Meditation in more ways than one

In the interest of keeping on top of my blogging, here is one. I sweep the contents of my desk with my eyes, looking for inspiration. They waver on a half-eaten candy cane. Sugar for breakfast? Sure.

Another office refurbishment, another anxious search for a new meditation pod. They have built some curiously titled “shoosh rooms” and while I’m not entirely sure of their true purpose, I am hijacking one every day at 11am and sitting in the dark. Concentration, or lack of it, is a difficult thing to achieve just now. My success sort of works on a swinging scale. More often than not I’m avoiding the audio, such as the binaural recordings, and trying to just take myself out of the space I’m in, mentally. Focussing on the shapes that float in front of my closed eyes, or the steady beeping of a crane. Then from a corner of my brain, a little face pokes into view and goes ‘hey, I wonder how Carla’s baby is going?’ or ‘I should check that lottery ticket, I’m probably sitting on half a million’ or ‘one day Bear Grylls is going to eat something poisonous and die’. And I humour it for a moment, not realising it’s an evil trick on myself. Then I’m like “waaait a minute”, and breathe deeper, and focus on that floaty red circle again. For a few seconds, at least.

I think distraction is the real key. It’s like when I’m doing a hard cycle, or if I’m in the swimming pool – swimming is by no means my forte – keeping my mind pre-occupied leaves my body open to do what it’s supposed to do on its own. So I will think about the lottery, or Bear Grylls, and then I’ll be at the other end of the pool. That doesn’t really work with meditation. In times of extreme internal commotion, I have taken to counting, forwards and backwards, without stopping. It sounds loco, but it means all I have room to think about is the numbers. There is a downside in is that it doesn’t always relax me, even if I am breathing deeply, however I like to think of it as a type of a cerebral spring clean. It’s also why I enjoy logic puzzles so much.

I also did my first pasta bake on Wednesday night, under Ben’s supervision. He was multi-tasking, working on his bike in the kitchen at the same time. There is something reassuring and warm about this domesticity we have created. Sometimes we long for a place we no longer have to pay rent on, large enough for a dog, and three kids, and one of us earns enough that the other can stay home and perpetuate the domestic wonder. But other times we are stoked just looking at our retro coffee table/radiogram that we scored on eBay and the glorious red fruit bowl we’ve been hunting down for 6 months, and eat pasta bake, and listen to episodes of This American Life. It is necessary to meditate on these things, rather than waste energy with the other 7.5 hours of the day. It is a shame to waste anything, really, but particularly energy.

And with that... I'm off to meditate.