pavomag.com

My favorite yogic breathing exercise is breathing in for 1-2-3-4, holding it in for 1-2-3-4 and breathing out for 1-2-3-4.  It forces you to pay attention.  It keeps you accountable for every second of breath and it helps achieve what is so difficult to achieve in meditation, stillness.

I first attempted meditation in high school.  I'd read some book that offered a beginners meditation practice in which the meditator focuses on the flame of a candle in a dark room.  So I lit a candle, turned the lights off and I sat down in a half lotus position determined to master this meditation thing.

I did not master that meditation thing.

About three seconds after my candle gazing began, I started to wonder why the hell I was staring at a candle.  My eyes were getting dry.  Was I supposed to blink? Was I suppose to contemplate the candle? (The candle is a nice blue color... the flame is mostly orange...I think I'd like pizza for dinner...) The book told me to "empty my mind" but that was completely unfathomable.  My mind was a super highway of pinging thoughts.  Uncontrollable.  And so my first meditation experience was short lived, arguably non-existent.

What the yogic breathing did for me, was help me achieve not an emptiness of mind, but a slowing down of the thoughts on the super highway of my frontal lobe.  At times I’ve achieved that blissful stillness that goes along with deep meditation, but it’s rare.  When I get there, I usually think something like, “Yes! I’m doing it!” and then I’m back to square one.
 
Our minds are worlds.  We can go to the jungle, the beach, our childhoods, etc.  The places we go inside our minds can be places of peace but they can also be places of great pain and suffering.  Sometimes we cannot escape those places.  We get trapped.  By meditating, we are choosing to specifically go somewhere else in our minds.  We can go into our lungs and diaphragm.  Into our hearts, our guts.
 
Meditating is simply choosing.  Choosing where your mind is and exercising control of your thoughts instead of thoughts controlling you and your emotions.
 
Meditating is only one of my many forms of Sanctuary.  They range from yoga to watching endless episodes of Sex and the City to geeking out over sentence structures.
 
For this issue of Pavo, I’m going to write (another Sanctuary!) about all of these things I find refuge.  I’m very interested to see where my mind goes. 

Comments