Meditation: Why?

WHY MEDITATE?

 

Why meditate? Why go on long meditation retreats? Someone once said to me, about a meditation retreat that I was planning: “What’s the point? All it will do is make you a better meditator.”

 

What an excellent question! If I can’t do a good job of answering this question, then I will be less effective in my teaching, especially for those who are attracted to the concepts of meditation and mindfulness, but who (and really this is most people) are disappointed when they begin the practice of meditation, and find that it is not an instantly pleasurable experience. In fact, for most people, meditation is difficult; it requires patience and persistence. It is a new skill; a new mental skill, and it requires practice.

 

I often compare meditation practice to the process of learning a new sports skill, such as learning how to serve a tennis ball. The tennis serve is not a natural move for most people; it is complex, and it requires a lot of different body parts to move in different but coordinated ways, in the correct sequence. It feels very awkward, at first. In order to learn how to do it even reasonably well, you have to practice it, over, and over, and over again. Over time, in many different practice sessions, it will take thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of practice serves to get reasonably competent. You cannot learn a tennis serve any other way. You cannot learn to serve a tennis ball by reading about the mechanics of the tennis serve, or by watching other people serve the ball, or by reminding yourself throughout the day to remember, and mentally rehearse, how your arms and legs are supposed to move when you serve. Now, all of those things can be helpful in the process of learning the serve; but, without the actual practice of the serve, without the drudgery and discipline of forcing yourself to stand behind the baseline, tossing up hundreds of balls and hitting them, observing the results… then all the watching and reading and thinking and visualization in the world will not help you.

 

Once you have become competent at your tennis serve, your brain will have physically changed. Learning a new skill (any new skill) is accompanied by a process of “re-wiring” and shifting of resources in the brain, to meet the new demands being made upon it. The oft-used phrase in neuroscience is: “Where neurons fire together, they wire together.” Once the re-wiring has become established, the new skill no longer feels new, because the brain is no longer struggling to meet the (formerly new) demands being made upon it. What we need to remember is that repetition is the key for new pathways to be established in the brain (and in life, for that matter). And this repetition is likely to feel awkward (at least), at first.

 

In some ways, meditation practice is like learning to serve a tennis ball. When we begin to practice meditation, we are undertaking the task of paying attention to the present moment, and doing so non-judgmentally. And, we quickly notice, this is not particularly easy for most of us, most of the time. When we are not actually engaged in an absorbing task, we usually let our minds wander all over the place. Instead of actively engaging our attention, we usually let it drift to whatever sensation or train of thought may arrive, without even noticing what it is that we have focused, or re-focused on. We go onto autopilot. We may find ourselves engaged in the mental re-hashing of various distressing life events; we may fantasize (happily or fearfully) about various possible future events. We may mentally criticize ourselves for doing certain things or feeling certain ways. The point is not that any of those mental topics is necessarily bad; the point is that we are, very often, being mentally passive, and not active; we are being absent, and not present, in our own mental lives. Instead of paying attention to what is going on, in our heads and around us, we are passively responding to the whole show. And, very often, we are mostly un-aware of nearly all of what is actually happening in our lives.

 

Meditation is a process of learning to be more mentally active. Over and over again, we ask ourselves to notice what is going on. We may choose a focus point, such as the sensations of breathing, to pay attention to. Then, when we settle in to do this task, we quickly find that we lose focus, and our minds drift away to something else; it may take some time even to notice that we have lost focus on our chosen object (such as sensations of breathing). The task then is simply to notice that this has happened; to re-focus on the chosen object; and to notice any judgments that accompany this process (I may notice that I am irritated or discouraged, because I so quickly lost focus). And (this is the key) this process is repeated many, many times; just as we repeat the movements of the tennis serve, so in meditation we repeat the process of gently bringing attention, or mental focus, onto a chosen object. This repetition is what changes our brain; this is what makes us more capable of being mentally engaged in our lives (as well as less reactive, and more compassionate). A recent study authored by Lidia Zylowska and her colleagues at UCLA indicates that meditation training is an effective intervention for people with attention deficit disorder; when we think about it, of course, it hardly seems surprising. Meditation is (partly) about learning to pay attention, by repeatedly practicing “paying attention”! And the practice of meditation has been linked (in some cases, very consistently) with: reductions in blood pressure; improvements in mood; reductions in compulsive or addictive behaviors; improvements in capacity to pay attention; and many other positive results.

 

 

Comments

[Cherry - The Lead Guru in Miami Meditation]

meditation has become a valuable tool for finding a peaceful oasis of relaxation and stress relief in a demanding, fast-paced world. Other uses are for; healing, emotional cleansing & balancing, deepening concentration & insight ,manifesting change, Developing intuition, unlocking creativity, exploring higher realities and finding inner guidance