Meditation has proven to be a saving grace in my life, and I somehow manage to do it every day, but it’s not always easy. Lately I’ve had my own struggles in keeping focused, and not allowing troublesome thoughts and worries to surface during my twenty-minute sessions. It’s been a couple of months of agitation and annoyance with the world, and that has seeped into my meditation – a combination of grief and healing and the rushed passing of time that has resulted in general prickliness, and a vague, troubling sense that I’m no longer the best company. My heart hurts a bit too much to really care, which is another sort of sadness altogether, and so I turn back inward, back to the simplicity of the practice.
As evening descends, sooner and earlier than it ever did in the summer, I find myself sitting lotus-style in the dim living room, the glow of a solitary candle the only light as the sky deepens from blue to a darker shade of the deepest ocean. I go through my usual focal points of meditation, mostly about family, and then, where I would usually start letting my mind wander a bit, I returned to the way I began meditating about four years ago, with a basic counting of numbers that went along with the breathing.
Inhaling slowly, I would focus on the breath, thinking to myself ‘Breathing in one,’ then on a slower exhalation thinking ‘Breathing out one’. On the next inhalation, I would think ‘Breathing in two’, then ‘Breathing out two’. At this point in my practice, my inhalations are about twelve seconds long, and the exhalations are about twenty seconds. That’s about two full breathes per minute, which is why a twenty-minute meditation seems to move along pretty quickly, and I don’t have to count that high before it’s done. That’s a good length to completely calm the brain, and on this day it works. The worries about my niece and nephew not returning my texts, the concern about getting my Mom to schedule her next doctor’s exam, the stress and sadness of finding my own way through grief – they all somehow fall away as the minutes tick by, and the breathing steadies.
The mind is clear by the time I’m on the tenth inhalation or so, a reminder that it’s still possible to achieve that calm and stillness. A reminder that I can still find that quiet.
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