Balance

The word for today is balance.

In my mind, I'm picturing a surfer -- actually a surfer's feet on the board, a surfer's body, swaying, adjusting to find that balance to stay on the board, to ride the wave. The surfer does that by feel, not consciously thinking, now I have to move my weight to my left foot to counterbalance the rising water on that side, and by practice. By the time that thought could arise and the body could respond, the balance would be gone and the surfer would be a swimmer. But practice -- failing to do it and falling in, over-compensating and falling the other way -- it becomes instinctive.

In meditation, we practice finding that mental balance. We find the focus -- the breath -- and rest attention there. But sometimes we grab onto it and tighten around it, squeezing it and creating tension. Sometimes we're too relaxed and lose track of the breath, wandering off into thoughts about other things or just spacing out.

We practice finding the balance with the breath. But we bring our balance into the world.

To me, tightening my attention on the breath, grasping onto it, is the same feeling I get when I grab onto an idea of how the world should be. I can't see other options, I can't wait for this thing to arrive, I don't understand why everyone doesn't agree with me. It's a small, closed space of shallow, tight breaths.

When I loosen up, I see there's more space. My chest expands, my belly relaxes. There is air, there is room, there is no need to look ahead to the next breath -- just this one is enough. Just this one is wonderful. But staying with this one breath is important.

Sharon Salzberg writes:

When your attention is diffuse, it’s like a broad, weak beam of light that doesn’t reveal much. Concentration brings the weak beam down to a single, sharply focused, supremely bright, exponentially more illuminating point.

How can the breath be illuminating? It's just the breath; it happens whether we think about it or not. If it's not a problem, why should we notice it?

I recently heard Kate Bornstein talk about gender and aging and her Zen practice, which is to contemplate the koan, The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

Maybe the way we approach the breath is the way we approach everything: Grasping or ignoring, chasing or controlling it, critiquing it and our powers of observing it. Maybe if we can find ease and balance with the breath, we can find that with other things in our lives. If we can stay with one breath, we can stay with one thought or one conversation instead of anticipating the next one. We can greet its arising, appreciate its fullness, and release it without regret.

It's just breath. And it's everything.

Be here now -- while on your way there

Air travel, with its schedules and lines and inherent dangers and hyped-up threats and small seating spaces, is stressful, no matter who you are. Meditation is a way of working with stress. So it makes sense that Delta Airlines has added guided meditations to its in-flight entertainment options.

The app is called "OMG. I Can Meditate" and it's available through the Delta Studio suite of in-flight entertainment via seatback screens or on the WiFi-enable device of your choice. (It's available for nonflight meditation as an app for iPhone or Android also.) It offers a menu of several 10-minute guided meditations, with names like “Blanket of Love,” “Dealing with Anxiety,” and “Relaxing in the Clouds,” narrated by Lynne Goldberg, a meditation coach and co-founder of the app.

The OMG website is a bit breathless in extolling the benefits of meditation -- reduced stress, improved health, better love life, greater success -- although it connects all of the benefits to actual studies. It's a bit light on the news that the benefits accrue to those who have an ongoing practice of meditation. Those 10-minute bites may help for those 10 minutes and a few following, but to see long-term results you need to practice long term.

But ... making even 10 minutes of air travel more pleasant is certainly worth the effort. And if meditation can make being packed into a small space without much space to less objectionable, that might be enough to convince people of its power and to give it a try on a regular basis.

Not only does meditation reduce stress and anxiety, but it improves your physical health and well-being, decreases feelings of depression, improves memory, focus and concentration, makes you less reactive, which helps your relationships, boosts your self awareness and creativity, and to top it off, it makes you happier.

Continue reading: Why Meditate? | OMG. I Can Meditate!

Not only does meditation reduce stress and anxiety, but it improves your physical health and well-being, decreases feelings of depression, improves memory, focus and concentration, makes you less reactive, which helps your relationships, boosts your self awareness and creativity, and to top it off, it makes you happier.

