A Modern Perspective on Meditation

Meditation is frequently perceived as a mental exercise of quieting one’s thoughts … an intimidating prospect when gifted with an active mind. An increasing body of research shows that meditation is actually a full body experience: the mind quiets, breathing deepens, heart rate and blood pressure fall, neurotransmitter levels  adjust toward a state of relaxation. So which really comes first, the mind quieting or the physiological changes? At the junction where yoga therapy and mindfulness meditation meet a powerful approach to meditation exists — where it does not matter whether you start with the mind or the body because the mind-body connection itself is the meditation focus. With focus on the mind-body connection, meditation becomes an embodied practice … an opportunity to bring self-awareness off the meditation pillow and forward into daily life. By bringing self awareness into daily life, routine, tasks become opportunities to meditate.

Yoga therapy is a growing field in which therapeutic concepts and techniques from yoga are used to support an individual’s movement towards wellness. One basic premise of yoga therapy is that communication from the mind to the body, and from the body to the mind, is virtually instantaneous and extremely complex so it is appropriate to perceived it as an integrated connection. We’ve all experienced how quickly our body kicks into fight or flight mode when threatened  or how quickly emotions arise at the thought of an injustice. This is the body-mind connection at work. Similar to body-mind psycho-therapeutic modalities, like Somatic Experiencing or the Hakomi method which believe that the body stores trauma, another foundational concept of yoga therapy is that beliefs, fears, doubts, and trauma are embedded as tensions and constrictions throughout the entire physical body. In the yoga therapy model, these stored experiences result in imbalances which when left untended can express themselves as chronic pain or recurring emotional/mental patterns, like depression or anxiety.

Making your body-mind connection the focus of your meditative practice provides you the opportunity to transform your relationship with yourself. For example, by tuning into the quality of your breath when stressed or anxious, you can take a deep breath to relax. By noticing the unique physical expression of your emotions, you develop the ability to notice your emotions before they fully kick in. By learning to focus, you begin to recognize when you are distracted. Conversely by learning to acknowledge distraction and to choose to gently refocus, you interrupt the pattern of your mental chatter. Mental chatter revolves around the past or the future, but the mind-body connection and the five senses are fully in the now. This quality of listening deeply to yourself grounds you in the present moment.

Making your body-mind connection the focus of your meditative practice transforms your relationship with others as well. By recognizing the qualities of your breath, you start to notice which events and thoughts contribute to shifts in your breath patterns. The time tested advice “take a deep breath before you reply” does in fact physiologically break the neurochemical cascade associated with emotions, thereby creating space within which reaction can be transmuted into response. By deeply listening to yourself, you begin to learn how to deeply listen to others, bringing more than your sense of hearing into the moment. Ultimately to offer presence to someone else — whether a loved one, a client or a student– you need to be present to yourself as well.

In the modern age, setting aside time daily from an already busy schedule is often a barrier to learning meditation. When the focus is the mind-body connection meditation becomes a transportable, empowerment tools that can be used anytime and any place. Opportunities to meditate surround us throughout the day … are you caught up in your thoughts or do have the presence of mind to recognize these opportunities? Those impatient minutes waiting in the line at a grocery store become an opportunity to notice your breathing. The driver who cuts you off creates an opportunity to recognize the physical qualities of annoyance as they arise. Your daily walk becomes an opportunity to stop and smell the roses. The growing field of neuroplasticity has proven that the brain is capable of growing more neural connections throughout our life. As you teach yourself to notice these opportunities, you are in fact repatterning your brain to become more proficient in noticing these opportunities, rather than continue in mindless patterns. The result is an escalating compounding effect whereby the tendency to fall into old habits reduces, as you begin to increasingly notice that you are surrounded by opportunities to tune into your mind-body connection.

This is the junction of yoga therapy and mindfulness meditation — a mobile empowerment tool that radically transforms your relationship to yourself and with those around you.
 

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- by Meenal Kelkar, Meditation Facilitator, CYT, CPRYT
- published by the Ventura County chapter of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, The Ventura County Communicator, March – April 2009