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How Do You Know If You’re Meditating?

 

There are five primary areas of practice to the Writer Wellness plan. Relaxation/meditation, creative play, fitness and exercise, journaling, and nutrition.

“Success is never a destination—it’s a journey.”                 ~Satenig St. Marie,

Unless we have a homemade brain wave monitoring machine, we usually don’t have the means to measure our level of success with meditation in a scientific sense. We can feel certain changes and measure them to a degree. The average meditation journey should experience three specific measurable stages:

1.Tension-this is where we notice just how tight our jaw bones are, how sore our backs are and how busy our minds tend to be.

2.Letting go-this is when we notice some of the tension releasing and our breathing is slowing down.

3.THERE-this is when we become aware of very few things, less and less bothers us physically and mentally we realize our thoughts have slowed down, and we can control whether or not we want to follow monkey mind down its ragged path. We do not follow monkey mind.

These stages coincide with known and studied brain wave activity.

1.Tension = Beta (busy, busy, busy mind)

2.Letting go = Alpha (focused awareness on our breath and what it’s doing, fewer thoughts)

3.THERE = Theta (just about to cross the hazy boundary into slumber-ville)

Sleep isn’t meditation, and theta is the gatekeeper of sleep, so the goal is to remain relaxed and aware at the alpha level. Regardless of how messy the day has been, a successful meditation session need only give us a conscious pause from the issues we’re dealing with and that’s enough. Yep. It only takes a few minutes a day to meditate successfully. But what does a successful meditation practice “feel” like?

This brings up the question of goals. Should we have goals where meditation is concerned? Is it better to let things take their course and follow along?

Like yoga, meditation is a blend of healthy balance. It’s right to set a goal to meditate for a specific amount of time each day. It’s right to practice particular habits like sitting still and watching breath flow. But it isn’t right to set expectations beyond the realm of the realistic. Why? Because unlike measuring the fact that our brain activity actually slows down during meditation, it creates more stress to attach a measurement or a benchmark for meditation. “If I don’t find perfect peace in my life in three months of meditating, I failed and will give up meditating.” Or “I should notice a major shift in my actions in a set period of time, and if I don’t I will stop meditating because it just isn’t for me.” These are normal examples of our “quick fix”, I-want-it-now mindsets, and this doesn’t work with meditation.

With meditation, the less you expect, the more you receive.

To answer the question of what successful meditation feels like, beyond the physical and mental releases (which may not feel gigantic, but they occur,) the positive results of regular meditation show themselves in our everyday actions.

1.We are more patient.

2.We smile more.

3.We laugh bigger.

4.We appreciate little things more.

5.We share more.

6.We hold the door more often.

7.We focus better.

8.We are healthier.

9.We are brave.

10.We trust more.

11.We think the best first.

12.We are less critical of ourselves and others.

13.We are more accepting.

14.We are more loving.

15.We are more truthful.

16.We are more understanding.

17.We are more creative.

18.We are more of who we were meant to be.

19.We are better drivers.

20.We are better listeners.

It’s a long journey worth every step. Do you have any meditation stories to share from your journey?

Be well, write well.

~hugs,

Joy

Joy E. Held is the author of Writer Wellness, A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity, a college educator, blogger, and yoga/meditation teacher. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Romance Writers Report, Dance Teacher Now, Yoga Journal, and Woman Engineer Magazine.

Photo: K. Held, 2011

Copyright 2018, Joy E. Held

Creativity, like beauty, is sometimes “in the eye of the beholder.” A homemade greeting card with hand printed sentiments looks cheap to some people while to others it says the creator means to share a heartfelt idea with more than just a dollar bill. Many, many people are mistaken when they believe they aren’t creative. We are all creative to some degree every day. It’s a matter of how and collecting the ideas into something meaningful to someone else.

“I’m sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn’t make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.”

                ~Rita Mae Brown

I wish I could draw more than stick figures. Somewhere in my grade school days, I remember a teacher saying, “Your handwriting is perfect, but the picture of the cat leaves something to be desired.” I didn’t continue to practice my drawing after that.  Today when I journal and want to illustrate my writing, I still feel frozen and hear, “I’m not good at this so don’t try.” And I cut pictures out of magazines and collage instead. It’s another means of creative expression, but I still wish I had been encouraged to continue drawing or at least left alone to discover my limits. Oh, well, onto plan B. Write. The teacher said my penmanship was excellent and that’s where my energies went. Stories, posters, poems, letters, you name it, I wrote it. And then I decided I wanted to be a teacher.

