Breaking the body to build the mind

For more than a year I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing one of these 10-day meditation marathons as a way of adding to my five tepid years of the practice. I think I can handle the emotional isolation involved, but I’m genuinely concerned about the physical pain.

We’re talking about sitting cross legged for 10 hours a day for ten straight days.  I can’t sit cross legged for 10 minutes without pain shooting up my back and down my sciatica. I famously can’t make it through dinner without standing up to stretch my legs. I’ve got two partially herniated discs that I’ve managed to control over the years with a combination of exercises and abandoning the fun stuff I used to do like long-distance running. How am I gonna make it through a marathon of sitting up straight?

The primary complaint about physical discomfort for folks that do Vipassana is back pain. And this is for people that don’t generally suffer from back pain.

I’ve done a few Google searches and found a lot of references to Vipassana meditation as a way of reducing back pain, which is often linked to stress. This seems like good and bad news. I’d be happy to add it to my back-relief arsenal that already includes stretching, sit-ups, pushups, and all other manner of funny looking abdominal exercises. And I’ve always been underwhelmed by Western medicine’s approach to back pain, as well as Western society’s horrid treatment of our backs. It took me some time to stop expecting doctors to be able to do anything about back pain, and once I did I found that I could get along with them a lot better. These days I don’t bug those doctors and they don’t bug me, but then again they ask me to sit on my butt for 100 hours.

Still, there’s something scary in this “it’s all in your mind” approach, even if that happens to be true. My guess is upon starting Vipassana I’ll try to explain that I’ve got disc hernia that makes it hard for me to sit still, and a peacefully smiling instructor will tell me that back pain in fact comes from spiritual imbalance and that there’s nothing for me to worry about. Everyone goes through back pain during meditation, they’ll say, you’re no different, and you have to stop listening to what those doctors tell you.

If you’ve ever had chronic back pain you know it sucks. I’m fully ready to believe that a good chunk of it’s in my head. I’m hoping this will teach me how much of it is.

Digital media navel-gazing at its most profound

For a while I’ve been bouncing between different writing projects including this blog, Twitter and, well, my job. I’m still in the metaphysical tweeting-about-tweeting phase, much like the nascent blogosphere of the early 00’s was filled with navel-gazing posts about what it meant to be a blogger and the future of journalism. And for a while I’ve been trying to be freer in the things that I put on my blog, to avoid writing essays every time I post. So here we go: instead of Tweeting about Tweeting, I’m blogging about Tweeting.

I initially had this idea of Tweeting about the process of meditation. So I tried it out on Twitter, and it seemed kinda cool. Just the sheer 21^st century absurdity of it seemed so appealing to me, the marriage of absolutely irreconcilable opposites. And it reinforced the idea that, yes, Tweeting really can be a cool repository for stray thoughts I don’t have much else to do with. Maybe someone else will appreciate them.

And then there’s the idea of creating your digital space, which bloggers have pretty well figured out. Back in the day (I mean way back, when the famous Talking Points Memo was one guy in DC coding HTML and reading wire stories) blogs were for the most either glorified journals or hyper-political commentary forums. It didn’t take long before people found their niche, such that now you can find blogs out there on just about any subject, country, dispute or cause a person could think of. The nice thing is this is actually much more valuable than everybody repeating the same things over and over again.

My point. I’m getting there.

When I started trying to take Tweeting seriously, I saw this space for a guy who could tweet about how meditation is this truly practical, functional thing people can improve their mood, get more done, be more focused and enjoy things more. And of course the very forum of Twitter makes it logical to do this live. AND – there’s nobody else out there doing this. As far as I can tell. Most of the meditation related tweets I find are people repeating passages by spiritual gurus ranging from Sai Baba to Buddha, or heartfelt messages about discovering inner peace (in 140 characters). And there’s actually quite a bit of Bhudda and spirituality linked commerce that enters the picture, but I won’t get into that.

I wanted a narrative about the experience of these things. Because I do come across thoughts during the day related to the practice of meditation that I’d like to be able to publish. Of course I’d love to be able to debate about all manner of things – the US debt crisis, fossil fuels, alternative energy, monetary policy, the future of Brazil – but I just can’t sit here and tell you what I really think about the things that matter. That’s a no-no for reporters in today’s digital culture – just ask Octavia Nasr what a careless Tweet can mean for a career.

