Apr
7
Meditation and sleep
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My former employer, the BBC, recently aired a series of 3 programmes exploring the Scientific validity of Alternative Medicine. The last investigated the efficacy of meditation.
I can personally vouch for some profound effects of meditation. When I meditated half an hour a day in January, I mostly slept extremely well, and had many days where I felt refreshed, relaxed and energised. With my recurring headaches, this is not such a common condition I normally find myself in.
Meditation appears to be very good not only in countering the effects of stress, but, better still, limiting the intensity of stress in the first place. I find myself seeing a stressful situation in a more objective way without so ready an excitation of the emotions that give it its charactersitic stressful flavour.
For reasons not clear now, when my work changed in February, I got out of the habit of meditating, and swiftly forgot to do it at all.
But now I have resumed and immediately feel the benefits. In the past, my headaches were mis-diagnosed as being symptomatic of depression, for which I was prescribed Seroxat. Taking that medication at first saw subtle, but obvious lifts in my general mood.
The effects of a good night of sleep following good meditation put Seroxat into the shade. I feel so wonderfully alive and happy. I can get on and do more, which in turn lifts my self esteem of course.
You may be wondering about the mystique of meditation. From what I have read and practiced, it is extremely sad that the natural act of meditation is elevated to an art that is made to seem inaccessible to all but those who sit cross legged and have achieved enlightenment.
Basically, meditation is a natural way of being that we all do anyway. We just fail to recognise or label it thus. Being absorbed in the smell of a flower is a meditation. During hide and seek, when you hide behind a curtain, and stay calm, observing the darkness of the curtain material is meditation.
In essence, when you are meditating, you are disengaging from your normal life, even that of relaxing watching TV. You become an observer, not a participant. Classically, you may observe your breath. For me, I observe my headaches. You may think of someone, and observe the thoughts and feelings that arise.
Even when you meditate, lots of thoughts will pop into your mind. You observe them and avoid as much as possible being caught up in them.
Maybe I can give you a concrete example. I arrived at my friend’s Chinese restaurant 2 weeks ago with a bad headache. A group of us meet there every week to play Go. I told the son of the owner that I wanted to meditate for 5 minutes. As I started to focus on my uncomfortable headache, his father started shouting loud at him, in Chinese. Rather than feel my meditation ruined, I changed my focus to the shouting. I observed each shout, and my emotional reaction to that shout. I observed, rather than felt unsettled by the situation. Five minutes later, I felt very relaxed indeed.
You see, by relaxing, and allowing yourself to experience the World in a calm, non-judgemental way, you get used to handling situations calmly without over-reacting. This alone, is very good for someone like myself, with a set of emotions always on a hair trigger.