I thought I had detected a discrepancy between one theorist and another. In 1972, Dr. Herbert Benson published "The Relaxation Response". I had found out a little about transcendental meditation and I had read "The Inner Game of Tennis". Twenty years later, I listened to "The Higher Self" by Deepak Chopra and began a meditation practice. All sorts of evidence pointed to multiple benefits from meditation, which I took to be sitting upright but relaxed in a chair, focusing on a point somewhere in what I could see and not moving. I understood that a mind produces thoughts and that mine would do so fairly often. I understood that when I caught myself thinking and not focusing on my chosen point, I was to terminate the thinking and return to my focus.
I knew that the ancients, especially the ancient Hindus, and later the followers of Buddha, had developed this practice but Joseph Needleman's "Lost Christianity" and other sources had shown me that this sort of concentration and attention-anchoring practice was part of many other traditions, too. The discrepancy or difference I thought I detected was between working in a psychological way on my ability to be conscious of how I was using my mind and taking Benson's goal of relaxing the body.
When my friend thought that doing any sort of meditation for only a minute would be too short a time to make a difference in mental habits and awareness, I suddenly saw another way of looking at Benson's work and the related work by Charles Stroebel, MD. My goal in mediation has been to increase my awareness of my thoughts and how I use my attention, where and what I place my attention on. The usual advice for meditators is not to focus on something they can see but to focus carefully on their breath. The breath is important in many ways since it is both under our conscious control and also under our unconscious control. We can hold our breath, we can breathe faster or slower, we can pay very deliberate attention to slowly inhaling and slowly exhaling.
So whether you take Benson's approach of relaxing or the more abbreviated method of Stoebel of just focusing on the breath for 6 seconds, in both cases, you are interrupting the mind's usual preoccupation for what happens next or what happened in the past. As soon as you try to take a deep, slow conscious breath, you are focusing on right now, on your body as it is right now. More importantly, you are placing your attention on an aspect of the present and you have to use your conscious ability to do that.
So, yes, you can practice meditation and you will benefit from doing so, in many ways. So many ways that scientists in several fields are quite surprised at the variety of benefits and their power from developing mindfulness meditation practice. However, you can make quite a lot of progress by just training yourself to use little chances during the day to put your attention on your breath and body. If your attention is on your breath long enough to take a slow, deep breath or two,you are increasing your awareness of yourself and your life and its possibilities. Just take a few good breaths whenever you think of it. You will benefit.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
