internal checkup tells you whether your body is still in good posture or not. If your neck tends to extend forward, that will cause bad posture and symptoms like neck, shoulders and arm tensions over the long run. Give yourself a short breathing/meditation break every so often, I prefer every 25-30 minutes. This way your body posture will benefit (assuming you have a posture issue). If you don’t have a posture issue, at least it will let your body relax.
3. Oxygenation of your whole body and brain
Taking conscious breaths, means taking deeper breaths. Taking deeper breaths feels a lot better too. Part of the reason for that is that you are providing extra oxygen to your body and brain. This oxygen exchange where you take in more oxygen, and let go of the carbon dioxide, is always good for the sense of well-being. Try it at least once a day, and also notice how it increases your productivity.
4. Reduce the stress inducing Cortisol and fight or flight response
Stress which most of us get on a daily basis in some for or another, will increase our levels of cortisol, which is associated with the fight or flight response. While this response is sensible in a truly threatening situation, it can become harmful this state becomes permanent. By taking periodic mini-meditations, we can activate the parasympathetic nervous system which in effect allows us to take a breath and a step back. This will in turn, reduce the harmful cortisol levels, and a relaxation response results.
5. Lowering Anxiety, Blood Pressure, and Heart Rates
There is a growing body of research showing that slowing down our breathing through meditation is going to help lower our blood pressure, anxiety levels, and heart rates. Slowing down our breathing regularly, or getting into this habit will long term help prevent stroke and many other health problems. Then of course there are many other benefits, like better concentration, more productivity, better focus, etc. Each of these benefits is a reason in itself to take up this habit of taking meditation time-outs, or mini-meditations throughout your day.
These are just 5 reasons to try mini-meditations today. Please comment if you found another reason to do regular conscious breaths throughout your day!
by Sicco | Apr 29, 2014 | Health Benefits of Meditation, meditation
Retreating to a Monastery
At a recent retreat or day of mindfulness and meditation at a nearby monastery, an interesting question arose from the audience. Members of the outlying communities had driven in to visit the monastery, where a number of full-time nuns and monks practice every day. Someone asked, “I feel such peace when I visit your canyon (the monastery is located inside a group of mountains). When I visit any another canyon, I don’t feel that same peace. Is this canyon a special place?”
I think there are several different way to look at this question, and perhaps see several layers of answers. Some answers may ring more true to some people and another answer to another person.
In terms of the physical place, you have the actual canyon with a monastic community. Retreat centers tend to be in beautiful and natural surroundings, to allow nature to do it’s own form of healing medicine as well. This particular community mentioned above has their own little valley, surrounded by beautiful mountains, many birds and other creatures. Living in this center, there is a practice community of monks, nuns, and laypersons, intentionally and purposefully choosing to live on a mutually agreed to wisdom path.
Of course these are all regular human beings too, with their own issues and afflictions to work with. However, they are choosing to take a path that aims to help relieve suffering in themselves, and those around them (those who intentionally reduce their own suffering, and increase their inner peace and joy, can’t help but relief suffering in those they in contact with). It is like a ripple in a pond, what you do to yourself, harmful or beneficial, affects everyone around you. Helping others will come naturally, not in a forced way (like converting others or other coercive methods). This joy and equanimity, or solidity that a trained mind consciously cultivates, ripples throughout the communities it touches and interacts with. Sometimes in an obvious way, but probably more often like an undercurrent influence. In so doing, this spreads the fruits of the particular practice and plants new seeds with that same intention…To help relieve suffering, decrease harm, and increase joy and peace throughout the wider world.
There is also the visitor perspective. The person going to a retreat at a monastery, the practicing “lay person”, who come for a brief retreat from their day-to-day busy lives, to get nourishment and recharge by a community that practices peace. Lay practitioners are likely very busy meeting the needs of their local communities, their children, spouses, colleagues, perhaps volunteer activities, and finally making sure they earn enough money to pay the bills. These are all a lot of obligations, pressures, and potential sources of stress making it very hard for many to carve out time in their days to take care of their own minds and bodies.
