I’ve Been Meditating, Can You Tell? Pt. 2

I’ve also been wearing birds as shoes but that is neither here nor there.

It’s been two weeks since I started meditation. According to my bedmate, the most salient change in my disposition has occurred under my eyes, where my bags typically reside. His trained eye indicates that they are less pronounced but I’d like to credit that to the sun’s kiss still lingering on my cheek, so here are the changes I’ve noticed.

Advanced Efficacy. Again, I can’t quite determine whether there is still an element of the placebo effect at play here but I don’t give a hooternanny because I am getting shit done. Here I’ve spent the past twenty six years of my life procrastinating like I get paid to waste time and in the last two weeks, I’m pretty sure I’ve achieved more than I have in the course of the entire 2015. (I made and attended three annual check-up appointments, for example.)

Organized Thinking. If previous to my tango with meditation, my mind felt like a landfill, where ideas and inquisitions and theories were being deposited and then never again tapped, it feels much more like a book shelf now. One that is color coded and fractioned by author and book-genre. This might very well be a function of my not “transcending” (incidentally, as you continue to meditate transcendentally, the ocean that is your thoughts begin to access lower and quieter levels of the sea, where waves aren’t breaking and your most inaccessible unconscious is being tugged at — and it is called transcending), and as such just sitting quietly, with my eyes closed, twice a day for twenty minutes, letting thoughts come and go as they please but never quite losing sight of them.

As a result of the organization, I also feel more articulate.

More Thoughtful. Because I’m spending 40 minutes of my day with no one or thing, I’m more inclined to execute against the minutiae that steal our days. These things might seem like trivialities but they go a long way. Examples include calling my mom, or grandmother, sending thank you notes and writing to tell people I’ve been thinking of them. Just yesterday, in fact, I looked over at Amelia’s desk and said, “Hello.” She told me it was the nicest thing I’d said to her since we met in 2009. All this stuff makes me like a less self-involved version of myself.

We’re identified as a generation of narcissists as a result with the relationship that we have stricken with social media, but I don’t think we give enough credit to the fact that we don’t engage in much “me” time. Laying in bed or getting a pedicure or taking yourself out for a glass of wine isn’t really “me” if you’re still tuned into the frequencies of e-mail or Instagram or any host of digital connection that keeps you embroiled in a moment that doesn’t really belong to you. By shutting off — I mean really shutting off, you’re doing something that is actually for yourself. Call it brain-cercise.

The Challenges: Finding a quiet place to hang out with myself during work. I’ve been mistaken for dead more than once and find that the hardest battle is pushing myself out of work-mode to sit down and shut up for twenty minutes mid-day.

Most Awkward (or Affected) Moment: When you’re meditating in public and someone comes over to talk to you even though your eyes are closed and you are forced to raise your hand and say, “I’m meditating.”

Most Enlightening Moment: When you come out of meditation and feel like you’ve just taken an adequate disco nap.

Most Upsetting Moment: When no disco emerges from the anterior motion.

What I Can Compare the Feeling to: That cool and lucid moment when you’re about to fall asleep and feel like you might be dreaming, but then are jolted back into this version of reality.