Meditation has multiple definitions but for my purposes related to mental health, meditation means awareness. When I first encountered meditation, it was as a beginning writer. The instructor used a meditation sequence, basically a list of suggestions that the class was to follow, in order to relax us and help us focus our mind. The instructor claimed we were all tense from commutes, work, problems, and must retreat from those conditions into our mind.
To get into a meditative state, we were asked to tighten, then loose our neck, shoulders, arms, hand, legs, knees, feet, while breathing deeply. This took approximately two minutes, then we were asked to imagine a place where we were happy with our eyes closed.
To my surprise, while working with a group of teenagers who had just experienced an emotional upheaval, I turned to meditation to calm them down. Their reaction to seeing pain, was to talk loudly without listening all at the same time, to throw things, get into other teen’s space, stomping and making a ruckus that could be heard all around. I felt responsible.
I passed out a chocolate candy to each, turned out the lights and had them go to their happy place whether it was the seashore, the football field, to the forest, or whatever they liked. I didn’t ask and they weren’t required to tell.
The next time I asked them to meditate by turning out the light, they said, “don’t turn out the lights, if our folks find we needed a time out, we’ll be in trouble.”
Oops. Serious disconnect. Somehow a good thing for personal well-being and self-control had been turned into punishment. I learned about time outs from my younger brothers and sisters, since by then spankings were out of approved procedures. No one had ever explained time outs weren’t punishment.
My first use of a time out was as a summer youth camp counselor, where one student was being a disruptive show off, and I found it worked because what the student wanted was inclusion but also attention.
But to get back to meditation, the essence of the practice involves a number of things:
· Slow controlled breathing with lowers the heart rate and reduces anxiety
· Relaxing muscles. When tight, muscles can cause pain, and make it difficult to breathe deeply
· Focusing attention. Our brains respond to stimuli from our bodies including eyes, nose, ears, hands, feet, skin, mouth, muscles.
When we focus our attention on our bodies, we take our minds off work, emotions, dilemmas, and noise. We also learn from what things we must detach our attention. If we want to make our body feel better, we can focus on improving that area.
We can also focus from bad things to good things. We learn we can control what we think about. Not all of us can do this, we often have scattered thoughts where many things try to control what we think.
Prayer is different from meditation but is essentially the same. Through prayer, we find a peaceful place and we think about a topic.
Prayer is of five different types:
· Requests for good things for someone we love
· Gratitude for things we receive
· Requests for aid for our difficulties
· Lamentations or exclaiming about our hurts
· Praise for God
Prayer goes beyond meditation’s simple focus of attention from self and good to remember society and ideals. It too, focuses the mind, but on different topics that are emotionally potent.
Gratitude, sorrow, pleas for help, thinking of others, and solving our own problems are all good topics to focus on at least once a year, once a month or once a week, whenever the need moves us.