Continue reading: Why Meditate? | OMG. I Can Meditate!

The value of meditation

Maybe you've heard that meditation is good for you, that it can make you happier and healthier. And that's enough to get you interested but not enough to get you started.

How about this: It can save you money.

Rearchers at Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital looked at some of the large body of research that's found health benefits from meditation and other mind-body practices, like yoga and tai chi, and found people who used relaxation techniques were 43 percent less likely to visit the hospital, be ordered a medical test by their doctor and to need emergency care, compared to those who did not use the practices.

To determine that, the researchers analyzed 4,000 records from patients between 2006 and 2014, who followed a doctor's recommendation to use relaxation techniques such as meditation, yoga, and tai chi in addition to medical treatment for stress-related health problems. They also looked at the records of 13,000 patients whose doctors did not make these recommendations.

The researchers found that mind-body practices resulted in annual health care savings of $2,360 per patient, based on reduced emergency room visits alone.

They estimated overall annual savings -- taking into account the costs of hospital and doctor visits, and medical tests -- of up to $25,000 per patient.

"These practices can ... decrease the anxiety associated with many health conditions, lead to improved self-awareness, and may enhance other self-care behaviors," Dr. Michelle Dossett, a physician and researcher at the Benson-Henry Institute and one of the study's authors, told The Huffington Post. "These practices can decrease a wide range of stress-related symptoms and medical conditions."

Feel better. Save money. Become a nice person because you're less stressed. Good reasons to try meditation.

Hillary holds her seat

One of the benefits of meditation is that you become less reactive. You cultivate the ability to rest in a calm, clear space so that you can choose how to respond rather than habitually hitting back.

There may be no better illustration of that than Hillary Clinton, who was the only witness in an 11-hour highly politicized hearing having to do with the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Libya that left four Americans dead; Clinton was secretary of the state at the time.

Clinton was widely praised for her calm, somber attitude through the day of questioning by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. How did she do it?

"I tried to meditate in the breaks," an NPR reporter overheard her say.

NPR notes that there had been no formal breaks in the hearing up to that point, so Clinton was practicing what's sometimes referred to as stealth meditation -- meditating in place so that no one knows you're doing it (as opposed to going outside to sit under a tree or locking yourself in your office). It can be done by placing your attention on an object or a sensation -- your breath, the feeling of your hands holding a pen, the warmth coming off a cup of coffee, the droning sound of a politician making a statement. The trick is to stay present, not to space out. One way to do that is to become aware of all that's happening, noticing the sound, the sensation, the movement, without becoming engaged with them -- to rest in the awareness of what's happening.

Meditating in place is a skill that's helped immensely by practicing in designated meditation sessions. If your mind has practice in resting in awareness it can find that place on the spot more easily. "If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained," says one of the Lojong slogans. (Lojong is a system of Tibetan Buddhist mind-training slogans.)

If you can practice patience in the traffic jam with a sense of humor approach or whatever approach you want to use, you are training for really major difficulties in your life. So, it sounds silly, but actually, it’s true. If you’re sowing seeds of aggression in the traffic jam, then you’re actually perfecting the aggression habit. And if you’re using your sense of humor and your loving-kindness or whatever it is you do, then you’re sowing those kinds of seeds and strengthening those kinds of mental habits; you’re imprinting those kind of things in your unconscious. So, the choice is really ours every time we’re in a traffic jam. Pema Chodron

Learning to step back

When someone pushes my buttons my instinct is to push back. That may feel right in the moment, but it doesn't lead to good outcomes -- it leads to yelling and posturing and anger and, well, nothing beneficial.

One of the benefits of meditation is that it helps me find the space between the push and the push back, to let the energy dissipate instead of escalating it.

A new study shows I'm not alone.

In a working paper published by the US National Bureau of Economic Research this month, researchers found that teaching Chicago high-schoolers meditation techniques designed to help them find that gap significantly lowered crime and dropout rates for participants and boosted school attendance.

