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Why can’t I meditate?

1 Comment / Brain Have Fun / By Human123

With the advances in neuroscience and better measurement tools such as MRI, scientists are finding hard facts about benefits of meditation. For example, a study by Harvard unveils the cognitive and psychological benefits of meditation that go beyond stress relief and relaxation. Meditation group participants had a significant increase in gray-matter density in the areas of the brain associated with learning and memory compared to the control group. These effects were seen over 8 weeks with an average practice time of 27 minutes each day.

Still, despite the numerous benefits, I found it incredibly hard to sit still for a prolonged period of time when I started. Why? Was there something wrong with me? Why even 5 minutes of “doing nothing” caused such discomfort and pain? I had applied a process of statistical thinking to find the root-cause of my predicament and the means to succeed. The good news is that if I could succeed, you can, too.

Initial condition

Was I always like this? Of course not – as a child I could go the whole day “doing nothing” and being happy. Each one of us had a clean slate and sometime during adolescence we’ve trained ourselves to multitask, memorize, judge, decide and do all kinds of mental work except one – clean and purify at the conclusion of the task. I precisely remember a moment when I realized I finally learned to multitask, but at that moment I also felt I lost something far more precious – ability to just be. I could not retrain myself to switch from a scattered mind to a single mind easily. This was the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning.

Desired outcome

Become the master of my mind. Later on I learned that this goal is not the best goal to have, but for the time being let’s assume this is something a novice practitioner can strive for.

A process

My purpose is not to develop a set of rules to go from A to B, but rather think about what kind of energy and sincerity is needed to be successful in meditation.

Time frame: how long did it take for me to accumulate the mental garbage? Years, decades? Is it reasonable to expect all of that miraculously disappear in a short meditation practice? I have a rule of three: any new activity that I want to learn more about, I should give at least 3 tries. With a highly cognitive activity such as meditation, a month may not be enough. It depends on the initial state of the practitioner. The more open and humble attitude helps, but is not a prerequisite.
What motivates me? Am I more likely to succeed when I am motivated by the process itself, or when I keep my mind on the end result? In the latter, I educate myself about the benefits of the end result, and remember to have patience and determination to go through. If my goal is to be able to enjoy the process of meditation faster, much more energy and resources may be required to break through the self-constructed barriers and hard-wired habits.
Observing the progress. It is the one of the hardest things to measure and acknowledge. Observing self with impartiality means that I have already reached a major milestone! The quality of thoughts, emotions, and relationships can be tracked via writing a diary.

One of my favorite guided meditation methods is listening to “Buddhas’ Fun” CD. When I am struggling with my thoughts, I listen to “breakup meditation” track. When I want to recover fun in my brain and warmth in my heart, I listen to “Buddhas’ fun” track.

The beautiful thing about meditation is that the enjoyment of the process and the end result can grow without limits, irrespective of age, wealth, social status, and fame. Anyone can do it if they set their mind to it. What a wonderful gift we all possess!

Savor ‘Who am I?’ – rider of the storm

2 Comments / Brain Have Fun / By Accompletion

Turbulence – coming and going. Thrown into the storm. Emotions

Turbulence – Life; feeling alive. Do I always appreciate feeling so alive and look forward to its lesson and accept it?

Waves. The ocean. Fighting it – hurting and drowning.

Accept the waves coming and going? People coming into my life and leaving? Luck and trouble intermingled. Luck is trouble.

A rider of the waves
accepting and feeling the waves, moving with their motion, up and down, unwavering. Enjoying the ups and downs, while knowing in the end there is always defeat.

Victorious defeat of me over myself.
Of SELF watching my self.
Elevating to the next wave that comes down at the same time, endlessly.
Eternally – love, being alive – genuine LIFE.

A rider of the waves – to become a master of the waves.

Savoring the power – becoming mine. Becoming me. Becoming ‘Who am I?’.

Becoming.

Being
genuinely

Impostor of Love

1 Comment / Brain Have Fun / By Human123

“Your body language shapes who you are” – said Amy Cuddy in her TED talk. We are more used to thinking that our body language is a manifestation of who we are, not the other way around. The authors of the controlled experiment inferred that by changing the posture for only 2 minutes they were able to observe significant changes in body chemistry. In the power pose group the average cortisol level (stress hormone) decreased by 25 percent and the average testosterone level increased by 19% from the baseline.

What impressed me most is duration of poses: in only 2 minutes the body responded to postures. My teacher Grand-Master Johwa Choi always said that human body is very honest, it does not lie. You could train your mind by training your body, and the other way around. Then the question is: what value do I want to internalize and project the most? For some people or situations, it may be power, and doing the power poses as suggested in the talk might help. For others, it may be love, freedom, and hope.

Practitioners of meditation have long known of the self-persuasion process. Our feelings are subjective because they are judged by us, the very same object that is feeling them. Feeling love or not feeling love is not a yes/no type of measurement, and over time practitioners can recognize purity, vastness, and subtlety of their own feelings. It is quite possible to feel tired and uplifted at the same time, painful and joyful, sad and hopeful.

