Dabbling in Meditation: A Family Affair.

It’s been less than three weeks since I committed to meditating at least once a day. I began to notice benefits within the first week. Whether those benefits came out of placebo-like expectations or not, they existed. The first, and still, most noticeable benefit is a greater self-awareness, leading to greater self-control, snowballing into greater self-love. Within days, I was noticing myself calling out my moods for the lies of habit they were.

(Yellowstone 2015)

“I feel so bad” I’d hear myself say in my head, and then I’d have a bad emotion which led to a bad thought. This sequence was often interchangeable yet with my newly gained ability to slip into the now and reflect on the validity of the negative emotion, negative self-talk, and negative thoughts, it was always proven false. I was always in the now, and it was always perfect.

I’ve realized that my body and mind had been responding to how I trained it, when X, provide Y. For instance, a “bad” feeling (X) did not necessitate the provision of a bad memory or worry (Y) to back it up. I also believe that the establishment of the meditation habit has been a team leader on my team of new good habits (working out, eating better, avoiding alcohol, establishing routine.)

I’ve been noticing my mother’s chronic cough since I’ve been staying with them for the past couple months and it’s begun to worry me. It’s a puttering cough, that continues throughout the day. It strikes me as a nervous tick, an inability to relax, more than it worries me as developing COPD. Although, I fear that if she doesn’t correct it, her breathing will get worse as she ages past her current year of seventy. I told her of the benefits of meditation, what it’s been doing for me and asked if she’d like to join in my practice.

We’ve done it three time in five days. I joke to myself that it’s the perfect thing for us to do to spend time together because we sit silent in the room with our eyes closed, yet I get credit for spending time with her. She seems to be taking to it, maybe for the reason that her son is sitting with her, maybe because she believes it will help, probably a bit of both.

After the second session, I pointed out to her that she didn’t cough once during both meditation sessions. Proving to myeslf, and hopefully convincing her unconscious mind, that she can indeed breathe easily and effortlessly. She, of course, at this point, goes right back to letting out her puttering engine coughs, but I suspect this may change with continued meditative practice.

My mother wrangled my father into joining us yesterday. He said he didn’t need it but I pointed out the preventative health benefits, which encouraged my mother to harangue and trap him. So, he joined us. However, I suspect he merely viewed it as nap time, and in line with myself, a rare opportunity to sit in a room with my mother for twenty minutes without her speaking (she’s a talker.)

Ohm, shanti, shanti.