My experiment with meditation

Photo by youngling
Meditation
Does the word conjure up images of Indian Holy men sitting for hours on end with their legs crossed; hands on their knees with palms facing upward?
After years of western clinical study, you can now discard that thought, as people from all walks of life, from Plumbers to CEO's of major corporations have taken up the practice.
So what exactly is meditation, and why should I waste twenty minutes of my precious day to practice it?

After a lifetime of reading about it, and seeing it in magazines and tabloid style journals, I decided to finally give it a try at the beginning of April of this year.
Seeing as I hadn't a clue as to where to begin I headed for my trusty computer, dusted off the keyboard, fired up Google, and typed in the keyword "meditation."

A daunting task that returned 38,600,000 hits awaited me. "Hmmm I muttered to myself," images of days in front of the pc whittling away at the inessentials to get to exactly what I needed, a no-frills approach to meditation regarding a busy lifestyle.. I then typed in
"Meditation Western Style," and came across a book aptly named, "The Relaxation Response" by Herbert Benson MD. A free electronic copy can be found here.

I was a thoroughly Western, rational, mechanist, Ayn-Rand-Objectivist, John-Wayne-style "I'll do it myself" individualist until I read this book, and put its theory to practice.

THE RELAXATION RESPONSE is written in such a clear and no-nonsense way, and it's so easy to follow, that its gotten me to do what I had come to believe was the impossible: to sit quietly for twenty minutes every evening with a relatively empty mind.

Herbert Benson is a Harvard cardiologist who pioneered the research into stress-related causes for diseased such as hypertension. Always weary of having his research seen as nothing more than new age fluffery, Dr. Benson made sure to prove his results by rigidly adhering to the scientific method.

Dr. Benson's results show that there is a capacity inherent in all human beings to invoke a "relaxation response" that can counter the effects of the "flight or flight response" which is at the root of many modern stress-related illnesses.

By learning to invoke the "relaxation response" once or twice a day for just ten minutes at a sitting, one can effectively lower high blood pressure, and gain more tranquility in their emotional life.

Here are my results to date:

Focus – My job is an extremely highly technical one requiring a great amount of mental flexibility, and the very first response that I had noticed was my ability to sharply focus on what I was doing. Prior to this my mind would wander all over the place on no particular topic at all. Now my ability to zero in on what I am doing while I eliminate all of the mental white noise is remarkable. Focus = efficiency and maximizing of time.

Relaxation - I now notice that I can relax not only faster, but longer as well. Prior to this, relaxation was just another word in the dictionary, and no amount of metaphysical alchemy would ever allow me to experience it. Boy was I wrong.

Sleep - I have always been a person who never knew how long it would take for me to drift off to sleep, and my bed was constantly my battleground. In spite of a long, and hard day at work, I would sometimes go to bed exhausted, and unable to sleep. Thoughts would be racing through my head at the rate of about 1 per second.Well not any more. If I find that I can’t switch off my mind at bedtime, then I simply invoke the relaxation response that I practice every night after my workout, and dinner. Within 30 minutes I am now fast asleep.

Other subtle changes – I am also noticing other changes that are somewhat hard to verbalize. It seems as if my entire being is now more energized, yet relaxed. I can now work longer, and rest better, and all of this in only two months time.

Try it for 2 weeks. (The time it took me to begin to notice the subtle changes within myself) I guarantee that you will reap the rewards that the relaxation response promises to deliver on.