Meditation and fitting it all in…

It’s been a few months since the book launched, and there have been many meetings with students, nurses, young doctors and others interested in mindfulness.  This topic of resilience, sustainability and mental health management is on the move…

My book, Stopping the Noise: A Simple Guide to Unshakeable Mindfulness, by a busy ER Doctor , has been bought and circulated in international hospital workplaces in Ontario, Canada, as well as closer to home hospitals in locations across Australia—extending from Darwin in the Northern Territory all the way down to Hobart, Tasmania.

Amidst the many discussions of the ideas within Stopping the Noise, I have been trying on more than one occasion to crystallise the ways that I use to overcome the initial difficulty of “settling the thoughts” as we try to meditate.  Mindfulness or meditation strategies are designed to break the constant and varied flow of thoughts and feelings in our minds.  I have to apply these “back to basics” principles in my own meditation practice for effective practice sessions.  Some days it is easier than others, depending on what is happening in the “outside world”. 

My medical career is constantly busy in terms of thinking and emotional demands.  The health care system shows no sign of reducing its pace and intensity.  It’s very satisfying and stimulating, combining teaching with my clinical practice.  Like most work, getting the “balance right” is the challenge.

Last week I ran a mindfulness session with our junior doctors. They are apprehensive as they see the coming workload of the post-graduate training programmes that they are about to enter.

I saw that some of them are practising mindfulness concepts already, and some seemed to not yet be ready to experiment with mindfulness or meditation at all.  This is normal. 

What also became apparent is that my own depth of meditation practice has to deepen even further to remain effective as a meditation teacher. This is similar to all teachers, whether it is mathematics, language or a practical skill.  The teacher needs to continually deepen their own learning.

So for me this involves spending a longer time in meditation practice, which has been a recent change.  It was interesting to see the internal objections and reasons coming up about how difficult this would be, but it is now a part of every day.

Each morning, 30 minutes.  Each evening 30-45 minutes. Apart from the practical difficulties like discovering whether sitting cross-legged on the floor is possible for longer time-periods, it has been very helpful.

The conversations that I have with various people I am mentoring, some in medicine and some outside of health care, are better conversations when I am focussing on my own re-balancing every day.  I am more helpful.  The right words come out at the right time.

A quick word about physical discomfort in meditation…traditional cross-legged sitting positions for meditation can be impossible or painful for many of us.  I have discovered that the cushion I was using for short meditations (20 minutes or so) just isn’t very  comfortable to sit on for the new extended practices of 30-45 minutes. One particularly thin foam meditation cushion on a hard plastic backing was a total disaster.  

Sitting upright in a comfortable lounge chair certainly works, especially for people with arthritis or joint stiffness.  Too much comfort can create the tendency to “fall asleep” during the meditation practice.  As I said in the book, there is still value in spending the time, even if we fall asleep, but ideally staying awake is what we are aiming at.

Experiment with what your body can tolerate in terms of practice positions and padding under you. There’s something to be said for having a blanket wrapped around to stay warm, during meditation.  Deliberately choosing icy meditation caves in Tibet is for the real extremists.

And so for me, every morning, the alarm is set a bit early. Dragging my head up into an upright sitting posture, sitting cross-legged, and getting straight into a 30 minute meditation. My mind gets the message that I am serious about the longer practice periods. Less of the morning meditations work effectively, because my mind wanders a lot, whereas almost all of the night practices go well. We are all different in our patterns and the main thing is to “try stuff”.

Meditation also comes easily at other times of the day, and at times I have this clear intuitive message: “meditate now”, but the busy hospital day does not always accommodate this.

But there’s just no substitute.  Whether you watch a podcast on Buddhism, or a mindfulness video with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the theme of self-discipline being important in practice sessions is universal.  And it’s NOT easy, at first.  The intellectual understanding is the easy bit, as discussed in my book.

It’s 11pm, and it is meditation practice time.  Bye for now.  Good luck with your own meditation work. Talk again soon...