Meditation

Last Wednesday night at my Conscious Community class we got to talking about meditation. The rabbi was talking about the frustrations he has had with meditation and I finally "came out" as a meditator. I'm proud of my daily discipline even if I don't get more than a few minutes most days. (About 5-15 minutes weekdays, plus yoga beforehand. About a half hour on Saturday morning in the early hours before going back to bed.) So I gave some suggestions about what makes it work.

Then, to my great pleasure, my friend who attends the classes asked the benefits of meditation. I told her some of how I had got started. I didn't tell the whole thing there, but I will here:

I have problems with my SI joint, a muscle near the hips, and have had trouble with it for years to the degree that at times I couldn't walk. (This has been getting bad again recently with the pregnancy.) I eventually realized that no doctor was helping me with it effectively and that I would have to fix it myself. To do that, I began taking yoga. The problem was that there was chanting at the beginning and end that just plain wasn't Jewish and I discovered I wanted to study Jewish meditation. I had played around with it a little through the years, especially as a teenager, but didn't do much on my own with it.

So someone who throughout the years has alternated between boss, neighbor, teacher and friend or mine, Abby was teaching a class on just that. When I entered her class I came with the intention of getting rid of the chattering in my head. It has helped tremendously and led to other benefits too. Some of these benefits come directly from the time I spend sitting the morning, some have come from things we discussed in the classes I took with Abby, and some has come in the way I try to look at the world minute to minute, using the meditation as a tool to remind me how to do it.

Over the time I've been doing meditation which started arond 2002, meditation has helped me:

Reduce anxiety
Face the morning when I used to become very emotional about having to do so
Relax
Have greater faith
Love more
Accept more
Reduce anger
Be more patient in spousal interactions
Be more forgiving (sometimes... this is a tough one for me, but I'm having some success with it right now)
Like myself more
Find solutions to problems
Feel safe

The hardest thing about meditation for me is, I think, the voice in my head that says other people don't have time for this so I have some nerve doing it when there is WORK TO BE DONE! Sometimes I work through this by saying that the time I take to meditate makes me more efficient in dealing with my life. (Kind of like sleeping, but even more so. If I can waste less energy on negativity, all the better.) At other times I simply thank myself for taking care of myself.

Obviously the preoccupation now is wondering how I'll find time for that and yoga once there's a baby here. However, as meditation has helped me accept more in the world and surrender more to G-d and what G-d sends, I also think I'll deal with that when the time comes. I hope I can learn to make the time I spend with my child into a meditation of its own. I already do a certain kind of meditation in the chaos of a school environment by being ON with kids. (It gives me a high. The better I know them, the greater the high.) But I would like to have a quiet meditation too. We'll see what happens when I get there.

In the meantime, I would like to help more people become accepting and open to real meditation. What do I mean by "real"? I guess I'm not sure yet. But I can think about it and write more if I still want to later.

That's a lot for you to read now. I still have a list of things I want to write about, but that's enough for now.