The Elixir of Meditation
9 minute read
Meditation is not something you do to attain ‘enlightenment’ or stop your mind from doing its business – analysing, projecting, remembering, predicting etc. Meditation is a process of watching, of honing your awareness and learning to disassociate from the succession of sensations, thoughts, feelings and emotions that show up on the screen of your consciousness. It’s also a process of experiencing yourself as part of the fabric of reality, connected to all things.
As a yoga and meditation teacher for over 18 years, I’ve heard countless times from students that they are ‘no good’ at meditating, that they ‘just can’t’ or that they’d like to but are unable. To that I respond: okay, how about this? Find a comfortable, quiet spot to sit, free from distractions as much as possible, put your phone on airplane mode and set a timer for five minutes. Then sit there and watch what happens. This is meditating.
I doubt if anyone is innately ‘good’ at meditating, like so many things it’s a skill that can be acquired and practiced. With repetition comes fluency, little by little, again and again, we show up and put in the time. Five minutes becomes seven, becomes ten, becomes fifteen. Meditation stops becoming a chore and becomes a refuge. We come back to our practice because it feeds us, it nourishes and sustains us. We do it when things are good so that it will bolster us when things are rough.
The day before my forty-fifth birthday I went for a routine mammogram and was told that the radiologist saw some irregular cells and wanted to do a biopsy. Since my sister had already had (and recovered from) pre-menopausal breast cancer I was considered high risk and they didn’t want to take any chances. Obviously, this was not the birthday present I was hoping for. A couple of weeks later I went in for the stereotactic biopsy but the procedure did not work as the target cells were sitting right against my pectoral muscle and there was a danger that if the radiologist got to the cells, he would pierce my pectoral muscle in the process. Unwilling to take the risk he strongly advised I have a surgical biopsy. Of course, I followed his advice and two weeks later was biopsied under sedation.
It took six days to get the results of the surgery, a total of five weeks from the fateful mammogram. Thankfully I was all clear but let me tell you that those five weeks were long. Very long. I had to pull on all of my years of yoga and meditation practice and teaching to maintain my equilibrium. I had to disassociate from the near-constant stream of anxious thoughts and projections in my mind and take refuge in the fact that I really didn’t know what the outcome would be. I had to tell my mind over and over that, while it was possible the cells would be malignant, it was also possible they would be benign. Had to choose to prioritise the fact that I really didn’t have enough information to assess, but what I did have was this present moment which was free from the certainty of a result. I made it a conscious practice to keep coming back to the present moment as a radically open field of possibility.
This is very deep practice. So much harder than any backbend or arm balance. I realised that all of the practice I had done until then was preparing me for this experience. I had built up a lot of hours in the equanimity bank and they paid dividends. I can’t say that those five weeks were anxiety-free, but I managed to stop myself from catastrophizing most of the time and didn’t completely freak out .
One of the greatest benefits of meditation is that it strengthens equipoise. Sustained practice over time harnesses neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change itself in response to experience. When you meditate, you use your mind to change your brain.
More specifically, you use your intention to put space between the objects of your awareness (thoughts ‘what if the biopsy is cancerous?’; feelings ‘I’m so jangly and anxious right now’; sensations ‘my heart is racing, my mouth is dry and my palms are clammy’) and yourself as a being who is awareness itself ‘ I am aware of all these fluctuations, yet I am separate from them.’
Your intention to observe your inner states creates a disidentification with those states, so you start to understand that they are temporary, but that, you, the observer, are the thing that abides. As you become more adept at watching the changing scenery in your bodymind, you become less reactive, less subject to the vagaries of the mind. You become sovereign in your being. This is a long haul process, one of learning to use intention to modulate the limbic system (emotional brain) and tame the watchdog that is the amygdala, the part of the brain that monitors all incoming data and signals the rest of the brain how to respond. From here a cascade effect is initiated causing psychophysical changes that affect how you feel emotionally and physically.
The brain’s method of registering input and converting it to output is multi-faceted. As we go about our days and nights we are constantly receiving data in the form of sensory information – sights, sounds, tactile sensations etc. This data is intercepted by the thalamus, an area of the midbrain near the brain stem whose job is to convey information from the external world to different parts of the brain for processing. There is a direct communication channel between the thalamus and the amygdala, which assesses all incoming data for threats to our wellbeing.