But it turns out my career does allow me to talk about meditation. And the whole point of Twitter is that you stir of interactions and create connections and build communities by sending out messages about the things that are important to you. So I had envisioned something of a gym locker room for people trying to get their own brains in order, or to build up their concentration level. A set of meditation mechanics collectively kicking the tires of Mindfulness (or maybe #mindfulness). I haven’t gotten that because I’m not seeing people out there with the same concept.

And, yes, it was harder than I thought. It turns out that Tweeting – surprise! – actually does distract from meditation. I found myself, at times when I wanted to be winding down, thinking of ways of Tweeting without saying the same things over and over again. So, I was breathing and concentrating, and I forgot about other stuff #meditation. Or maybe Wow, it’s really hard to #meditate after work. It was like a reporter trying to keep a dying story alive, trying to turn nothing into news long just long enough for something to happen. And it got to be another *project* of which I already have too many, and even more that were once projects that I’ve walked away from, leaving me unable to focus, which was the point of the exercise to begin with.

And I was getting a few concerned messages from college friends that went something to the effect of “Dude, you OK over there? Not going off the spiritual deep end, are you?” And I can’t really explain this level of detail on my @brianpablo10 account (that’s why we’ve got Off the Wire). The imminently public nature of Twitter makes it very, um, public.

So I crawled away from the idea of being the enlightened BuddhaTweeter, and told 49 followers I wasn’t gonna do it anymore. But I actually feel like I don’t want to give up on it yet. Granted the experiment is only three days old. I’m just holding out that there is some way to dump stray thoughts out into the world in a productive way, that could eventually be useful either for me or for someone else out there. And because unlike kids today I can’t just float right into new technology, dinosaurs like me I need some kind of gimmick to plug ourselves in. I thought this would be the one. We’ll see. And so will my 49 followers, who are waiting with baited breath.

My meditation redux

 I’ve tried to get more serious about meditation over the last couple weeks, and it’s been an interesting experience. Part of it is because considered doing a 12-day meditation retreat with about 14 hours a day of meditation interrupted only by light meals and some chats about spirituality. It appeals too me. I’d like to figure out where that would take my brain and how it would change my behavior.

Meditation has given me more focus, and helps me clean out some of the junk floating around in my head. But it generally only does so for about 10 or 15 minutes after I’ve finished the session, which I usually try to do for at least 10 minutes every morning. What I’ve come to realize is that many activities in life are chances to do something similar to meditation. Walking from my house to the bus stop is a chance to observe what’s around me instead of listening to the incessant rattling that’s going on my head. Sitting on the bus is a chance to watch what people are wearing and how they carry themselves, or gaze out at the park and the guys playing morning soccer or look at the beautiful old buildings along the side of the road.

Once I’m on the bus on the way home in the evening, my brain is usually so drained that I can’t do much other than let my conscious run around however it wants. I’ve tried to do some meditation after coming home from work and I generally find it’s the absolute most difficult time to do it.

And meditation does have its limits. About a year ago I was so enthralled by its power that I came to think, possibly without realizing, that if practiced with enough depth and consistency it could be the solution to any emotional problem. But I realized there are lots of moments when greater clarity and focus are not by themselves going to solve a problem. Mindfulness does not help you make decisions, even if it can help you understand the process around the decisions or make it clear that you need to make a decision. And it does not force a person to confront things that are difficult for them. It is not a substitute for courage, dedication, or hard work. It can at best illuminate the need for these things.

And meditation digs up a lot of stuff out of your psyche, which is a double-edged sword. It can put your mind into a state of relaxation that lets you enjoy the things you want to do. But it can also dig deep down and pull out that bad mood that was lurking below the surface that you weren’t paying attention to because you were distracted by other things. When you break up the layer of clutter in your consciousness, you’re not always going to be happy with what you find below.

I’ve tried to spend a good chunk of today, a lazy Sunday that I’m spending at home, to really do some serious meditation. Part of this is in preparation for someday being able to do a longer “boot camp” so to speak, because I figure if I’m going to make it 12 days I should be able to make it a couple hours. I worry about whether the experience would simply be isolating. A person all by themselves trying to sort out what goes on in their own brain, with no distractions, no books, no music.

It always surprises me how little training we get in understanding our own minds. Of course this is difficult because each mind is so different – cada cabeza es un mundo, as Venezuelans like to say. But most of my friends and family have jobs that are almost entirely focused on their mind, which makes it strange that we don’t try harder to understand our minds the way athletes get intimately familiar with the functioning of their own bodies. I think meditation offers a window in. But knowledge is only part getting what you want from life. In the end there are no answers, which is simultaneously daunting and liberating.