On my first day of meditating at home, I was lying on the floor,
trying to focus on my breath. I was also trying to gently push away the
intrusive thoughts that were rampaging through my mind like a willful
2-year-old who is being told "no."
But my house was filled with family and dogs, and there was a ball
game blasting on the TV downstairs. The thoughts I was trying to evict
were starting to sound hysterical.
Then I heard it—the
clack, clack, clack of dog claws on the hardwood floor.
Snuffle, snuffle,
nuffle. Buster, our Tibetan spaniel, was inspecting me like a
search-and-rescue dog looking for signs of life. Why hadn't I closed
the door?
There's a good reason you never see pictures of gurus posing with
their families and pets. Can't anybody get a little inner peace around
here?
A Skeptic In the Land of Zen
I'd been assigned to take a meditation class and write about it. The idea wasn't just that it might give me, to borrow a
Seinfeld catchphrase, serenity
now.
The aim was to see whether it could actually fix some of my health
issues, such as persistent high blood pressure. Over the past 30 years,
studies have found that regular meditation can indeed lower blood
pressure—and reduce pain, ease depression, cut anxiety, boost alertness,
even make you smarter.
But I expected nothing more than to catch a couple of Zzzs. I'd
always found the idea of meditating a little off-putting. Many years
ago, I bought a copy of
Full Catastrophe Living by Jon
Kabat-Zinn, PhD, the University of Massachusetts Medical Center
researcher who transformed an ancient Buddhist style of meditation known
as mindfulness into something more scientific. The technique is
deceptively simple: While focusing on your breathing, you observe your
thoughts and sensations but don't attach any emotion to them.
When you do that, studies have shown, your heart rate and breathing
slow, your metabolism decreases, and your muscles relax, which, over
time, can help heal the eroding effect of stress on your body. When
Kabat-Zinn taught this skill to patients with everything from heart
disease to psoriasis, they experienced less stress, anxiety, and pain.
They even saw some of their physical symptoms disappear.
I was impressed but not persuaded. Kabat-Zinn said we should "be in
the moment" instead of obsessively reliving the past or anxiously
anticipating the future. But I didn't see the payoff. I thought my best
bet for happiness was to
not be in some of my moments.
I'd been living with the reverberations of the proverbial unhappy
childhood (death, boarding school, and parental mental illness are
involved), which left me grappling with a low-grade depression
and a fight-or-flight switch stuck in the on position. What failed to
kill me only made me stronger, I figured, but I still needed to take two
medications to keep my blood pressure down.
Besides, there was a second stumbling block on the road to bliss: the
"find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed for 20 minutes"
requirement. Where is that place? I have a husband, a son, and a writing
career that involves multiple deadlines, a long-term relationship with
the FedEx guy, and 2,645 e-mails. Meditation master Jack Kornfield, PhD,
once wrote a book called
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. If meditation were to work for me, I'd have to have my ecstasy while doing the laundry.
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