“…the creative process is an artist’s industrial secret. Why clue the competition? When times are hard, the ‘divine flame’ gets one invited to dinner and written about by art historians. Why jeopardize one’s insurance?”

                ~June Wayne

In college for my teaching degree it was important to come up with interesting ways to present the same old information to students. Writing was my go-to option and lo-and-behold, the evaluations and letters of recommendation I received from my college professors said, “Joy is very creative.” It was too vague a statement to me like people who say something is “very interesting.” It’s a veiled meaning for odd. Yep, creativity is odd? That’s one negative message I refused to hear.

“Art does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.”

                ~Agnes Repplier

Must be time for me to stop trying to justify creativity and just be creative. Do you consider yourself creative?

“Be well, write well.”

~Joy

As is my practice after car trips, I cruise by the fitness center on the way to the hotel room. Good. A treadmill and space for my yoga mat.

Unload the car and change for my workout to release the tensions of getting lost on the way to the hotel. A new highway had been recently changed and the directions we received literally took us into a brick wall. After driving a few miles out of our way because there were no other exits off this highway, we found a parking lot to turn around in and head back. We could see the hotel from the highway, just couldn’t get off the highway to find it. Several miles down the road, an exit appeared and we zig-zagged our way back to the hotel. Nice hotel and not their fault the Ohio road department built a brick wall where their parking lot used to be. Moving on.

I want some cardio first because it serves several purposes. Study after study says it’s the best for chewing up belly fat the fastest, it helps with thinking, and it releases more toxins than any other type of exercise and that is very relaxing. Plus if you don’t focus well during cardio workouts, you will fall off the equipment or stumble on a rock if you’re walking or running outdoors. I chose the treadmill over the elliptical. Ellipticals irritate old ballet injuries in my hips and glutes.

Shoes tied and step on the well-worn rubber band that will hopefully take me to sweat-city in about twenty minutes.

Push start. Nothing. Push every other button on the panel (this is also what I do with my forehead on the keyboard when the computer isn’t responding. My husband loves fixing it when I do that.) Nothing. Try fist. Maybe the buttons are unresponsive because this treadmill shows its age with the wear on the tread, labels peeling. I don’t care as long the damn thing will just come on and start pushing me. Nothing.

I get off and look around the whole machine for a hidden restart button. Kinda like when I have to reboot my computer because I have fifteen or twenty different things open all at once and the system implodes under the strain. I check the electrical plug, thinking it may be so old that it’s a manual. If that’s the case, I’m walking around the parking lot twenty times. Seems to be plugged in alright. Then I direct my attention to the one thing I have intentionally neglected because I don’t know what it is. A silver metal square is hanging from a frayed blue nylon cord. I think it’s the heart monitor which I have no use for because I’m already aware that my heart rate is pretty intense because I got lost on the trip, it was further than I expected, the roads were….. Anyway, I cave and go to the desk and ask for help.

“Did you put in the key?” says the kind young woman behind the counter.

Sigh. The desk clerk returns to the fitness center with me and takes the metal square on the end of the cord and attaches it to a worn down image of a key. The square is a magnet. It is literally sucked into the front of the panel by the power of the magnet. She pushes start and poof, tread rolls. Outsmarted by a piece of equipment again. Such is my existence. But I felt much better after the workout and the writers conference the next day was excellent.

Has a piece of exercise equipment ever gotten the best of you? Do tell.

“Be well, write well.”

~Joy

Getting lost is a disconcerting sensation. For many goal-oriented people, being lost means something, somewhere broken down along the lines of their motto, “I cannot cope with the worst case scenario, so, I will over-plan to be prepared if the worst happens.” While making a plan, then working that plan is a valid approach to achieving success, the best of us can get lost. Coping with the reality might be easier if we practice meditation because the feeling of being lost in our own minds and bodies but not experiencing panic is possible. Then it’s a matter of transferring that lesson to real life situations.

