The other day I came upon a post about mindful meditation; it didn't go into details, just that it was not the same thing as having a mind cluttered full of thoughts and worries. As I usually do, I shared my experience, which I'll do in a second in this post, but what I found was that it had received a zillion likes and comments, the canine equivalent of a wagging tail with or without an acknowledging woof.
I noticed later that the author had meticulously woofed and wagged back and excluded me, even though I was the one contributing the maximum number of words, including what mindful meditation was, the caveats, etcetera.
I suddenly realized I didn't fit in this crowd. This is a strange world. Although I had come to LinkedIn hoping to find a conversation, there's just millions of strange people who I don't understand and can't relate to, and who, in turn, don't understand me. If this is because I am bipolar and the madness is apparently easily discernible, I don't know.
The thing with a sterile landscape, featured in the post I mentioned a while back, is not that it frees up your mind to focus on landscape; by default, it sets the default mode network whirring, and we are off daydreaming. That's why we go to places with less distraction, so that we can be peacefully distracted. Daydreaming isn't a bad thing; it lets us connect the dots in ways we otherwise can't.
Mindful practitioners don't go to such places to meditate; they just do it. Anywhere is fine, really, as long as you can sit there and not get eaten. Although you might go out and spend big bucks on a meditation spa, the point is not the fancy part. It's all about trying to quiet the default mode network, the me-me, pattern-seeking, heavily trafficked area.
A chair in a room or on the floor with a wall to support the shoulder is fine. All you do is focus your attention on your breathing, narrowing it down to the sensation of breath as it leaves your nostrils. As soon, or rather sooner than later, you'll catch yourself not focusing on that boring, plain chore but hotly debating the weather or something else much less esoteric. That's when you again go back to the breath, nostrils, and so on. That's mindful meditation.
The caveat is that you can't do this quieting in one session; it takes practice. It's a muscle you build with repetition. Also, there's a limit to what this can do. It's akin to a gentle, rhythmic breeze that calms the ripples on a pond; you can't expect it to work if a large fish is thrashing in the water or there's a tsunami hitting the water body. Just like in this sketch don't expect the poor rickshaw puller to get out of his debacle by meditating. Get real people.
