Knowing how to how to hold a thought, image and feel is essential to reinventing our lives. After we begin to get the idea of living a life that is “being,” and start relearning how to think, and learn how to focus long enough to think, we see clearly this is not easy to do. Ask anyone who lives a hectic pace, especially if he or she lives in the city. First, there is the noise. When you first try to stop long enough to begin learning how to meditate, you become aware of each and every sound. I lived in an apartment building when I started. I heard every footstep, every door closing, any child running on the block and every station my daughter would play on her television or radio. I heard them all the more BECAUSE I was stopping for a while in an attempt to still my mind and quiet my body. I found it frustrating because all of these distractions were not making it easy for me to silence my own inner ramblings.
But if you stop and think about it, city people do indeed handle noise very well. I remember when I was a child we lived just a few feet away from an elevated train station. I never had any trouble going to sleep. I got used to the noise and eventually, the rhythm of the trains pulling into the station and out became a lullaby. I remember when I first went away upstate with friends when I was in my late teens everyone (except me) could not sleep because it was too QUIET and the crickets “made a racket all night.” As I began meditating, I eventually realized that noise was not the reason I could not lay still or still my mind. I learned I was making my own racket. Environments often cannot always be orchestrated to suit one’s preferences. Unless you go on a retreat, you will never encounter the perfect setting and then again, if it is too quiet, the noises of silence can prevent you from focusing. It was at that point that I decided learning to focus, to meditate amidst the noise is an important tool for any work toward any goal.
Remember how your parents would always say “How can you study with the record player on (or the TV or radio)?” We did though, didn’t we? What happened when you tried to study in silence? I know I had great difficulty without background sound. The point is, we already know how to do this thing called concentrating and focusing, don’t we? Once we get in touch with this ability once more, it’s amazing how much ‘quiet’ we can create within the ourselves that is the mind. Middle Eastern and Asian disciplines are especially adept at this, especially in controlling pain.
The mind can and does control the body which is physical therefore, the mind controls the physical. There is no difference between the physical that is the body and all of its neurons of pleasure and pain and the physical world of energy. Let’s look at how to begin.
I remember very clearly my first attempt at quieting my mind and silencing my inner screams. I had lost my husband at a young age and was raising my daughter. Shortly after, my father died and since my mother was disabled and unable to manage on her own, I had her come live with me. I was also working and I was going to school. My plate was full. I look back and see that I never had to opportunity to grieve and because I was so committed to doing everything correctly, I functioned for about ten years on four to six hours of sleep a night. My daughter was prone to ear infections and high fevers so there were regular runs to the emergency room when her fevers spiked. My mother was a stroke and heart attack victim so there were doctors appointments and emergency room runs when she had chest pains and there were times she had to be hospitalized. I became a wizard at organization, medical coordination, student, employee and especially mother. I was also quite FRIED! I was running on empty.
When I first tried to focus, the beating of my own heart pounded through my brain. Stress severely interferes with proper breathing so naturally, I was breathing in a very shallow manner. My mind was darting from one thing to another such as my schedule for the next day, the reading I had to do for class the next night, how to get home on time Thursday to get my daughter to the allergist for her appointment, my laundry, dropping it off in the morning to be dried and folded and so on and so on and so on.
My first attempt was a total failure. All I had managed to do was barely five minutes. There was too much going on inside of me to feel like I had gotten anywhere. But, I had stopped my crazy pace for one day for almost five minutes. So I continued on this every night. My goal initially was to reach five minutes of calm, restful laying down. It took me over a month to achieve that first five minutes!
But, this is what I was able to accomplish in those five minutes. I would not take a call. My daughter or mother would take messages. I would not allow myself to be interrupted. I finally was able to block out all the apartment noises and the sounds from the sidewalk. During this first month, I let my mind dart about from thought to thought. I just worked on controlling my emotional response to the thoughts that would run through my head. If I felt stressed out thinking about an up and coming test that week, I would mentally talk myself into slowing my breathing and detach my mind from this stressful thought by allowing the thought to remain and affect me until I controlled my stressful response. Then that particular thought would go away. I would handle each thought, problem or concern in the same manner. I had reached a point where I would see animals in my mind and just watch them until they went away (refer to Chapter 2, Native Medicine).
Once I learned to control my stressful responses, I began to “play.” I would just fantasize about a beach, or a lake or riding a horse until I could smell the salty air, feel the chill of the lake water or hear the rubbing of leather on the saddle. This detached me from where I was and into another realm where I was in control of my mental and emotional responses. If nothing more is ever accomplished than learning how to rethink, this skill alone is a worthwhile skill to acquire. I would use this exercise to calm myself before exams especially if I thought I had not prepared enough. I knew my fear would interfere with the recalling of information I would need for an exam. I realized that since I read all the material, the knowledge was already somewhere in my brain, I just had to learn how to summon it up. By picturing myself taking the exam and successfully answering questions, I carried this meditative experience into examination with me. Since I had already taken the test in my mind, I was never nervous on my exams anymore and actually did very well as a result. By preparing and rehearsing, I caused a change in my stress level and changed the energy being generated around a particular event. In other words (and though I did not think of it in this way at the time) I had begun casting rudimentary spells (turning concerns into desired outcomes).
