فصل پنجم

chapter-5

just meditate

I’ll say it dead straight, because this is how it was presented to me: When you’re an anxious type, meditation is non-­negotiable.

Sky, the spiritual counsellor I employed during my time working in magazines, would tell me, ‘Sarah, just meditate.’ On my Tuesday afternoons with her, tucked up under her cashmere blanket in her sunny office with harbour views, I’d want to dissect the how and why of the way in which meditation worked. Am I doing it right? How do I know? Where does it leave me and my cerebral ways if I reject thought? But her response was always, infuriatingly, the same: Just meditate.

Frankly, I’ve not the patience to share with you the countless studies that show that meditation works. This is not that kind of book. Just know that it does. Or Google it.

I do however want to share this: I’m crap at meditation. But for the past seven years I’ve meditated in my crappy way, twice a day for twenty minutes. I rarely ‘go down’ into the deep place that others speak of. My experience is mostly rat-baggy and noisy. But here’s the thing: You can be crap at meditation and it still works. The mere intention to sit with yourself is an act of self-care as far as our brains are concerned, which, voila, triggers the comfort system. And, you know what? Even knowing it’s okay to be crap at meditation is comforting.

And don’t forget – anxiety is a head thing. It’s characterised by thoughts. So, so many thoughts. Meditation draws energy down from the head. It works to still the mind. It turns the volume down on the thoughts. Meditation almost defies description. It’s a wordless pursuit, so any description of it is a bit redundant. After years of meditating, I’ve realised words and thoughts can only point to the experience. They are not the experience itself. Just as the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. Which can hurt the head when you try to think about it.

So …

Just meditate.

25.

I met my current meditation teacher Tim in the midst of my Mid-thirties Meltdown, after Sky had moved to Japan. I was in a bad way, sick, unemployed, lost. I’d stopped meditating. Actually I’d never really started. Or it had never stuck, even after my attempts with Sky and years of doing yoga and various workshops and retreats.

When we meet in his Berber-carpeted rooms in the particularly refined Sydney suburb of Woollahra, I feel compelled to tell him that I have a prejudice against him. ‘You look like the preppy guy who looked down on me in my public school uniform on the bus. I feel like a ratbag sitting here.’ He did. And I did. Feel like a ratbag.

Tim smiled. ‘Meditation will help with that.’

I came across Tim via a guy I met on Bondi Beach at 5am one morning. He claimed to know me from a yoga class and approached to tell me I needed to meditate. ‘I can just tell,’ he said in a way that suggested he regarded himself as highly intuitive. The tears streaming down my face as I paced the promenade pre-dawn after an entirely sleepless night might have also helped him draw such a conclusion. He said I should contact Tim.

Later that week Tim was mentioned on two other occasions. Three strikes and I have to act. I guess it’s a three thing again.

I learned the Vedic style, related to transcendental meditation, which originated more than 5000 years ago in India and moved to China 2000 years later morphing into the Buddhist tradition. It’s a technique with structured boundaries … but then it lets you loose. You can sit in a chair, or on the floor. You do it twice a day. And after a shower is best because ­meditating releases an oil on the forehead that apparently makes your skin look younger and it’s best not to wash it off.

You recite a mantra, faintly, in your head, for twenty minutes. That’s it. If your mind wanders, return to the mantra. Don’t worry about your breathing. Or your posture. Or your chakras. Return to the mantra. When thoughts bubble up, that’s cool. Actually, it’s better than cool. Thoughts are little pockets of stress that your consciousness encounters as it descends into calm. When you ‘think’ them, the pockets of stress are released. Pop! And you return to the mantra. It’s seductively convincing to know my thoughts are all part of the process. I’m not fighting myself.

But more than that my crazy, crappy thinking is what gets me to the meditative state. The more I think, the more I must gently return, in my case, to my mantra. In yours it might be to your breath, or to quietness, or to a speck of light burning bright in your third eye. Really, it doesn’t matter, for it’s actually the repeated gentle returning to a quietness that counts. It’s this sturdy vigilance, this steering toward stillness that builds the relaxation response – or calm muscle – in your being. And slowly, slowly you notice this calmness playing out in real life. Not immediately, but with time.

