Meditation: Day One

I have heard of the benefits of meditation ever since high school.  It seems to be something reserved for a certain kind of person, those who are independently wealthy, or perhaps, who have different perspectives on how to live life, maybe vegetarians, (of which I am now among the ranks), or actors and actresses, creatives types, artists, musicians, photographers (of two I claim an amateur kinship with).  Meditation seems something reserved for monks sitting with legs crossed nonplussed by life.

Recently, as in the last year, I have discovered that I suffer from a bit of depression and anxiety, which has caused among other things, sleepless nights.  I also have found that I suffer from a general malaise, a kind of boredom with life, which erodes my creative zeal. 

I decided to try the techniques as suggested in Victor Davich’s 8 Minute Mediation, which takes a non-secular and very simplistic approach to meditation.  Davich’s ket tenant is that mindfulness, the goal of meditation, is “allowing what is.”  It is, I take, what we mean when we ask people to be in the present, not to allow the past or the future to burden us. 

The book is an eight-week program, broken down into one week steps.  The first week meditation is watching the breath.  More particularly, the meditator is to simply pay attention to the breath as one breaths and to let all other thoughts slip away.

I did the first day of meditation and found that eight minutes of breathing passed by very quickly.  And yet, when I brought myself out of the meditation, I was very much aware that some time had passed.  My youngest cat had settled in next to me where she had not been before I started meditating.  I say settled because she seemed firmly rooted to the floor next to my foot.

I am looking forward to the effects that meditation has on me.  I wonder when I should do it, though I think I will probably try to do it at night. 

I am hoping that it will bring back the creative juices once more.