Mind Over Matter
The thin line between thinking about nothing and thinking about everything
Story by Max Broburg
Photos by Jhomarie Sadang
Sitting cross-legged on the floor doing nothing brings priorities and distractions into full focus. A quiet mind can be difficult to achieve, especially when the solution to these distractions is to be present.
Your heart starts to beat faster in a rapid thump, thump, speeding up and making the task of clearing your mind impossible.
To calm this rapid thump, thump, many people turn to various forms of self-medication like anti-anxiety drugs, hours of Netflix or a few drinks.
These methods don’t appeal to everyone, leading others to turn to meditation practices such as Vipassana, meaning “insight” in the Indian language Pali.
Indian scripture mentions meditation in texts dating back as far as 3,000 years.
Known as mindfulness in Western countries, the practice prescribes openness and nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. Tim Burnett, executive director of Mindfulness Northwest, teaches the practice of meditation in a secular way, removing fears of any religious association.
Mindfulness is practiced individually and in groups. Mindfulness Northwest leads group meditation retreats and events lasting anywhere from a few hours to several days. Retreats like these happen all over the world and are sometimes done in complete silence.
Mindfulness is similar to describing how someone would learn to walk on a tightrope, according to author and practitioner Sam Harris. You put one foot in front of the other and hope you don’t fall.
Falling, from a mindfulness perspective, is whenever your mind wanders. When you fall, getting back on the rope should be as simple as returning focus to your breath.
Slowly, the thump, thump has lessened.
“It’s just like exercising your brain,” Phil Burns says. Burns is a mental health counselor at Western’s Counseling Center.
Meditation, in Burns’ view, is a way of opening up to the feelings and emotions that make your heart beat faster or slower. The goal is not to forget you have three exams in one week and no job offers after college. The goal is to identify what these events are and how you feel when you are thinking about significant life events.
You have become accustomed to the feeling of being still. Focusing on the rising and falling of breath. The goal is not to run away from discomfort, fear or sadness, the goal is not to sit and do nothing. You want to understand the issues you are facing and what you are feeling as you face them, whether these problems are feeling depressed over a bad grade, an argument with your spouse or a parent being sick.
Burns uses mindfulness to help clients understand and open up to their anxiety instead of immediately trying to fix their depression or anxiety. Abrupt schedule changes or cutting out activities are short-sighted “solutions” that don’t solve a person’s underlying depression and anxiety. He looks to understand the causes of depression and anxiety rather than finding a quick fix.
“The more you don’t want to feel anxious, the more anxious you start to become,” Burns says.
Although meditation and mindfulness have been practiced for thousands of years, Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, popularized mindfulness in a therapeutic environment in 1979 when he conducted mindfulness exercises and studies in hospitals.
Kabat-Zinn taught mindfulness to patients who were experiencing chronic pain and observed their pain levels at the beginning and end of their meditation. He found patients had less pain or were able to live with their pain easier than before their meditation practice. Although there are many different reasons for this shift, one that has been given by Burns is the patients learned to not let their pain define them. Pain shifted from an identity to something patients were being treated for.
Once you become comfortable sitting still and the thump, thump of your heart starts to slow, focus on your breath from beginning to end. From the beginning of air entering your stomach to the last bit exiting your body, center your mind on the process of breathing.
“The more you do it, the greater positive impact you get,” says Kimberly O’Brien, a Bellingham-based psychotherapist. “It’s really challenging to return to the present moment.”
O’Brien is a Vipassana practitioner who discovered meditation and mindfulness during graduate school at Antioch University in Seattle.
The thump, thump returns and has started to speed up with the realization that three assignments are due before noon.
Just like that, you have fallen out of your meditation practice. Through the constant reminders to be still and empty everything in your mind, you become more distracted and unable to give into the feeling of sitting on the floor by yourself. Focus on where you are, how it feels to sit on the floor, what you are feeling in the present and slowly return to your breath. It does not have to be slow, fast or completely calm.
“One misconception is that meditation is about emptying the mind. I see it much more as a tool for investigation of the mind,” says Sue Smalley, a professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry at University of California Los Angeles and founder of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, via email.
Smalley and her colleagues conduct research and produce various meditation resources to help make mindfulness more accessible to the public.
In this moment, as you control the thump, thump of your heart, don’t pay attention to what will happen today or what happened yesterday, be present in this exact moment in time.
Meditation is about acceptance of the present moment and pain occurring in your life.
“Part of being in the moment is accepting what is,” O’Brien said.
As you focus on your breathing, from the beginning of your inhale to the end of your exhale, the anxiety and thump, thump has been replaced with the acceptance of your reality, in an attempt to understand the anxiety or fear.
“People will come in and talk to me about being really anxious,” Burns said. “There is this whole experience playing out that’s anxiety that you’re not that familiar with.”
Burns asks clients who are suffering from anxiety to examine themselves in the present moment. The question Burns usually asks is “how anxious are you right now?”
Examining and understanding yourself in the present moment allows you to explore what is happening right now, as opposed to worrying about mistakes in the past or potential mishaps in the future.
Staying in the present moment starts with the connection of your mind with your breath. This allows you to stay in tune with your body and notice what is happening in your mind in that exact moment.
Steady breathing and focus have slowed the rapid thump, thump. A certain calm has washed over the mind, slowing the thump, thump of a sometimes rapid and sometimes calm heartbeat. This stops when an alarm sounds, signaling the end of this meditation practice.