Yesterday I attended a beginners workshop at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. To being with the facilities there are gorgeous. The upstairs meditation hall is a beautiful open area lit by a huge skylight and lots of windows allowing us to watch the sun change through out the day as it traveled across the smooth hard wood floor. The class itself fluctuated between various types of sitting and walking meditations in the morning with a Q&A session before lunch, a silent lunch, a short social time and then more sitting and walking meditations in the afternoon with again an Q&A session at the end.
When we came to the end of the day we were asked what we had taken away from the day and I realized I had some difficulty answering the question. I have already taken a beginner meditation class before and started my own practice for a few weeks or a month before the craziness of December/January with all the holidays and events that have been going on that have thrown my “usual” schedule for a loop. Because of that I didn’t feel that the day was that much of a learning experience for me. What I was looking for was to be reinvigorated about meditation and to some extent that occurred.
I again realized that my biggest difficulty in meditation is not restlessness as it seemed most of the younger crowd and some of the older crowd was grappling with but was instead lethargy (sloth and torpor). Part of that can be blamed on it being quite warm, getting over a cold and being generally sleep deprived but I also see it as something indicative of how my mind works and will be interesting to work with, assuming I get back into a practice. I often skip meditation to sleep more but maybe it should be just the other way around.
The other thing I again realized is that I either completely ignore my internal dialog or mine is significantly less active than many others. The instructor would remind us from time to time during the meditation that we should “come back from the story”; however I never found myself in a story. I would have thoughts from time to time but they were usually unrelated ideas that I wanted to ponder and were never stories about my life. On the one hand I’m quite happy about that but on the other I I don’t have much of a personal narrative. I in fact generally dislike the idea of a “personal narrative” but I have come to understand the use/necessity of one. Because of this I want to try and take up blogging again. It forces me to take the time to digest and reflect on my life or my “narrative” if you will and develop it how I see fit.
Finally, there were two new things that I took away from the day. One was a sound meditation we did. The idea is to simply sit and listen to the sounds around you. I loved it because, where as breathing meditation is about focusing the consciousness in a very narrow way, this was about focusing the consciousness in a very expansive way. Moreover, being present to the breath is very separating from your surroundings where as the sound meditation brings you in closer connection to your surroundings. For someone who is naturally more internally focused I enjoy breaking out of that and focusing externally. The second thing that I took a way was a few personal connections with some of the younger participants. Its great meeting people at events such as meditation since their being there says a lot about their personality and they tend to be people I connect with. This guy Payton and I got talking about the best place to buy loose leaf tea and an awesome sounding Boston vegan group that has a food co-op in Cambridge.
Over all it wasn’t what I had built it up to be but it was still a learning experience and I hope to use it as a restarting point none the less.
