Recovery Girl: Meditate

From time to time over the years, I've tried to meditate. My reaction wasn't much different from my mother's upon trying yoga, "It's awful. You do nothing. I don't like it." Motion is our medium. To sit quietly -- we don't, unless it's late at night and we're very tired or we have an apple or a book or the phone in our hand.

I, however, have made progress in this department in recent days. I can't say I enjoy meditating; but I do it: five minutes every morning. I first began to feel its effects during a bout of acid reflux (indigestion). Anxious about the reflux, which was inhibiting my sleep and was probably due to anxiety and/or age in the first place, I began (as anxious people do) to grow extremely anxious about being anxious. Not for the first time, I had a real incentive not to be anxious. But how? Since I already exercised regularly, meditation seemed like the next cost- and side effects-free solution.

I'd tried meditation in the past, but this time, I felt my body -- and then, soon afterward my mind -- slow in a way that felt undeniably pleasant. I could hear the steady thump thump of my heart. The sound of it, the very insistence of it, moved me in a way I hadn't felt moved by my physical being since I'd  felt my my own babies knock around inside me.

Well it's not such a big deal to sit still for five minutes. But then something else happened. The goal of meditation, of course, is not to think but to focus: a paradox -- to me and the rest of the uninitiated. Every time your mind starts to do what it's not supposed to do, i.e., think (about breakfast, plans for the day, the latest storm center of life) -- the gurus tell you to simply turn your attention back to home base (your breath). Should your mind wander back to the storm center, simply observe yourself doing that and return to home base.

So here's how I got hooked: one day, while agonizing over something and starting to feel my stomach cannibalize, I remembered from meditation the trick of cutting off my thoughts, of simply picking them up as you would an errant child, and depositing them back in the more neutral zone of my breath. In a way that I can only describe as miraculous, I was instantly transformed from an angry person to a person observing an angry person. And more effectively than any medication or therapist, I managed to cut the cord between me and my highly flammable emotions. In other words, I could detach. Thump thump. I felt the beat of my precious heart.