Brief Update: Meditation

12+ minutes of what I will call more successful meditation this evening. Mark of success: I wasn't checking the clock every 40-120 seconds or so. In fact it got past 10 minutes quickly with barely one clock-check. My mind still wandered aplenty, but that is to be expected.

Thanks to Jackie, Mike, and Jen for some thoughtful comments on my last post about meditation. I enjoyed all the insights. What follows is just sorta some additional thoughts based on what they wrote.

My understanding of meditation based on my brief experiment with it over about a month or two in late 2007/early 2008 is that, indeed, as I believe Mike said, it is something to practice. That is to say, it is a skill that requires development. I think I read in at least one place that it often takes a year or more before you start to notice serious benefits to repeated practice. I don't know how true that is, but I hope I can stick with it long enough to find out.

I know one key to approaching meditation, at least when starting out, is zero expectations. That includes zero expectations of oneself. You shouldn't get frustrated if your mind wanders and you struggle to concentrate, as I believe was Jen's point. That's the mindset with which I approach it, too, and the only mindset I can approach it with if I want to progress.

Really in the beginning it is all about developing "consciousness" and "awareness" (don't ask me to clearly define the difference between those two concepts, there may not be one). The eventual goal being to develop the ability to distance yourself from your own thoughts and feelings, to become more of an observer of those thoughts/feelings rather than a captive participant engrossed in those thoughts/feelings. With that distance supposedly comes more ability to control where one's own thoughts/feelings go (a holy grail for someone with concentration problems).

There's a book called The Happiness Trap which introduces a similar concept called "de-fusion." De-fusion, in that book, basically involves the same thing described in the above paragraph: learning to observe your thoughts and how your mind is operating without necessarily letting your thoughts control your emotional state. That book is tied into a mode of therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). That idea is a whole 'nother blog entry (in fact it's whole other books).

Jackie, I know almost nothing about Tai Chi. You piqued my interest.