Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!
Meditation and Its Many Benefits to Health and Life
Something has happened over the past six months that has made meditation, or even just simple, focused, conscious breathing, much easier for me to access than I could before. I have started enjoying the deep stillness and emptiness that meditation lets me experience. It also heightens my senses and awareness immeasurably, giving me time and space to experience life more directly, but also giving all the “stuff” in the background of my psyche a chance to more quietly process my thoughts, ideas, or concerns in their own rhythm. The insights that have come from sitting still or even walking slowly and just concentrating on my breathing—something I have always had a hard time doing—are refreshing and surprising.
Part of this recent change, I’m sure, has been reading (and rereading) one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s last books, The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now. It beautifully and concisely sums up many of the themes of his previous books, including insights from the lectures, teachings, and writings he shared with his Zen community in the year before the debilitating stroke he suffered in 2014 at age 88. In practicing some of his insights, I have found many new ways to appreciate the simple yet profound experience of life he advocates. (Note: I’ve borrowed the title of this article from him, as well as Sylvia Boorstein and others who use it to advocate meditation. I don’t think they’d mind.)
Calming the Mind
I have always had an overactive mind. Thoughts and impulses come at lightning speed, with a very good reserve of detailed memories to back them up. This sharpness has served me well in life, especially in business. But at the same time, it has made me more critical and judgmental of myself and others, and this is not how I want to be living now. It also doesn’t serve my health well.
When I practice conscious breathing, my mind doesn’t necessarily slow down, but it recedes into the background, and my thoughts don’t have the urgency they once did. Thoughts come and go, but I don’t hold on to them. Aligning my mind with the ever-quieter rhythm of slow breathing and sitting still slows down the rush of thoughts. They are also less dictatorial, that is, I don’t need to act on them or react to them. Often, I have no “thoughts” at all as my awareness is focused on the depth and sensation of each and every breath. I experience a peace and calm that is easy and refreshing.
Buddhists have a phrase for minds that don’t stop and can’t be calmed. They call it “monkey mind,” the endless stream of stuff our vast mental capacity is capable of coming up with and focusing on. Our modern lives offer endless distractions that can excite our minds, keeping us focused on ever-more activity and urgency (even though much of what we respond to as “urgent” really isn’t pressing or critical). Calming this mental activity, living in our breathing bodies, and experiencing the deeper insight and wisdom that this state of being inspires is the essence of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism as I have come to know it.
The Breath Is Our Sun
The breath is to our bodies what the sun is to our solar system. It is the powerful driving central force of life within us. Every part of our bodies, including our minds, gets its energy from the breath. Our breath doesn’t just deliver oxygen, it creates the very rhythm, the gravity if you will, around which our entire being is based. Nothing we do can exist without our breath. It gets its prompts from whatever forces created life on this planet and evolved every form of life. The first creatures to “breathe” air were bacteria, 3.1 billion years ago, which made the evolutionary jump to using oxygen for energy instead of sulfur. Our breathing heritage goes far back to those tiny ancestors.
Health and Life Benefits
The known benefits of meditation are many, and the list keeps growing with more research. Meditation can reduce blood pressure just as well as any statin. It can be extremely effective with reducing stress and is beneficial to mental health. It improves sleep. It improves attention span. It has been shown to slow age-related memory loss. It accelerates recovery from exercise and aids digestion. These are just a few of the scientifically proven benefits of meditation. I’m sure many more will come to light as more people practice it and more research findings emerge. In my experience, I can imagine the positive effects of conscious breathing on all my organs as I “let go” and allow my body to do its natural work of healing, recovery, and becoming stronger.
Along with the list above, I have found a couple of additional personal benefits:
1. Body awareness—With each breath, I can feel its effect on different parts of my body. I can feel how the breath creates space within me, physically and mentally. This awareness allows me to “check in” with myself and feel more fully alive, as well as check in with myself to sense how things are inside me, physically and emotionally.
2. Mood—The effects of a few minutes of conscious breathing can shift a strong emotion and introduce clarity and patience to alter a bad mood or resolve a sticky situation in life.
And above all, keep in mind that conscious breathing is not “doing nothing.” It is total, albeit effortless, engagement with your mind and body.
Being and Doing
The benefits of meditation are a big plus for my physical health, yet a potentially bigger benefit is the focus it brings to my inner life. It is like a doorway into the world inside me. In quieting the rush of busyness and schedules, which is how I’ve spent much of my life and what modern life very often calls for, I can instead allow myself to BE instead of DO. This changes everything because it brings to the forefront the force that gives me life and all the wonders of being alive in the first place. It is where my health practice over nearly 20 years has been leading me more and more.
In the midst of this quietness and doing nothing, often a big insight will come to me about existence or health or something else. More often than not, it is a positive shift or a solution to a question I’ve been pondering or something that is happening in life. And then I realize the ultimate wonder of existence—we are never reallydoing nothing;the natural forces within us are always at work, seeking to improve things for us. Time to sit still and listen to them.
