In order to better understand the potential benefits of
meditation, I attended an instructional class for beginners in the practice of
Zen mediation at Village Zendo. I entered the session a bit skeptical to be
completely honest. While the idea of
sitting still for a 2-hour meditation session may be calming for some, for me
it actually really stressed me out. However, while still a little unsure about my feelings towards meditation, looking back on my experience, it really was a surprisingly pleasant experience, and I did feel that it
reduced my stress level as it gave me the needed chance to drown out the hustle
and bustle of the city and reflect on my feelings, at least for that moment.
Coming from no
previous experience in or understanding of the practice of meditation, the
articles by Lutz
et al. (2008), Jensen
et al. (2013), MacLean et al.
(2010), and Baer
et al. (2006) helped me better understand the purpose of meditation. Lutz
et al. (2008) identifies an important problem in studying meditation, mainly
that meditation itself is a very broad term that must be differentiated by type
of meditation practice: “Failure to make such distinctions would be akin to the
use of the word ‘sport’ to refer to all sports as if they were essentially the
same” (163). In their paper, they
examine two Buddhist styles of meditation—Focused attention meditation (FA) in which
focus is voluntarily directed to an intended object and open monitoring
meditation (OM) in which instead of having an explicit attentional focus,
content of one’s experience is monitored in the moment. In relation to my experience, after spending
time learning about the appropriate posture (of which I took the Quarter Lotus position)
the instructor spoke, having us meditate in a way that seems more consistent with OM as she emphasized focusing on the present moment. She mentioned how we are constantly lost in our thoughts and spend most of our lives worrying about things and end up years later not really knowing where our lives went.
During this time the instructor stressed the importance
of not letting our thoughts overpower us but rather to observe them
nonjudgmentally, similar to the sitting meditation exercise in the
mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) method described by Jensen et al.
(2013). This method, as both Jensen et
al. and my instructor noted is used as a means to “let go” and instead focus on
the present moment in a non-judgmental way.
However, while this OM-based method was used in the beginning to set us in a certain mindset, I feel that the majority of the session I attended was really spent using a more focused attention (FA)-based method, as awareness was directed specifically towards counting our breathing from one to ten, starting over when our minds wandering from our breathing. We were told that the purpose of doing so was to bring our focus to the present and regulate the mind. Though this may seem like such a simple task, I found myself constantly back at one, as my mind continuously drifted from the counting thus forcing me to start over. We also did some walking meditation in which we took steps with the rhythm of our breathing. This was an interesting approach and a more relieving method for me as I can have trouble sitting still for meditation, but at the same time, it was much harder to focus on my breathing with so much else going on, as compared to the sitting meditation. I think that the walking meditation, at least for me, put into perspective just how difficult it can be to separate yourself with everything going on around you (especially in a crowded, loud city like New York). In this walking meditation I became much more aware of my surroundings and others present in the class, thus making it even more difficult to focus on my breathing.
While I am clearly a novice in the practice of meditation, reading a paper like that of MacLean et al. (2010) helps me understand how continuing the practice of such meditation can have future benefits. Like the meditation class that I participated in, in their paper they use a FA-based model of meditation, in which participants practice sustained attention to a non-visual “chosen stimulus” (e.g. sensations of breathing). In this study, participants are trained for 5hr/day for 3 months in order to examine the effects of such training on sustained selective attention. Their findings indicated that training lead to visual discrimination improvements resulting from the reduced resources needed to discriminate an unchanging target (the target length was held constant in Retreat 2, see Figure 3). These improvements were associated with increased perceptual sensitivity as well as improvements in visual attention during sustained visual attention tasks. Therefore, this study offers support for the long-term continuation of meditation practice.
However, while this OM-based method was used in the beginning to set us in a certain mindset, I feel that the majority of the session I attended was really spent using a more focused attention (FA)-based method, as awareness was directed specifically towards counting our breathing from one to ten, starting over when our minds wandering from our breathing. We were told that the purpose of doing so was to bring our focus to the present and regulate the mind. Though this may seem like such a simple task, I found myself constantly back at one, as my mind continuously drifted from the counting thus forcing me to start over. We also did some walking meditation in which we took steps with the rhythm of our breathing. This was an interesting approach and a more relieving method for me as I can have trouble sitting still for meditation, but at the same time, it was much harder to focus on my breathing with so much else going on, as compared to the sitting meditation. I think that the walking meditation, at least for me, put into perspective just how difficult it can be to separate yourself with everything going on around you (especially in a crowded, loud city like New York). In this walking meditation I became much more aware of my surroundings and others present in the class, thus making it even more difficult to focus on my breathing.
While I am clearly a novice in the practice of meditation, reading a paper like that of MacLean et al. (2010) helps me understand how continuing the practice of such meditation can have future benefits. Like the meditation class that I participated in, in their paper they use a FA-based model of meditation, in which participants practice sustained attention to a non-visual “chosen stimulus” (e.g. sensations of breathing). In this study, participants are trained for 5hr/day for 3 months in order to examine the effects of such training on sustained selective attention. Their findings indicated that training lead to visual discrimination improvements resulting from the reduced resources needed to discriminate an unchanging target (the target length was held constant in Retreat 2, see Figure 3). These improvements were associated with increased perceptual sensitivity as well as improvements in visual attention during sustained visual attention tasks. Therefore, this study offers support for the long-term continuation of meditation practice.
Overall my time at Village Zendo was a great learning experience, one
that provided a short respite of calm from the stressful life of a student in the midst of exams.
No comments:
Post a Comment