People like me are drawn to this Vedic style. It doesn’t feel rigid. There are no rules and all is forgiven. And yet there are boundaries, a structure, encased in a discernible philosophy that can be pulled apart and played with and understood. I think this is why it attracts so many of us who are unable to just sit. The Beatles did this Vedic style. David Lynch has been practising it for thirty-eight years and reckons his weirdest creations have emerged from his meditations.

When Russell Brand cleaned up his act a few years back (he started talking a lot of sense about the environment and ethical issues and I once saw him photographed in the gossip pages riding a bike), he put it down to Vedic meditation.

After a few weeks meditating with Tim I front up at his studio in tears. ‘It’s not working,’ I tell him.

‘Keep meditating,’ he says. He pours me turmeric tea and sits back. ‘It’s not really about what happens during the twenty minutes of meditation. It’s what happens after, out there in real life.’ ‘Right. This changes things. So meditation is like a little forum for airing grievances, purging the crap. So we can move on.’ Tim doesn’t say I’m wrong.

‘You’re watering the root so you can enjoy the fruit,’ he says and demonstrates a tree with his arm. ‘Keep watering, get the tree stable. And then things will grow from there.’ When people ask me for the ‘one thing’ that’s helped with my anxiety, I tell them there’s been no one thing. But if pressed, I concede that meditation has steered me to most of the good things that have happened in the past seven years.

The other thing I tell them is that the thing about meditation is that you always have it with you. You don’t have to rely on anyone or anything. You sit. With yourself. And just meditate. This is incredibly powerful in itself.

HOW MEDITATION GOES FOR ME

I am not a meditation teacher and I don’t want to share how to meditate here. Again, not that kind of book. I’m just offering a bit of insight into my experience. I figure it might help you feel more comfortable about it, and with being not particularly good at it. I still find it helpful to hear about other people’s tussles with meditation.

I meditate after exercise and before breakfast in the morning. It helps when the body is ‘open’ and alive.

I try to do it outdoors in the sun as much as possible. I meditate on rocks at the beach, on park benches in parks, on mountaintops at the end of a hike.

My head always meanders to my to-do list or to what I’ll do right after meditation. In fact the whole meditation is a tug-of-war with an urge to schedule.

As this happens, repeatedly, I gently turn my attention away from the surging urge, to my mantra. It’s like looking away from a kerfuffle going on outside to your right, away from the agitated conversation to your left, back to straight in front of you – no jerky moves, just a steady steering back to centre.

My head wobbles wildly like one of those toy dogs on the back parcel shelf of a car. It only stops after I start to descend a little into stillness and the thoughts settle like those birds in the tree I described from that yoga retreat. If I do indeed descend.

Sometimes I’ll open my eyes and I’m almost facing the back of the room. Like Chucky. I’ve bitten my lip before from a violent head jerk to the right. My teacher Tim, I know, watches me with a smile as I battle it out. Anxiety versus Me. Anxiety can sometimes still win.

Then there’s this: the grimmer the environment, the better the meditation. I love meditating in cabs, in a parked car on a busy street between appointments, on planes during take-off, in a sunny spot sitting in a gutter in an alleyway on the way to a meeting. During a stint working in TV, I’d meditate in the porta-loo while I waited for my curlers to set each morning. Working from a low base reduces the expectation. All that matters is that I’m sitting with myself. All that’s left is the simple joy of, well, just me and just meditating.

This practice, repeated in meditation, now plays out in my life, I’ve noticed. I now gently turn away from kerfuffles and default back to ‘steady’. My assistant Jo always comments on how I can shut off from calamities taking place in the office and window-washers and screeching fire sirens outside when we’re having a meeting. I don’t jump when there’s a sudden noise. I can stay steady.

As the softness seeps in, even while thoughts do their jumpy dance in my head, it feels like the rigid boundaries of my body release. It’s like I’m undoing a corset, or the button on tight jeans, and my insides are able to gently expand and my cells can stretch out languidly into the space created.

