Why Meditate?
Starting a meditation practice can be challenging. Confusion, frustration, sore knees and backs, false starts, and—no matter the style you choose to practice—a burning desire to do anything but meditate may arise instead of the peace and equanimity you wish to cultivate.
Our minds, once trained to respond to occasional stimuli and threats, are now constantly over-stimulated and stressed out. We aren't habituated to being at ease. We stimulate to relieve stress, yet stress when over-stimulated. It's a vicious cycle, or negative feedback loop. Meditation helps rewire all that. As we become mindful of our mind, body, feelings, and sensations, we learn how to non-judgmentally witness our cravings for and reactions to stimuli and stressors, creating space.
In space, there is choice. And choice is everything.
As holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl put it:
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Mindfulness helps us view and acknowledge our feelings and sensations as data, or suggestions, perpetually changing and arising and passing away. We grow more pro-active and less reactive. And what is pro-activity other than choice?
Each meditation tradition, from Buddhist to Vedic to secular, has different practices and goals. What all have in common is maintaining focus on a fixed object—the breath, a mantra, the navel, or awareness itself—for a fixed period of time. Just as important, meditation is returning to your object when you get distracted (and you will get distracted).
Modern science is finally catching up with thousands of years of practice and tradition. Meditation has been shown to down regulate the amygdala and balance the parasympathetic nervous system. It helps you develop more folds in the outer layer of the brain and thicken the cortex and insula. It also activates genes that improve immune functioning, fighting off cancer and viruses, and can make you a bit less of a jerk (purely subjective experience, studies hopefully forthcoming). Buddhist, Vedic, and other cultures have performed the meditation injunction for millennia, but western academia has, via electrodes, EKG machines, and peer review, come around to an ancient truth that was unthinkable only a decade ago: meditation works.
Creating space for proactive choice is only the beginning, and needed now more than ever. Since the digital age, the average human attention span is now less than a gold fish. We are expected to process between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements per day. The average working American is burnt out, and desperately needs time off, while more than half of us spend five or more hours per day on our phones. Since 2020, anxiety, depression, and stress are rising. And rising. Before 2020, researchers estimated that the average American adult will spend 44 years of their lives on devices (one third of our lives are spent sleeping. So, if you live to be 82, you will spend 44 years on devices and 27 years sleeping. This leaves 11 years to be awake and not on a screen!).
How are you spending your 11 years? Are you overstimulated and stressed out, or peaceful, grateful, and at ease?
The spaciousness of the present moment, even just a nanosecond of it, is where we choose who we are. It's where we become more than automatons of stressors and stimuli. The present, or Now moment, is always on, available, and open for business; more fecund, insightful, and creative than all maybes, soons, laters, futures, pasts, thens, rather-thans, daydreams, fantasies, dopamine hits, cortisol rushes, sugar highs, cravings, aversions, and delusions combined.
Maybe you found this page because you're curious about meditation. Maybe you desire to grow and change, to be less reactive, more accepting, and at ease no matter what life throws at you. Maybe you're waiting to make wiser choices.
Meditation helps. I can help you meditate.
Please contact me to schedule a complimentary 15-minute Zoom call to see if we're the right fit. I work with absolute beginners and those who wish to stabilize their practice.