Meditation
For Emotional Well-Being

Last modified on: 08/08/06

Meditation Boosts Happiness and Health, Study Shows

Meditation reduces negative emotions and strengthens the immune system. In a study of the effects of meditation by Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, participants who completed an 8-week meditation program had stronger antibody responses to a flu vaccine and reported drops in negative feelings. The results were published in the July/August Psychosomatic Medicine.

"How sweet it tasted!"

A favorite Zen parable:

"A man walking across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!"

"This Is It"

Alan Watts wrote in This Is It of an experience of "a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is. Existence not only ceases to be a problem; the mind is so wonder-struck at the self-evident and self-sufficient fitness of things as they are, including what would ordinarily be thought the very worst, that it cannot find any word strong enough to express the perfection and beauty of the experience."

He goes on to say that "the immediate now is complete even when it is not ecstatic." For some reason, this is not, as it sounds, a declaration of hopelessness but of acceptance and utter contentment.

The Moment as a Brushstroke

Recently, I was painting a rose, a very big one, on the top of my future kitchen table top. The painting has taken almost a month. Each petal takes almost two hours. As I sat down to paint, I was excited, inspired, eager to feel the brush in my hand and enjoy the sensations of spreading bright, buttery paint onto a clean, white surface. However, once the process was underway, my attention dissolved, and my mind was full of miscellaneous preoccupations.

I watched how my awareness changed. It happened when I began painting a new petal, and I thought, "I'm doing this so that I will have a completed rose, and a table to eat on." Suddenly, the moment, which contained a brush stroke, was lost in this abstract thing, which contained a completed rose. I sat down in the first place because of the pleasure that comes from those single brush strokes, but I forgot how ultimate they were. A painted rose is just an abstract way of defining a collection of brushstrokes, so each brushstroke is more real than what it appears to constitute. Without them, nothing else exists.

In this same way, the moment is a brushstroke. It's so easy to pay greater attention to what we perceive as the moment's purpose, the goal it carries us to, but if we let go of the moment, we let go of everything. Like painting, living in the moment is a wonderful and beautiful experience.

Ways of Seeing Things

On a warm evening, I was walking home from work and felt a sudden, inexplicable contentment. For several hours, nothing in the world bothered me, and I was so elated I nearly laughed out loud. I had unintentionally entered a meditative state of mind and realized something interesting about it. I did not see things differently... I had no "way of seeing things" at all. It was the absence of a way of seeing things. Things just were. They weren't good. They weren't bad. They weren't neither or in-between or a mixture of good and bad. They just were.

Making Time To Reset

My biggest obstacle to meditation is just getting myself to sit down and do it. I finally asked myself a few things that helped me find the motivation:

-- How much time do you spend stressing out and trying to recuperate, because you did not take five minutes to breath and reset, to make a peaceful place in your mind?
-- How much energy did you waste trying to solve a problem that you could have found the answer to in seconds and without effort if your mind had only been a little calmer?
-- If you set aside five minutes in the morning to read the comics in the newspaper, why can't you set aside five minutes to breath? Which is more important? Which will make you happier?
-- Can you still your mind for five seconds right now?

The Here and Now

One goal of meditation described in numerous texts on the subject is to exist in the moment, i.e. "be here now." I think perhaps this is really no different than being aware, because of course you are always in the moment. You can't travel through time. So, in a sense, being here now is really just about being aware of the fact that you ARE here now. Also, you can be aware of a memory, aware of the fact that you are remembering something, or you can be aware of your anxiety about the future, and by turning your attention to these things, you see that all there really is is your memory or your anxiety... nothing in the past and nothing in the future, just effects and precursors. The moment is all there is; we just have to realize it.

Purpose

The ultimate purpose of meditation, according to philosophies such as Zen Buddhism, is not to produce pleasant emotions, experience a supernatural phenomenon, or even to relax. Instead, if there is any purpose at all that one can point to, it is to practice a state of mind or being that is unattached and unmoved by events or thoughts, perceptions or sensations, to find inner silence and lose that sense of separateness that adds unnecessary abstractions to our experience of life.

Expectation

Some say, when you meditate, you must not have a goal beyond the simple act of meditating. You must not hold in mind any expectation. Any image you form of what meditation will bring you becomes the substance of a false experience. For example, if you imagine a state of oneness, you may feel a sense of union with the world around you, but that experience will simply be a product of your visualization.

Technique

When choosing a technique, not all methods feel right or comfortable. Different people need different methods. Thus, the meditation practice that works for you will not work as well for everyone. Lawrence LeShan wrote in How To Meditate, "There is one warning sign in meditation that should always be obeyed. This is a sense that you should not be doing this particular meditation, that it is 'wrong' for you."

Intuition

The most powerful guide to meditation is intuition. With intuition, I believe a person could discover many of the common meditation techniques on their own.

