How do you begin a meditation practice and what meditation might be right for you?
Moving towards meditation.
In the pausing between one breath, one thought and the next, neuroscience and the teachings of yoga come into relationship. Meditation, practiced for thousands of years and now studied and researched shows us that there is a measurable transformation of the brain itself. Meditation practice creates density in the prefrontal cortex, weight to focus and decision making. In contrast it lightens the amygdala, softening stress and fear responses. Studies from Harvard and Oxford show what I have witnessed, in my 20 years of teaching and therapy experience; a shift towards safety, a return of joy, an improvement in chronic pain, release of held trauma and a lessening of auto immune burdens. Cortisol levels regulate. Sleep returns, inflammation drops. Clarity, compassion, and ease are sustainably experienced.
I began practicing yoga in 1997. Like many I came to the practice at a junction of crisis in my life, arriving in Australia after over a year travelling through India and S.E Asia. In my 20s at this junction between childhood and the adult that was to become.
‘We landed: thin, harbouring parasites, no bowel control, dizzy head spinning out of control. I experience reverse culture shock. The hostel’s blackboard tells us that Diana is dead and it is heralded as the day’s amusement. But instead I feel grief and distress and feel my steadiness turning upside down in this Southern Hemisphere.
We need to work and we have a visa that allows us limited employment. I have the skills to care for people and find myself within days looking after Mannie. A millionaire now, but a jazz musician before, travelling through Russia in the 1930’s. He fled Nazi Germany, a German Jew. Having made his fortune here selling sausage skins. He also sells ditties and jingles to advertisers on TV. Within his penthouse apartment with a music studio and views over Rose bay, he composes. Today the TV is on constantly following her funeral. I feel like the floor is made of jelly and push through. My body has lost sense of gravity.
The day before a doctor has prescribed medication to clear my guts of the souvenirs they had picked up through Asia.
I begin to panic at my body’s reactions. I begin to panic at the panic. I continuously sigh and it feels like the walls of the apartment are operating inwards, like the trash compactor scene in Star Wars. This breath created by my collapsing heart, an expandable space, a hall of mirrors for my emotions. Imagined boundaries of my emotions break free, I feel myself sighing, then, gasping. Every emotion, moments of damage catching up, chasing at my heels. Breath both betrays and forces honesty. Until this point, I have kept it together but arriving here has been like reverse culture shock untethering me. I panic at my panic attack. My body begins to betray my years of coping. I ring the agency saying I don’t feel well. As I am the live in carer, they send a doctor to me. Manny is in his music room, shuffling, playing chords on his electric piano, musical slogans of catchphrases of advertising. I hide this from Manny and make a reason to travel down in the lift, to meet the doctor there in the basement car park. The doctor thinks I have been overdosed with twice the dose of anti-parasitic medication. The dizziness and altered reality is a reaction to that. She prescribes Valium to chemically calm me.
She tells me the symptoms I am feeling are not illness but fear. She tells me to try yoga.
The Studio is called Yoga Moves: ‘move into a position to change your life’. It is full of dedicated and driven change makers. The practice brings me down to experiencing the earth, through the breath, instead of words. Moving and breathing to try and return to freedom in the body and the strong heart that is mine. A heart full of joy. I began. I played, like floating, not even aware of how energy is housed, simply blurring and moving into surroundings. Each movement possible and without hesitation. Feet like feelers translating everything downwards and bringing gaze inwards, rather than making sense with outside perspective. I am my only reference and key to the map of me. I find my way home to my heart.’
Looking back, almost thirty years later, if I had been told to try meditation I don't think it would have helped.
Research shows that mindfulness and meditation can cause negative effects in a significant minority of people, with studies finding anywhere from 8% to over half of practitioners reporting at least some adverse experience. The most common problems are increased anxiety, depression, and traumatic memories resurfacing, with more serious effects like dissociation, depersonalisation, panic attacks occurring less frequently. People most at risk include those with a history of trauma, existing mental health conditions, or a tendency to dissociate. Intensive retreat settings appear to carry higher risk.
We can’t ignore this as practitioners. It is important that our teaching is rooted within somatic experiencing as well as being trauma informed and sensitive; the teaching is as individual as you are.
The pathway of yoga and its practices support us towards meditative seated practices but for many of us it is not the place to begin. The word for postures ‘asana’ in itself means to sit. The movements, breath-work and interoception that comes from an asana practice begin to create the foundations and possibilities for a seated practice and more still meditative experiences.
In yoga our lifespan is described as having three stages: youth, householder and elder. In each of these stages the emphasis of asana practice, breath work, meditation and philosophical enquiry shifts. In youth, asana is the main focus preparing our awareness and physical body to have the foundations for responsibility, purpose and family life. It is developmental and has an emphasis on physical progress. In the householder phase, where we are supporting family life and work there is an increased emphasis on protection, maintaining and energy work through breath work and pranayama as well as asana. And in the third age an emphasis on meditation and philosophy. All elements are relevant and practiced at every age but the emphasis and priorities shift. Of course the stages of life are not always dependent upon age. For many of us coming to a yoga practice beyond youth and because of our sedentary lifestyles and lack of interoception, movement and asana still remain important and in the foreground. Not in the sense of becoming gymnasts but to support the qualities of both stability and ease in our bodies, of their ability to work with regulating the nervous system in this way, before we work more directly with stilling the mind.
For many of us, this sitting to begin a relationship with focus is not yet accessible. In triaging the supports we put into place, in the ecosystem of our lifestyle, it is not necessarily a priority. Emotions and history lived in our body through our nervous system require a choice and priority away from thoughts and language into movement, breath work and somatic experiencing.
The practice of mindfulness and meditation without this body and breath based foundation can for some cause this described increase in anxiety, overthinking and dissociation. Accessing and beginning a practice through virtual support or books overlooks (although accessible and affordable) the safety net and importance of how a relationship with a teacher is paramount to gauge how and what elements of yoga practice to access, on this path to balance and freedom through yoga. If you've been told to practice meditation and it feels like a burden, understanding and guidance is needed not more effort.
Let us not create a division and polarity in our practice but make it relevant and right for each individual, and that at times can mean focusing on movement. Each tool of yoga is not placed in a hierarchy, or linear path of achievement. The tools are placed around you, you are the hub, drawing on each to realise yoga. Through one to one work or group classes in Reading, these tools are layered into the teaching. A few years ago when I was playing with the sequencing of postures I began practising in a layered way. A repetitive and cyclical way of practicing asana. I would move into and out of a posture. Then begin again and add a posture, beginning again adding a third and so on. Rather than an a to b vinyasa, instead a vinyasa that circled and cycled. Creating what I called ‘daisy chains’, like those meditative habits of creating crowns of flowers, consumed by the process and totally in the moments. I began to explore repetition and form as a way of creating a moving meditation and somatic experiencing in our yoga practice. Bringing in elements of breath work, bhavana (as if…), and stay to create particular energetic shifts or structural changes within the body and breath. I began to notice how students could sustain focus and time travel an hour of continuous moment into feeling like minutes. That they could access a still mind through movement. That we could be nudged to unpeel our body through movement and build strength without burdening our minds. That we could re-pattern and remove calcifications in our body in a way that felt both gentle and powerful. That we could experience both the possibility to always begin again and to find that beginners mind even to those that have been practising for some time. This is the beauty of these moving meditations.
That we could move not only into a position to change our lives but also to find our way home to stillness.