My teeth relax in their sockets.

The inside of my nostrils release. And if they don’t at first, I focus on them doing so.

My fingernails soften in their nail beds.

My eyelashes soften.

I feel majestic and magnificent and suspended in a doona-­like cloud. Sometimes I get what I call my Michelin Man experience. I’m entirely convinced, my eyes shut, that my body has expanded several metres beyond myself in soft billowing folds, and I feel my ‘consciousness’ expand to meet it. Everything that’s rigid inside my body expands languidly into the softness.

If you own an Apple Mac laptop, you’ll know that suction-y, shwooping thing the power cord does when it connects with the socket on the side. Well, when – and if – I finally arrive at the full, expanded, settled spot I describe above, that’s the sensation. Shwoop! I fit. I’m connected.

When I come out of the meditation I try to hold this feeling. I open my eyes slowly and hold the gentleness. I stretch a little then stand up and keep holding. I try to hold it as long as I can – as I walk back home, as I have a shower, as I pack my bag to start my day. I hold it, I hold it.

3_bit.psd

STOP AND DROP

Not a meditator (yet)? Before I was able to get into it, Sky taught me a trick that was a good interim measure. ‘Stop. And. Drop.’, she would say – by which she meant, stop your head and drop into your heart.

As I say, the thing about anxiety, it’s all head. So anything that gets us out of our heads is good. It works a different muscle.

I used to keep a Post-it note affixed to my computer at the Cosmo office with ‘Stop. And Drop’ written on it. Several times a day I’d look at it and drop into my heart for a little moment.

You only have to hold the feeling for a few seconds to ‘get it’. Try pausing your thinking for a minute and drawing your focus down into the space just behind your sternum. Do you feel the shift? Does a ‘knowing’ ooze over you? You only have to touch it briefly for it to work.

26.

Sukshma [sook-shma]: (adjective) 1. subtle (Sanskrit); (noun) 2. the practice of being innocent, faint and effortless.

In meditation you practice sukshma as you steer yourself back to the mantra over and over. Just say the word to yourself, innocently, faintly and effortlessly. It’s so sukshma-ish, isn’t it? Like when a child touches your arm when they come out at night to tell you they can’t sleep.

You can’t try to be innocent, faint and effortless. You just be it. Like, now. In this moment. I think this is the appeal of it for me. It’s a rare thing in life that I can’t plan for, or wait for. There’s no run-up or tedious dress rehearsal. I just do it now as I type out this bit of my book (innocent, effortless key strokes) sitting in a public library with a heavy breather opposite me, having had two coffees when really I probably shouldn’t have.

4_bit.psd

ROLL A SPONGE AROUND YOUR SKULL

If you’re a regular meditator and anxiety makes it tricky at times, add this distracting trick to your usual mix: imagine a sponge gently working its way around the inside of your head, absorbing, mopping up the little anxious pockets. The mantra or breath moves the sponge around. You might find the inside of your head broadens.

5.psd

DEEP BELLY BREATHING ALSO WORKS

Please note that meditation is really really hard when you’re super anxious. It can be a bridge too far. The gearshift from a panic attack to a still mind is too dramatic. Know that this is cool. It truly is. So try some deep belly breathing instead at such times. A stack of science seems to support the practice. Dr Richard Brown, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and co-author of The Healing Power of the Breath, says that deep, controlled breathing communicates to the body that everything is okay, which down regulates the stress response, slowing heart rate, diverting blood back to the brain and the digestive system and promoting feelings of calm.

Flick onto page 155 for more techniques in such instances.

Deep breathing may also affect the immune system. Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina divided a group of twenty healthy adults into two groups. One group was told to do two sets of ten-minute breathing exercises, while the other read a text of their choice for twenty minutes. The subjects’ saliva was tested at various intervals during the exercise. The researchers found that the breathing group’s saliva had significantly lower levels of three cytokines associated with inflammation and stress.