The key is surrender. The first few minutes of sitting in meditation is normally a challenge almost every time we go to the cushion. That’s because we are so used to holding on to things. It’s a natural sensation to want to hold on. In my opinion, everyone is born with the desire to hold on because our bodies are constantly pulled on by gravity. It makes sense to me to hold on to things, people, and myself simply because it’s how we function in relation to the earth’s pull on our beings. Surrendering to this awareness of being held onto by gravity is the first step when sitting in meditation.

Up to the first ten minutes of meditation practice is basically about noticing gravity’s hold over our bodies, organs, and senses. Simply notice, then intentionally start at the source of the pull and work upwards through the body to relax or let go of the worry about being pulled down all the time. It’s very normal to feel everything settling downward (some people note this as being “grounded”), and it’s at this point of everything being settled down we try to surrender it all to a feeling of weightlessness. We let go of the worry. Surrender to gravity’s pull then allows the anxiety about whether or not it’s working to surface and face it. At this point, it’s possible to get lost in the lightness of being and just breathe until the session is ended.

It’s surrendering to the power of being lost and letting go of expectations that we practice on the cushion then try to recall when we get lost on the highway or in a tricky plot pattern we’re writing. In meditation we keep breathing and follow the breath to the end. In real life, we should apply the breath to keep us calm and working toward correcting the wrong turn or the wrong speech or the wrong choice. Everyone gets lost. It’s easier for some than others to deal with being off-track. A few moments of being lost in your own mind every day and surfacing to a better place, in the end, is one possible way to learn how to deal with the real world situation of losing your way no matter how much you plan in advance.

All the outlines, maps, and global positioning devices in the world cannot teach us how to cope. Those are tools for dealing with and correcting the problem. Applying lessons learned on the meditation cushion to daily realities is one method of coping with being lost along the journey. It happens to everyone occasionally. For those goal-oriented folks like me, the key is adding “get lost” to the plan.

“Be well, write well.”

~Joy

Wednesday Workout: The Consequences of Exercise

 

There are five primary areas of practice to the Writer Wellness plan. Every other week I will post an idea for relaxation (Monday Meditation,) creative play (Tuesday Tickle,) fitness and exercise (Wednesday Workout,) journaling and misc. (Thursday Thought,) and nutrition (Friday Feast.)

 

 

Lots of people look at exercise as punishment for eating. That’s too bad because the brain can be overwhelmed by the message of payback for the triple cheeseburger and might not recognize the good side effects of the workout. If we regularly view physical activity as retribution for taking in nutrition, then our workouts and mental attitudes about exercise suffer. Eating and exercise should go hand-in-hand, but we taint the value of the workout by viewing it negatively before taking the first step on the treadmill.

Exercise Benefits Your Brain Too

One of the many benefits to anyone who exercises is a positive outlook on life. After an exercise session, the body is pumping all kinds of good stuff around and around inside like blood and oxygen helping revive and cleanse internal organs. The brain is super happy because it’s churning out endorphins and spilling them into the bloodstream contributing in part to the good feeling also known as “the runner’s high.” As an extra bonus, the brain literally grows new cells as the result of a good, heart-pumping cardio session because exercise breeds brain derived-neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which, according to Dr. John Ratey in his book SPARK: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, is like “Miracle-Gro for the brain”.

 

Happiness, improved muscle tone, weight loss, and cardiovascular support. Why look at exercise as the demon and not the darling? Regular physical exercise isn’t a penalty, it’s a privilege, and the consequences of exercise far outweigh the side effects of avoiding it. But it’s important to go into a workout with a positive mental attitude. The negativity associated with regular exercise could easily negate the benefits.

Try Keeping A Fitness Journal

Keeping a fitness journal for a short while might help when we see the positive results written down. Note these things for a few days or weeks then review the notes. Think about the positive results while tieing on the walking shoes and add extra benefits to those workouts.

 

Date

Feelings/thoughts BEFORE working out

Describe the workout (i.e., twenty-minute walk in the park)

Note anything interesting that happened during the workout

Feelings/thoughts AFTER working out

 

Physical exercise shouldn’t be punishment for anything but viewed as a way to stay happy, balanced, and healthy.

 

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Be well, write well.

Tuesday Tickle at Writer Wellness courtesy of a great post from Bob Mayer and Cool Gus Publishing. Enjoy!

Here is a story about how life impacts art. jh

Good tip on keeping your yoga mat warm! Enjoy. jh