I’ve started meditating. Or at least, I am trying to start trying to meditate. I am following the program designed by John Kabat-Zinn in Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. This book, which is somewhat unfortunately titled, is awesome and I highly recommend it.

Why meditation? Well, for years I have been reading misc. news reports about the benefits of meditation. A few months ago I read a particular article about a study done in Boston where participants underwent an 8 week meditation program after which the study found significant changes in brain structure. This was significant, to me in any case, for several reasons. The first is that nearly every scientific study on meditation I have seen was largely qualitative. Those that did involve something quantitative like an MRI brain scan were largely performed on long time participants of meditation. These studies, while cool, are always subject to caveats. Secondly, these changes occurred over a time period of 8 weeks… a breathtakingly short period of time. It is only recently that we have come to fully accept that the brain is plastic into adult hood and here we have an example of a “simple” exercise that can healthy change the brain in 2 months. The final impressive thing about this study is that the participants were simply given instructions and a series of tapes and told to follow them at home.

So, if you add all that up you have dramatic healthy changes in brain structure over a short period caused by largely self guided behavior. Incredible. Needless to say it piqued my interest and I started looking into it alittle further. Once I started looking I heard this story on the radio. In my mind it was possible that the first study I mentioned above cheery-picked their participants, the story of meditation at the prison mentioned above addressed this. Here we have people who in most respects are a population of people who one would expect have few of the traits expected of a meditation practitioner. And yet, they do it, voluntarily. In fact there is a 1 year waiting list on the program. Plus, this isn’t the self guided 8 week program mentioned above. No, these inmates are put into a gym for 10 days and do nothing but practice meditation for 17 hours a day. Incredible.

I didn’t start with the 8 week program mentioned above. I actually found this great resource called Mindfulness in Plain English. Despite how straight forward and encouraging this book is, what they suggest is still rather intimidating. You start, for 20 minutes a day, just sitting and watching your breath. Thats it. I tried this for a week and, frankly, got intimidated.

So, I found the tapes and book mentioned in the 8 week study and decided to commit to the program. The first two weeks you practice what is called a body scan. You lay down and, guided by a tape, slowly scan over your body simply paying attention to it. Every time your awareness is drawn somewhere else, be it a distracting noise or thought, you simply notice it and return your attention to the body part. Thats it.

The next two weeks involve alternating between practicing hatha yoga, again guided by the tapes, and the body scan used during weeks 1 and 2. In addition to this you are asked to be aware of one pleasant event each day, jotting down whether or not you were aware of it as it was happening, how you were feeling and what you were thinking, as well as what it means to write it down. The 4th week you do the same but for unpleasant events.

Weeks 5 and 6 involve yoga and sitting meditation (That stuff that intimidated me earlier!)

Week 7 is up to you.

And week 8 you practice along with the tapes again, this time being aware of how your practice has evolved and changed.

So, I just finished week 2 of this program and I thought I would do a little check in.

Practicing the body scan has been harder then I anticipated, I often space out towards then end of the time period and I have a tough time concentrating. Also, I’m almost always tired so it is hard not to fall asleep! Despite this I feel like I have noticed changes in me. The most obvious is that I am much more aware of tension in body. I find that I notice tension creeping into my shoulders and neck as I work or walk and almost immediately work to relax the tension. I used to do this before, but I would only notice the tension after it started to hurt and I was not nearly as effective at relaxing.

A more subtle change is that I feel more competent at noticing when I am getting anxious and dealing with it. This is a rather recent developement, but within the last few days I feel like when I catch myself getting anxious early I can do the following: stop, focus on my breathing for little bit, relax my gut like I mentioned above, and be mindful of the anxiety. That last part is really the meat (I think) of what this whole meditation thing is about.

This is because everything I have described so far has been mindful meditation. Instead of simply practicing concentration, mindful meditation encourages awareness as well as concentration. In a way you are exercising your ability to control your awareness. This is not as easy as it seems, how many times a day do you catch yourself day dreaming… how many times do you not catch yourself! It is more then just day dreaming though, for me, for example, it has to do with anxiety. Once I start getting anxious it starts off a chain reaction where I start obsessing about things that make me even more anxious. Just thinking about those things as I write is starting off the chain.

Control, then, is important because it is how you break the chain. If you become anxious you focus your attention on the anxiety, not the obsessive train of thoughts that follows. Once you are aware of your anxiety, you can accept that you are anxious and move on to a new moment. Its ok to be anxious, it happens and usually for a reason. But there is no reason to become dis-proportionally anxious.

That is how I think it happens. Like I said, it has only happened a few times but it is encouraging.

I hope to do an update after the next two week block.