Harvard researcher Herbert Benson, who first coined the term ‘the relaxation response’ in 1975 to demystify meditation, used scientific research to show that breathing counters the fight/flight response and can even change the expression of genes.

There are lots of ways people describe deep breathing, but I think the following is one of the simplest.

Sitting upright or lying down, place your hands on your belly.

Slowly breathe in, expanding your belly, to the count of five.

Pause.

Slowly breathe out to the count of six.

Repeat for 10–20 minutes a day.

If you have never practised deep breathing before, you may need to work up to this practice slowly. Start by inhaling to a count of three and exhaling to a count of four, working your way up to six. Also, start by doing it for a couple of minutes and graduate to longer periods.

In some ways it works like meditation. The focus away from the head slows down ‘new brain’ activity. It also activates the comfort system. By voluntarily changing the rate, depth, and pattern of breathing, we can change the messages being sent to the brain. Also, by ‘massaging’ our vagus nerve, which wraps our bellies, meandering its way around our organs and up to the brain, a variety of anti-stress enzymes and calming hormones such as acetylcholine, prolactin, vasopressin and oxytocin are released. Esther Sternberg, physician, researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and author of The Balance Within, puts it well: ‘Think of a car throttling down the highway at 120 miles an hour. That’s the stress response, and the Vagus nerve is the brake … When you take slow, deep breaths, that is what is engaging the brake.’ 1_bit.psd

HAVE A GRATITUDE RITUAL

(AS NAFF AS IT SOUNDS)

I don’t do vision boards, and I don’t meditate to manifest handsome husbands and mansions with tennis courts. But I do have a grati­tude ritual inspired by the time I shared a glass of tap water with personal development educator/self-help guru Dr John Demartini, he of The Secret fame. I share it here because, like meditation, it’s a daily practice that has had exponential impact on my anxiety. To be honest, it’s a form of meditation.

Demartini is a central casting–issue Guru Dude. He wore black casual suiting (with a kerchief) when we met a few years back and speaks in dazzling motivational sound bites, generally trademarked. Indeed, Demartini owns The Gratitude Effect® tm. He also has a cloth keyboard cover embroidered with ‘What You Think About and Thank About, You Bring About’. I know both these things because, after discussing the topic of gratitude, he showed me the latter, along with his gratitude journal, a whopping great multi-volume tome that he carts around the world with him. He got teary as he read out a few passages for me. At the time I didn’t know what to make of it, but I was forced to suspend my cynicism and try his gratitude ritual for the column I was writing. The results were wonderful. Really. And I practise it regularly.

My ritual is based on Demartini’s, but a little less dazzling and sound-bitey. (And I’ve not trademarked it.) It goes like this: At night, after I climb into bed, I simply reflect for a few minutes on five things that pop into my mind that I’m grateful for. And say thank you for them. Usually they’re banal things, like ‘Thank you for the flukiness that salmon was on special the very day I go to buy salmon!’ Or ‘Thank you for my mate Rick who called today just to say he missed me.’ Who am I thanking? I guess it’s the ‘universe’. It might be God for you. It is for Demartini.

I don’t seek a result. But it feels super good doing it. I asked Demartini why this might be so. The simple act of reflecting for a few minutes (he prescribes, pedantically, 4–15 minutes) on the good stuff in our lives creates a congruency between our goals and their fulfilment. This moment of recognition that things are gelling cooperatively makes you feel synchronicity and oneness with the flow of life. Which feels good, really good. You touch it, right? You know, the Something Else.

It’s as if in that moment of gratefulness, everything makes sense. We realise all is okay and the world and the people in it are working perfectly, and we don’t need to interfere for it to do so. For me, this is a massive, gulp-for-air feeling. The bigness of life whacks me in the solar plexus. Which is why many of us cry when we’re grateful. I know I do.

Alex Korb writes in ‘The Grateful Brain’, ‘Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli.’ Literally, you can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time. Once again, the threat system in our amygdala is overridden.

On top of this, research shows gratitude stimulates the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that regulates anxiety.

Korb adds that the brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias – it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. ‘So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for.’ And thusly we build all kinds of right muscles.