Week #5 Progress Check
I hope you are doing well and keeping up with your mindfulness practice!
The meditation this week is about building distress tolerance --- something that is particularly relevant in the midst of a pandemic. This practice is deliberately delayed until the latter half of mindfulness training with the assumption that by now one has achieved a basic foundation of body and breath meditation focus. Our fight-or-flight system can be a bit trigger happy. Meditation helps calm the sympathetic nervous system which reacts to an actual threat or a mental threat such as an anxiety-provoking thought. Without a base of practice, however, asking one to intently focus on their distress may be risky. Being able to pivot away from the distress back to the serenity of the body and breath is helpful. There are ample studies that attest to the effectiveness of meditation to build distress tolerance. . .the ability to cope with uncomfortable feelings, events, and thoughts -- even fears -- as opposed to turning away from them in an act of avoidance. . ."flight.”
If you get a chance, please share your experience with this meditation. What kinds of things came up for you -- mentally and physiologically? Have you noticed an improvement in your tolerance for uncomfortable thoughts and emotions with successive meditation sessions? Is there anything that has been particularly helpful?
Also, I’d be interested in hearing about your experience with the Sounds & Thoughts meditation. While you are being asked to really tune into this sense this week, you have been using it all along. Sound is just one of the five senses that tether you to the here-and-now. When I suggested that handwashing be your mindful activity, you are tuning in not only to the visual experience of the activity, but the feel of the water and the lather of the soap, the scent of the soap, as well as the sound of the water as if you are trying to hear what the water is saying. Sound is also a key component of a simple breathing exercise. The sound of your breath is not only calming, it gives your busy brain something to do. I once suggested that you focus on the sound of your breath as if you are “straining” to eavesdrop on someone across the room. This straining isn’t a physiological function of course, it is a mental one.
There is an important lesson in this, and it is one that my teenagers -- who had always assumed that thinking was essential to experience -- had to learn for themselves: your brain is central to your ability to hear, but thinking is not! Presence -- hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling, tasking -- is “beyond the mind.”
In your quest for mindfulness, sound is fun to explore. Since hiking in the great outdoors is a wonderful activity with which we can still indulge, experiment with sound as your primary tether to the now the next time you go for a wander in the woods or a park. If you have kids, engage them in this exercise too! Pay attention to all of the many layers of sound in your environment from the sound of your breath and your footsteps on your path, to the nearby sounds of the birds rustling in the bushes or tweeting on the branches above, to the more distant sounds of hawks crying in the skies, to the softer-today rumble of traffic on the road and the rarer-today sound of the jet thousands of feet above. How many layers of sound can you find?
Let me know how you do! Week #6 (if you can believe) will be posted on Sunday. In the meantime, enjoy the Now!