Awareness

Awareness is the key component in the technique known as "mindfulness," the central practice in Buddhist meditation. This tradition simply instructs the pupil to be aware of everything... perceptions, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and awareness itself. Ultimately, this awareness leads to the realization that the self is fragmented and transient, and the emotional investment in the self dissipates.

This method is useful for combatting panic or intense, involved emotions. It is like pressing ones emotional reset button. You may find your perspective changing. You may experience a great relief. Yet, I believe one of the greatest benefits this technique may bring is pain tolerance. One of the characteristics of pain is the unbearable urge to get rid of it. This meditation technique can help a person endure emotional distress, ultimately allowing the person to come up with solutions to the distress rather than suffering at the whim of strong feelings.

The practice of mindfulness typically begins with a focus on one of several things, such as your breath, the sensations you feel when your lungs fill with air, the process of inhaling and exhaling, or your body, its position, its contact with your chair, and internal sensations. Once a focus has been chosen, it is important to stick with that for a while before moving on to broader or more subtle things, such as thoughts or feelings.

Instructions:

Sit in a comfortable position and remain unmoving unless you become uncomfortable. Relax your muscles into this position and eliminate any intentions to move.
Turn your attention to your breath (or whatever you chose to focus on), and simply watch without analysis or judgement.
When thoughts and feelings arise, simply watch them. Observe them without being carried away or becoming involved. Simply note the thought, and gently bring your attention back to your breath. When something distracts you, use it. You don't have to be interrupted by sounds, itches, or wandering thoughts. Instead, distractions are an opportunity to be aware.

I find it helpful to practice taking a step back from everything that moves into my awareness. When I start to worry that I'm not succeeding with the technique, I take a step back and observe my worry. When I feel that I am succeeding, I take a step back and observe that feeling. When I realize I am observing myself, I take a step back and observe my realization. This essentially reduces my mental activity to what might be called "first degree" awareness, or pure observation, as opposed to second degree awareness, i.e., being aware that you are being aware.

If you feel pain, simply watch it. Observe how it feels without making a judgement or trying to do something about it. Be aware of the sensations and the quality of pain. If you feel compelled to act, observe your compulsion. It is surprising how often pain subsides, even a terrible itch, when it is passively observed.

There is a lot more to this school of meditation than what I am presenting here. For example, Buddhists believe that compassion is an essential quality in psychological development. Many of their meditation exercises involve expressions of compassion.

Much of the information here comes from a course I took at the University of California, Berkeley, Buddhist Psychology, taught by Professor Eleanor Rosch. If you want to know more, I recommend books by Chogyan Trungpa and Thich Nhat Hann.

Inner Silence

Zen Buddhism is notoriously confusing and indirect. However, the practice of Zen involves one key feature: inner silence, or the cessation of thought.

Every moment, your mind is racing with thoughts, judgements, and worries. When you think about yourself or the world, you tidy up the enormous amount of incoming information by placing things into categories, representing things with symbols, imagining hypothetical situations, predicting the future, recalling the past, and so on. In short, thought is typically an abstraction of reality, a refined version of your perceptions, a step away from the true nature of things, and full of illusion. We see ourselves as entities separate from everything around us. We see ourselves as observers and the rest of the universe as the subject of our observations.

The idea behind Zen meditation, assuming it can be articulated at all, lies in interrupting the stream of thought while remaining conscious of that interruption. Zen is indirect, because any instruction one could give would become an anchor for further thought processes and analyses. Even worse, the mere discussion of Zen promotes its conceptualization. In other words, when someone tells you what Zen is, they are giving you a definition for something that inherently defies definition, and consequently their definition is wrong. For this reason, one cannot pursue Zen, because an idea or image is required in order to form a goal, and any image of Zen is incorrect in that it fails to convey the idea of not having an idea. Words cannot describe the ineffable. No symbol can represent the state of non-representation.

So, where does this leave you? What can you do to practice Zen? Traditionally, Zen masters used strange and unexpected behaviors to shock their pupils out of their conceptual thinking. However, this is now cliche. Those who practice Zen today use another traditional method called zazen, or "seated meditation," which basically amounts to sitting and doing nothing. It sounds simple at first but deceptively so.

Hui-neng wrote:
If you start concentrating the mind on stillness, you will merely produce an unreal stillness.... What does the word 'meditation' mean? In this school, it means no barriers, no obstacles; it is beyond all objective situations whether good or bad. The word 'sitting' means not to stir up thoughts in the mind.

One side effect of this technique is boredom. It occurs in the beginning, but it is a part of the practice. It occurs when your mind runs out of things to chew on, exactly the sort of state that fosters inner silence.

Recommended Books

The Way of Zen
The Way of Liberation
Om: Creative Meditations

all by Alan Watts

Understanding Zen

by Benjamin Radcliff and Amy Radcliff

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

by Shunyu Suziki

Wherever You Go There You Are

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

How To Meditate

by Lawrence LeShan

Transcendental Meditation

by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Meditation For Emotional Well-Being