I wonder what this looks like from the outside. Meditation gets a lot of comic treatment - the yogis and the spaceheads and the hippies meditate, not the black belts or the CEOs or the geeks. Or do they? Meditation is, as far as I can tell, the act of sitting quietly with the eyes closed. Doesn't seem like such a big deal, does it?
And yet, if you think about it, meditation represents the opposite of so many things in our lives today. When I am meditating, I am not talking. I am not doing my chores. I am not consuming anything. I am not even moving. I am doing only one thing: sitting. My brain might be moving in a million directions at once, but that's a fundamentally different state from watching TV, surfing the web, or doing dishes.
Instead, I'm being physically calm. I am breathing. I am concentrating on sitting in a way that doesn't cut off circulation to my legs, nor result in me eventually toppling over (surprisingly hard at times!). I end up watching what could be called brain TV: whatever is bouncing around in my head. It could be flotsam from the day at work, or speculation about what my cats are really thinking. I could be preoccupied with all the things I need to get done later, Or distracted by sounds outside.
When I'm really mentally frantic and want to calm the internal mental noise, I'll do one of a few things. I'll focus on my breathing: breathe in, breathe out. I'll feel how that changes the shape of my torso or requires different muscles depending on how I breathe. Or I'll count breaths: in, out, one. Or I'll repeat a phrase to myself, something as simple as the "ohm" sound, or the "nam myo ho ren ge kyo" chant, or even a positive affirmation of something I'm working on personally (yes, these really do help - if you can put aside cynicism). These will start to calm down the chaos of mental thoughts. Sometimes I'll step through relaxing different muscle groups in my body, starting with my head. For some reason my eyes and shoulders are invariably really tense - I am almost always holding those muscles taught, and it feels great to exhale and release them.
And then? Usually I'll have a phase of gentle mental wandering, following thoughts into time or space and gently bringing them back to here and now, gently returning to my muscles to relax them again, focusing on a space between my eyes or visualizing the earth. I let time pass in this phase until I feel I'm ready to be awake to the outside world again. Then I envision grounding myself in the earth, and open my eyes.
There isn't a "special" feeling after I've meditated, but I do have a sense that I've done a bit of mental housekeeping, cleared some space for myself mentally, somehow stretched an inner muscle that wasn't yet cramped but enjoyed the feeling. Lately I've had very vivid dreams - I generally meditate in the evenings - which just started with the meditation practice. I may have to start writing down my dreams, but in the meantime I know that scientific research has proven how critical dreams are for mental function and learning. I'm glad I'm back to dreaming.
This week I cleaned up my work computer desktop (deleting shortcuts and files, putting information where it should really live, etc.) and decided that with all the new space I wanted a new desktop image. I went through my pictures, and came across the image of the Big Buddha or Daibutsu in Kamakura at the Kotoku-in temple outside of Tokyo. The image doesn't give a sense of scale, but the Daibutsu is some 40 feet high .(People can walk up inside it...not sure what that represents, other than architectural curiosity or the ability to say "I was inside Buddha's heart".) I like that it fills my computer screen and gives me a sense of peace even at work.
Meditate sometime. It just might help you in ways you're not expecting.
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