I choose to focus on expanding my love, even if I am not feeling it at the moment toward a person or toward myself. Sometimes it is so tiny, I have to send in a SWAT team to make it show itself. The subject of love can be anything, the bigger the better – humanity or even the whole Universe. Love keeps growing with constant care, attention, and practice, until one day it will become 100% love all the time, everlasting and overflowing. I live for that day.

Dr. Cuddy’s main message was: “Fake it until you become it.” My teacher’s message in the ZEN method workshop is:

“Breathe love until it flows out of your eyes and ears.”

What kind of love? Not the relative love, but the absolute MuAh-centered love. Enjoy your love!

Untangling attachments to hack the code

1 Comment / Brain Have Fun / By Human123

We associate pain with the unwelcome aspect of being and living, something to avoid if possible. After all, being used to civilizing comforts of modern life is not a crime.

However, there is a time and place when I know I have to face it. Physical pain is the easiest to endure, with unequivocal benefits after each Taichi or meditation practice. I no longer think of it as a painful activity, but an opportunity to grow inner power, stamina, flexibility.

Some of my friends wonder – why is she blogging and talking about loaded topics such as pain, hurt, love, growth? One of them said: “Meditation is good, but I have always thought that if we don’t live to the fullest now, then when?” This is a good question and in my understanding the answer is related to quantity vs. quality of life.

Why, then, I ask myself? Any day, I can choose to distract myself with more fun, stronger emotions of love, joy, a wider range of satisfying tastes and experiences, or immerse myself in intellectual pursuits.

Instead, I choose to learn from the instigator of change, progress, and growth – my guide and teacher Johwa Choi, the “spiritual boss”. Sometimes he would tell me things about me that I don’t want to hear. Recently he joked that his job is very peculiar – to cause a pain in the behind to get me moving. Just the right soupcon of pain. I laughed because he knows my character so well. I would not budge if my feet weren’t burning.

He would sometimes let me know when I have forgotten about my true essence and switched to the right/ wrong mode of critical thinking without being aware. I know nothing is as simple as it seems, and in every strength lies a source of weakness. Certain teachings are harder to accept than others because I have created strong neural connections as part of my identity over many years. Letting go of “good” notions about self is the hardest. It hurts in the deepest spaces of heart ventricles. If I am not that “good” person I thought I was, then who am I?

Eventually, after mental fits and cries, the familiar process of self-exploration begins. The deeper I go, the more things I find – the good, the bad, and the ugly. The journey can become quite invigorating and adventurous. When I finally figure out why I react a certain way to certain people or situations, I feel like I hacked into the system and became the guardian of the galaxy called my brain. That virus can no longer enter unnoticed. Yippee! I am so hyped until I remember how much malware is out there… Oh, well, I’ll deal with it later. For now, let them all sleep and recharge peacefully together.

Staying Alive: Learning to unlearn

3 Comments / Brain Have Fun / By Human123

Do you believe in horoscopes? I read them sometimes to reflect on my life. A recurring message is a message of cause and effect:

If you don’t handle this influence well, you will have considerable difficulty with your relationships in the years to come. And these difficulties will be the result of unfortunate patterns established now. The border between discipline and habit is often hard to distinguish, but that is precisely the difference that you have to keep in mind at this time. Habit is mindless and unconscious, whereas discipline is self-imposed and suited to achieving your goals.

Learning from life lessons is not a trivial task. What makes it hard is a propensity to retreat within and avoid the painful and hurtful experiences, that is, aversion to loss.

I have been watching these hard-wired habits within myself lately. Interestingly, they are present in nearly every aspect of living. I’ve started taking tennis lessons and one of the first things I learned was about a desire to control. The more I try not to make a mistake by attempting to control technicalities of a stroke, the less control I have. Tennis is a highly cognitive sport with lots of opportunities for getting drowned in the noise – body movement, racket position, self-congratulatory or self-deprecating chit-chat, and so on. Learning what is the easiest thing to control in tennis seems obvious, but eludes even the good players.

Do you remember your first heartbreak? Did you vouch to avoid it at any cost in the future or did you decide to keep loving in spite of pain and suffering it may bring? I did the latter, but with passing time it became more challenging to stay true to that vow. People often disappoint, betr lotus ay, attack, and hurt themselves and each other, and these data make numerous imprints within the brain operating system. The longer we live, the more “people/ things/ situations to avoid” data we accumulate. The older we are, the less power we have for swimming out of the negative information swamp, and a window of opportunity for encountering a lotus flower arising from the mud is becoming foggier.

Is it not obvious that the easiest thing to control in any relationship is not the others, but ourselves? This basic wisdom eludes most of humanity. It eludes me when I am not aware, which is plenty of time. At first my meager attempts to reconcile conflicting information and emotions within feel weak and lousy, fake and frustrating. When I do well, I eventually recover love and peace. When I don’t do well, I close myself off to the source of conflicts and miss the opportunity to grow. Then a gentle voice reminds me: “Do you remember the promise?” I do. Life goes on and as long as I hear that voice, I am alive.

“As a human being what should we do to reciprocate the benevolent influence of life?”
”• Johwa Choi