According to an article on Quartz,

The study analyzed the effects of a Chicago-based program by the organization Youth Guidance called Becoming a Man (BAM). The researchers invited 1,473 Chicago teens, chosen at random from 18 public schools, to participate in BAM programming and compared them to a control group of similar students who were not invited.

The goal of the program, explains coauthor Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago and the director of its Crime Lab, was to encourage less violent behavior by slowing their automatic response.

We develop automatic responses, or habitual reactions, to save time. The Quartz article notes that  while American teenagers from privileged backgrounds learn to automatically comply with authority figures, handing over their smartphone to a mugger, or quieting down when a teacher says so, low-income teenagers may learn that submitting to authorities only invites more aggression. 

Much of the training focused on learning to work with anger by using breathing exercises and meditation techniques, such as exhaling while counting slowly to four.  A year after the program, those who participated in the BAM program were 44 percent less likely to commit violent crimes, and performed significantly better on an academic performance index that combines academic measurements including GPA, attendance rates, and dropout rates, the study found.

Learning to find the space between the stimulus and the reaction lets us decide whether the habitual response is the best one in a given situation.  It doesn't have to be a long pause, but it can be the pause that refreshes and resets the situation rather than the one that sends it tumbling into chaos.

Practice like a champion

My Buddhist teacher shared this photo of a T-shirt she saw someone wearing at the airport, commenting that it seems like a good message.

Practice like a champion.

Since my teacher suggested it, I have to think about it. That's the deal.

What does it mean to practice like a champion?

First of all, you do it a lot. You do it so many times that when you go into a competition, you don't think about where to put your hands or your feet; it's second nature.

You do it with precision. You practice to get better, not just to put in the time. You don't practice bad habits. You practice to correct bad habits. So you bring effort and intention to every session.

And you do it with courage. You try things that you're not sure you can do. You go out of your comfort zone. That's how you learn to do more than when you started.

It's more obvious in some other versions of the shirt that I found online than this one, but the whole slogan is "Practice like a champion/Act like a champion."

That's also a good reminder. You practice with diligence and clarity and intention during meditation so that you bring that to your post-meditation practice. That's why you do it, really -- not for 20 minutes of calm and escape from the torment of thoughts but for a less-stressful life. 

I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about how you can't win at meditation. There's no score. There's no winner and loser -- you're succeeding when you stop comparing yourself to others, when you stop seeing that you're in competition with everything.

Practice, though, is about working with yourself, honing your instincts, correcting habits that make life harder.

So when I sat down on my cushion this week, I said to myself, Practice like a champion. And I sat straighter, applied effort more precisely, and felt more confident. For real.

While I couldn't find a source for the slogan, it seems to be connected often with cheerleading. On a lot of the shirts, the front says, "Cheer like a beast."

A garuda, maybe, or a turquoise dragon. Or, maybe, say your mantras with a Lion's roar of confidence.

Meditation changes your brain

It's hard to keep up with all of the medical studies involving meditation, which seem to universally document its benefits.

This Washington Post interview with Harvard neurologist Sally Lazar gives a clear summary of some important findings from a study that put a group of people through an eight-week mindfulness meditation program:

Lazar: We found differences in brain volume after eight weeks in five different regions in the brains of the two groups. In the group that learned meditation, we found thickening in four regions:
1. The primary difference, we found in the posterior cingulate, which is involved in mind wandering, and self relevance.
2. The left hippocampus, which assists in learning, cognition, memory and emotional regulation.
3.  The temporo parietal junction, or TPJ, which is associated with perspective taking, empathy and compassion.
4. An area of the brain stem called the Pons, where a lot of regulatory neurotransmitters are produced.
The amygdala, the fight or flight part of the brain which is important for anxiety, fear and stress in general. That area got smaller in the group that went through the mindfulness-based stress reduction program.
The change in the amygdala was also correlated to a reduction in stress levels.

You may just notice that you experience moments of calmness. Meanwhile, your brain is working hard.