Here’s the promise: Meditation – and mindfulness meditation, in particular – will reduce your cortisol level, blood pressure, social anxiety and depression. It will increase your immune response, resilience and focus and improve your relationships — including with yourself. It will also bolster your performance at work and provide inner peace. It may even cure psoriasis.
50 Cent meditates. So do Lena Dunham and Alanis Morissette.Steven P. Jobs meditated, and mindfulness as a practice is sweeping through Silicon Valley. A week from Saturday, 2,000 technology executives and other seekers will gather for a sold-out conference called Wisdom 2.0, suddenly a must-attend event for the cognoscenti.
Even Rupert Murdoch has tried meditating, summing up its appeal in a haikulike tweet: “Everyone recommends, not that easy to get started, but said to improve everything.”
Really? For what it’s worth, I don’t think so.
I first learned to meditate 25 years ago, built a daily practice in mindfulness and spent hundreds of hours sitting with my eyes closed and my legs crossed. I also interviewed dozens of meditators, including the most prominent teachers, for a book I wrote in 1995 called “What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America.”. But the more time I spent meditating, the less value I derived from it. Which is not to say I think it has no benefits at all.
The simplest definition of meditation is learning to do one thing at a time. Building the capacity to quiet the mind has undeniable value at a time when our attention is under siege, and distraction has become our steady state. Meditation – in the right doses — is also valuable as a means to relax the body, quiet the emotions and refresh one’s energy. There is growing evidence that meditation has some health benefits.
What I haven’t seen is much evidence that meditating leads people to behave better, improves their relationships or makes them happier.
Consider what Jack Kornfield has to say about meditation. In the 1970s, after spending a number of years as a monk in Southeast Asia, Mr. Kornfield was one of the first Americans to bring the practice of mindfulness to the West. He remains one of the best-known mindfulness teachers, while also practicing as a psychologist.
“While I benefited enormously from the training in the Thai and Burmese monasteries where I practiced,” he wrote, “I noticed two striking things. First, there were major areas of difficulty in my life, such as loneliness, intimate relationships, work, childhood wounds, and patterns of fear that even very deep meditation didn’t touch.
“Second, among the several dozen Western monks (and lots of Asian meditators) I met during my time in Asia, with a few notable exceptions, most were not helped by meditation in big areas of their lives. Meditation and spiritual practice can easily be used to suppress and avoid feeling or to escape from difficult areas of our lives.”
50 Cent meditates. So do Lena Dunham and Alanis Morissette.Steven P. Jobs meditated, and mindfulness as a practice is sweeping through Silicon Valley. A week from Saturday, 2,000 technology executives and other seekers will gather for a sold-out conference called Wisdom 2.0, suddenly a must-attend event for the cognoscenti.Even Rupert Murdoch has tried meditating, summing up its appeal in a haikulike tweet: “Everyone recommends, not that easy to get started, but said to improve everything.”
Really? For what it’s worth, I don’t think so.
I first learned to meditate 25 years ago, built a daily practice in mindfulness and spent hundreds of hours sitting with my eyes closed and my legs crossed. I also interviewed dozens of meditators, including the most prominent teachers, for a book I wrote in 1995 called “What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America.”. But the more time I spent meditating, the less value I derived from it. Which is not to say I think it has no benefits at all.
The simplest definition of meditation is learning to do one thing at a time. Building the capacity to quiet the mind has undeniable value at a time when our attention is under siege, and distraction has become our steady state. Meditation – in the right doses — is also valuable as a means to relax the body, quiet the emotions and refresh one’s energy. There is growing evidence that meditation has some health benefits.
What I haven’t seen is much evidence that meditating leads people to behave better, improves their relationships or makes them happier.
Consider what Jack Kornfield has to say about meditation. In the 1970s, after spending a number of years as a monk in Southeast Asia, Mr. Kornfield was one of the first Americans to bring the practice of mindfulness to the West. He remains one of the best-known mindfulness teachers, while also practicing as a psychologist.
“While I benefited enormously from the training in the Thai and Burmese monasteries where I practiced,” he wrote, “I noticed two striking things. First, there were major areas of difficulty in my life, such as loneliness, intimate relationships, work, childhood wounds, and patterns of fear that even very deep meditation didn’t touch.
“Second, among the several dozen Western monks (and lots of Asian meditators) I met during my time in Asia, with a few notable exceptions, most were not helped by meditation in big areas of their lives. Meditation and spiritual practice can easily be used to suppress and avoid feeling or to escape from difficult areas of our lives.”
So how to use meditation to best effect?
by Tony Schwartz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Eric Michael Johnson