Having made the assessment, the amygdala in turn, conveys a message to the hypothalamus gland which responds by releasing a biochemical. If a danger has been registered, it releases a stress hormone like cortisol which activates the sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as ‘fight or flight.’ If the amygdala registers an incoming signal as neutral or positive, like seeing a photograph of someone you love, or being hugged by a child, the parasympathetic nervous system is switched on and feel-good hormones like oxytocin are released.
For the sake of brevity, I’ve oversimplified a complex machination and haven’t done justice to the elegance and sophistication of how the diverse architecture of the brain modulates the autonomic nervous system, the combined sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, and how we experience the effects of those modulations. Suffice to say that the brain is constantly receiving feedback from outside itself and this feedback comprises information from inside and outside the bodymind plexus, thoughts being an example of the former and sounds of the latter. This feedback affects the workings of the brain which in turn affects our physical and emotional states in part because of hormones released by the brain. Meditation and focusing on your breath affects this process.
Different parts of the brain are set up to deal with the information in different ways, kind of like a sorting system at a central post office. The executive control function part of the brain can learn to override some of the incoming messages and it’s this function that meditation enhances. As we become more proficient at watching the inner show, at identifying as the observer, rather than the observed, activity in the emotional brain slows down and there are fewer cortisol spikes, less fight or flight response. Focusing on your breath while meditating is really helpful because it gives your attention somewhere to land other than the fluctuations of your mind.
The breath is a yogin’s best friend for many reasons. Harnessing your awareness to the movement of your breath gives your mind something to focus on, keeps it centred in the present so that it is easier to watch thoughts, sensations etc arise and allow them to dissipate.
Think of the metaphor of riding a horse. The breath is the horse and your job is to stay in the saddle and not jump off every time a distraction arises.
But the breath also affects the body-mind via the workings of the central nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord. Steady, rhythmic breathing affects a part of the brain called the periaqueductal grey (PAG) one of the areas associated with pain perception and management. The PAG’s job is to release endogenous (made by the body) feel-good drugs like endorphins into the cerebrospinal fluid and it does so in response to slow, deep breathing creating quiescence in the body-mind. This is part of the reason meditating on your breath feels so good; in doing so you are actually changing the workings of your nervous system and the chemicals that are moving through your neural (nerve) pathways. These chemicals cause you to feel particular ways, which is why some of you may have dabbled in exogenous (made outside the body) drugs like THC or MDMA at one point or another. Altering your biochemistry can create welcome effects. If you think this not so, just remember the last time you had a blinding headache and took Disprin. That too is an exogenous drug and that too alters your biochemistry!
I haven’t yet mentioned the sense of connection to something bigger than yourself that is a common feature of meditation. The feeling of oneness and ease often results from the practice. We can talk about this in esoteric terms as mystics and poets have done since time immemorial. And we can approach it from the language of science.
Focusing on your breath during meditation not only elicits relaxation via the parasympathetic nervous system, it also affects part of the brain called the orientation association area (OAA), or parietal lobe. This part of the brain is responsible for your sense of where you are in space, your sense of yourself as a discrete body distinct from other objects. It’s one of the areas that gets data from the thalamus and much of this data reinforces our sense of ourselves as separate entities with well-defined boundaries.
The relaxation response of the parasympathetic system reduces the flow of information from outside to this area and diminishes its activity. This lessens your felt sense of yourself as being apart from everything else and causes a softening of boundaries, a sense of oneness and connection to all things. This unitary state is paradigmatic of mystical experiences and is the subject of so many poems and love songs to the divine. This is the elixir, the soma. The nectar at the heart of the lotus. How many sacred verses have been composed in homage to this transcendent state…
As the rivers flowing east and west
Merge in the sea and become one with it,
Forgetting they were ever separate rivers,
So do all creatures lose their separateness
When they merge at last into pure Being.
Chandogya Upanishad
But here’s the thing. This altered state is attainable in the everyday. It’s yours for the taking. It’s as close as your breath, and you can get there whoever and wherever you are. All it takes is practice. Moment by moment, breath by breath, we create a biochemistry of bliss and an inner garden of delight. Sit down today. Get quiet. Watch your breath. Resist the pull of sensations, thoughts, feelings. Claim your birthright. Take the throne of the witness abiding in awareness as your sovereign self, connected to all things, an essential part of the tapestry of being.
Dearbhla Kelly, January 2022
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