Learn to breathe! There is a way to breathe. Athletes know how to do it, dancers know how to do it, runners do it and swimmers do it. In order to have the body do what you are asking it to do, you must be able to keep a regularly timed flow of oxygen going through the body. Many people gasp when they attempt to work out because learning to breathe is an art in and of itself. Here is a breathing exercise that anyone can start. Keep in mind it will require a constant awareness that you are breathing and HOW you are breathing. This will be difficult in the beginning because breathing is an automatic response, an unconscious reflex. Once we TRY TO BREATHE it will be awkward and hard to keep a rhythm. It can also feel uncomfortable because most of us, as a rule, do not breathe properly to begin with. With proper breathing, we may feel light-headed at the beginning because we are drawing in the maximum oxygen we can with each breath drawn in. With beginners, this maximum varies. However, even just a fuller amount of oxygen regardless of how much, will play on the senses. As you begin this exercise, try not to think of anything else except the cadence of your breathing. Since we usually breathe from the chest (wrong!), we have to work on drawing air in by letting the diaphragm pull air down. In other words, when we breathe properly, our chests should not expand as much as they usually do when we breathe incorrectly.
Breathing will be accomplished by inhaling SLOWLY (AS SLOWLY AS YOU CAN) through the nose then, when you have drawn in the fullest capacity you can, SLOWLY breathing out through the mouth. Do this for four counts. Do not pause between inhaling and exhaling. Try to this is a continuous but relaxed “loop” motion. You might feel as though you have to stop and gulp down a big breath but try not to. The goal is control. You will probably feel as if your did a lot of work and automatically go back to your old breathing. If you can, try not to do this but rather, at a comfortable pace, keep breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth until you feel ready to do the exercise again. If you really need to catch your breath, by all means do so and be comfortable before you continue. Keep in mind that the long term goal is to breathe more rhythmically in this manner ALL THE TIME, just like dancers, reserving the deepest breathing for meditation and prayer work. Once you feel the benefits of skillful breathing, you will probably make it a routine practice every waking hour.
What is gained by this? Firstly, the higher level of oxygen will reach every blood cell and every cell of your body, ridding them of toxins. Your body will relax more and your mind will become more alert yet less distracted. From a Spiritual point of view, you are causing different ripples in the energies around you. These ripples are calmer, more focused and, when doing ‘work’ or prayer, connects you with the forces around you to bring about the desired result. Witches do incantations, Native Americans chant, sing and use the drum which represents the heart beat of Mother Earth, life itself. All of these rituals seek to become in harmony with the forces of creation itself. The words and rhythms increase in loudness and pitch and speed hence invigorating the force field that will begin to convert the energies into the mechanism that will create that which is desired.
In our beginning stages, when we are still buying into the martyrdom philosophy, the last thing we tend to think of is ourselves. Most of us lose touch with whatever it is that would give us glee and joyfulness of spirit. Most of us might even feel guilty about such elation which is why the next thing to do is something that is purely for yourself. I happen to love blowing bubbles. When I was a child watching the bubbles was very relaxing and I enjoyed watching all the colors in bubbles. So, I take time to just blow my bubbles because I like doing it and I want to!
By nurturing the self, we develop a better sense of worth and of deserving those things that are important to us such as the things we are working on achieving. It is very important that we feel we deserve that which we want or the work will not go through properly. By doing things for ourselves, we are enhancing our sense of worth. This enables us to enjoy feeling entitled to better circumstances which, in turn, enables us to get in touch with and “taste” what we want. We have all heard the saying “he wanted that job so much, he could taste it!” We need to work on ‘tasting’ what we want. We have to see it as being so real in our mind and spirit that for those moments, nothing else exists. Tasting it means, we have finally reached a focus point from which we can begin to cause that ripple in time and space that we looked at earlier.
The next thing to do is the opposite of nurturing ourselves. It is doing something that requires self-discipline. Even if it is as simple as switching that morning donut for a bagel, getting off the bus two stops before you have to in order to walk a little bit before work, or doing one chore every day that you would rather put off until tomorrow just for the self discipline. Discipline in any form or shape will hone the mind and make it better equipped to focus because the need and time for focus is not always convenient. Ironically, the need for focus is when things are the most hectic like when the baby is crying or the food is burning or you lost your job, failed that final or had to use the last of your vacation time when you had the flu. In short, the need to focus becomes most apparent and more important when everything is going WRONG.
It is an unfortunate reality that the ABILITY TO FOCUS becomes the most pivotal in times of greatest stress and chaos. Yet, because the strongest need for change is always the result of chaos, needing to recreate a more pleasant reality for ourselves does arise from the most difficult of times. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the best way for us to develop the self-discipline of focus in thought is during those practice runs during our daily hectic pace. Since I have personally learned that, if we don’t choose to change, sometimes change will be foisted upon us anyway, learning the skill of focus is a necessary skill indeed.
But even if we choose to change, we will be uncomfortable because change requires work and focus. If we decide we need to lose weight we need to change the way we eat. Will it be easy? Probably not. If we decide we need to change jobs, we have to go through the awkward and time consuming process of applying then interviewing then waiting. It this a pleasant process? No, not at all. But, we did decide we needed a change, didn’t we? The best motivation for change is discomfort and discomfort is, ironically, the best gauge of change.
That is simply how change operates.