My understanding of meditation and its impact from the perspective of a reformed skeptic
My mom tried to get me to do yoga and meditate since my late teens. I was a mischievous, distracted, and disobedient kid. Call it the teenage hormonal changes, immature maturity, or whatever else; according to my mom, I needed help. Since psychological interventions were out of the question, she enrolled me in a meditation and yoga class. I picked up some basics but never really took to it, at least not like my mom.
She started yoga and meditation to accompany me into picking the habit up (lol) but ended up finding deep meaning in it. She pursued yoga and meditation for many many years to truly understand its nuances. She overcame severe stage fright and doubt stemming from her unfinished education and fluency issues with English to become a yoga teacher. One of her biggest gripes has been that she failed to get both her kids into yoga. Well, that changed a few months ago, at the height of the pandemic (at least for one of her kids).
Onset:
The pandemic has been a period of intense learning. I broke from the personal and professional schedules to spend time with myself. In my isolation, I reignited my passion for learning and creating. I immigrated to SF to ensconce myself in the lifeblood of global tech innovation, to work with the smallest startups taking on audacious challenges, and ultimately to build something of impact myself. The pandemic was my fodder, and I zeroed in an idea that I loved, felt I could dedicate 10 years of my life to, and answer the question "why me." I'll write about that in a separate post, but suffice to say I was excited.
Soon, though, anxiety joined along for the ride. I felt my passion being consumed by a rotten apple of anxiety. I was stuck questioning the idea, whether anybody would find it useful, that it was too derivative and whether VCs would ever invest. I was also a solo founder and slowly realized how incredibly lonely it is to start a company while also working a full-time taxing job. This all came to a head one evening when I had a full-blown panic attack.
I got scared, I thought I was dying, that I couldn't breathe and that I needed to call 911 to help me out of my stroke or else I would die. Luckily a friend on the phone recognized my symptoms and guided me out of it. It still took an hour to run its course, and I was pretty shaken up on the other side. I knew I had to do something, and one of the things I picked up and started doing was meditation. Long story short, it has been incredibly helpful. I am going to talk about meditation from the perspective of a reformed skeptic.
Meditation - how to do:
When they think of meditation, most people in the West imagine sitting in silence with your thoughts, taking deep breaths, and chanting "Aum." While that is a great starting point, real meditation is more involved, especially in the beginning. Meditation is the most complete exercise for a human. Yoga and pranayam are the respective preparations of your body and your breath to finally mediate. Pranayam is the process of exercising your internal organs, and most importantly, bringing breath under your control. While not inordinately complex to teach, it takes diligent effort to become good at synchronizing your breathing to a count. Here are the things that you permute with pranayama - both nostrils, left nostril, right nostril, mouth, breathing and holding your breath (at full as well as at empty). You permute and combine these in various ways. E.g.:
- Close your right and inhale through you left nostril, hold at the highest, and exhale through your right
- Calmly inhale and forcibly exhale (almost making a grunt like sound)
- Inhale through both nostrils, alternate exhale between left and right nostril (while holding for 6 seconds when your lungs are empty)
There are many other variations of these, each with their own benefit. For example, "Bhastrika," as #2 above is called, is followed by a period that your brain is completely silent. It is a beautiful feeling.
From skeptic to a believer:
I am interested in neuroscience and the human brain, I read up on anxiety, trauma, and depression and their effect on our brain. Here's what I found and what I intuited (sorry not going to differentiate between the two, if anybody ends up reading this and wants more info hmu).
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the newest part of our brain; it differentiates us from other animals and is responsible for our ability to see and decipher patterns. It is evolutionarily the most recent, influenced more by the environment than genes. The cities we live in, the mega-structures we build, and the things we create to push humanity forward emerge from this area. It has given us so much, but it also has a dark side. For you see, the PFC likes pattern-recognition so much so, that it defaults to it for everything.
This incessant need to compare yourself to others (helped by social media bombardment) is seated in this area. Your PFC is not satisfied with the work you are doing; it needs to know whether it is good or bad. Since the PFC does not have the data-points to judge, it defaults to comparing to people you see in the (social) media. Media portrayal is overrepresented by the already successful, the fake, or the loud ones - a difference that your PFC does not see. Your PFC can't help but look at how far ahead these people are and compare your achievements and progress. It belittles your effort, your speed of execution, the validity of your idea, and your hopeless optimism. It is a perpetual motion machine fueled by doubt.
That's with anxiety - being stuck in the future. Depression in a similar vein is the mind being stuck in the past, if not a more debilitating condition. Your constant need to compare, seek approval, and diminished confidence can be attributed to the PFC. The PFC constructs your ego, which, in a way, is you containing your sense of self to a psychological husk created out of your own shortcomings. You live, breathe, and operate in this world through that limiting husk. Doesn't that sound like a terrible way to live?
Meditation is you taking time to be one with your breath. It is one of the essentials to life that you can control. You can't adjust your heartbeat, but your breath and the delivery of life-sustaining oxygen is within your regulatory control. By focusing on your breath, you observe the flow of chakra (prana, life source, energy). Your breath is a marvelous thing, so many parasympathetic responses are connected to it. Feeling nervous - observe your breath; you will find that it is shallow. Practice bringing your breath under control, and you will see your nerves rest.
Meditation is you bringing your PFC under your control. Asking it to stop trying to live in anything but the present, deeply realize that the past is immovable and the future, a hallucination. Meditation helped me understand that the only real thing we all have is time. Consciousness is possibly our ability to perceive time and affect outcomes. You are not racing anybody; if you have a higher goal or a more profound interest, cherish that knowledge; not everybody knows theirs. The journey is all we have, and choosing for the journey and not the goal is key to living a life outside regret. You become kinder to yourself (gosh darn it took me a long time to understand what people meant when they said this). Your anxiety is replaced by a sense of subtle urgency. You know your time is running out. Life's greatest joy is the privilege of deciding what this unrestrained self of yours should focus its time on.
Journey along, and I hope to meet some of you on the way.