The “marketplace” or cities and communities and world we live in, is for the majority of the world a busy place that sends many subtle and not so subtle messages that are often quite different than what you’d find in a retreat center or monastery. Messages like, “appreciate all you have today”, or, “enjoy this moment”, or “you can let all your muscles relax” now, or, “enjoy listening to the birds, while seeing the sun and gentle breeze play with the leaves”, etc. How many billboards and advertisements remind us of those types of simple joys? Usually the advertisements tell us we need to work more in order to be more happy, or we need a product or something else, or we need to be somebody else, or have x amount of money, work longer hours, put in more “face time”, or else look like a slacker. Get more degrees, or accumulate more daily, “likes” in order to belong and be happy.
These types of messages don’t encourage, or lead to more contentment, and accepting, appreciating what we have right here and now. Many in a subtle way might encourage us to be something else, or get something or some status, thus in a way saying we’re not good enough where we are, or who we are. And of course we don’t just get these types of messages through advertisements, but also through parents (well intentioned as this may be), schools, and through many other channels.
So when folks like myself go on a retreat, or go into nature, we know we have given ourselves permission for the duration of the retreat, to let go of expectations, societal judgements, and obligations, and literally “retreat” from it all. This consequently makes us more receptive and open to receiving that peaceful feeling the visitor to the monastery was referring to. If we had that attitude and mindset outside of the retreat, we can also discover that feeling peaceful is not limited to certain locations. It of course is harder to maintain this mind once we return to the marketplace.
A practice community asks us kindly to not use phones, and other things that compete not only for our decreasing attention and time, but are also reminders of the obligations and expectations waiting for us. So in that sense, the practice community may be for many people the only entity giving permission to take care of ourselves and to take a break from all the hustle and bustle of life.
I sense that it is true that a physical location can become, “special” in the sense that it is filled with a community of people who all agree to orient themselves, and move their energies the same direction, as opposed to the more scattered intentions and energies moving every which-way, that is more likely found in the marketplace. A community orientation of more peace, joy, and contentment, and less harm, suffering, and dissatisfaction in itself makes a huge difference in the feel of a place.
In the end of course, the underlying intention is to not have any “inside” and “outside” of the monastery walls, both literally, as well as in our own minds. To cultivate more and more of that intention that is incubated and cultivated in monasteries, into our own minds and then into the wider world and the marketplace. So that no matter where we go, what canyon or surroundings we visit, we can give ourselves permission to see and feel and experience that sense of peace that is available at any moment.
by Sicco | Apr 24, 2014 | General, meditation, Philosophical
One of the basic ideas behind meditation is that it is a form of mental hygiene. For the same reasons that brushing teeth regularly, or drinking enough fluids every day, or having a diet with plenty of fruit and veggies, meditation is likewise a part of healthy mind/body maintenance. Sleep is also vital to helping our minds relax. However even if you get 8 hours of sleep every day, that still means that our minds can be constantly stimulated and exhausted from “information overwhelm” or information overload those other 16 hours.
Rest your Weary Mind
This is why I think many of us are attracted to meditation. To give our “weary minds” a break during the day as well. Just like any other skill, it only works well if you make it a regular routine, rather then once in a while, or only when overly stressed.
The Murky Water Analogy
Murky vs Clear Mind Meditation
One of the simplest way to explain meditation, even if done for just 10 breaths, is through the analogy of the murky water. Picture if you will, two glasses of water (each representing our minds). Each has sand or contents, as do our minds. Now if our lives are busy, which most of us are, this glass gets shaken and stirred around a lot during our day-to-day lives. If you shake a glass of water that contains dirt or sand, you will see that the water gets murky and unclear. So it is with our minds.
The more that is “on our minds”, the more murky our thinking gets. The more information overload, the harder it is to make decisions, clarify our thought processes. And frankly with a murky mind like that, I’m sure you may have noticed too, it becomes hard to see and experience the here and now directly presented around us. Perhaps we miss the bird calling, the child smiling or the dog wagging her tail. Perhaps we end up more easily irritated, and short tempered. This seems to be part of the human condition.
So taking those meditation time-outs to allow our minds to settle does wonders for our well-being and those around us. It allows us more light and clarity coming through in our thinking. After all, if I set the glass of murky water down, and let it settle, it will began to become more clear almost immediately. Folks go on meditation retreats, in part because of a desire to settle much more deeply then a one minute or one hour meditation can do for them. Nevertheless, any settling, even if only a few minutes a day, or periodically throughout the day it is a great health benefit for the person doing it, but also to the people you are in contact with in your work or home life.
In a future post I would like to explore how settling into a meditation practice does not mean settling into ideological nests or pre-conceived ideas. What does settling into meditation mean to you?
