Becoming an Airhead

I was recently exposed to the art of meditation. Ok let me explain that, I have been exposed to meditation before but have always been reluctant to participant for fear of having an unfamiliar spiritual experience. I don’t think I could handle say an out of body experience, ala Eat-Pray-Love, that would be freak me out. So I have tended to stay away from things that are seemingly other-worldly, esoteric, new age etc. So how was this experience different? Well for starters it was a corporate event and those by nature tend to be spiritually neutral, for fear of offending employees. Still I approached it with a fair amount of scepticism and my defence mechanism was on alert. My plan was simple really, as soon as it starts getting ‘weird’ I start praying. So I went armed. Before we started the instructor opened the floor to any questions or anxieties we may have. That’s when I realised that I was not the only one who had had doubts. He then proceeded to explain that unlike what we may have seen or heard, what he was going to teach us would not be spiritual in any way. We would be meditating in the true sense of dictionary explanation of the word, instead of the religious Eastern use of the word which has become popular. The purpose of this meditation would be to teach us the art of quietening our inner dialogues. You see, our minds are always thinking and we carry the weight of those thoughts without even realising it. What this meditation would do is to help us create quiet spaces in our minds in order to get real rest. So without giving you a watered down crash course on meditation, what the process entailed was experiencing yourself using your senses rather than your rational mind. For example, we were asked to feel the chair instead of just acknowledge that we are sitting on it. The logic being the more you tune in with your senses the less thinking you do. He illustrated by explaining that when one experiences a really good song, they are feeling the song instead of thinking it and as a result the song can take them to a different place. At the end of a really good song one tends to feel light or even experience some euphoria. Now imagine you can evoke this lightness or euphoria on a daily basis. If you could get to clear your mind just like how you should practice clearing your internet browser history or your cupboard, regularly. We were advised to practice this at least once a day. At least once a day empty your head of the day’s worries, stresses, concerns etc and think of …nothing. At least once a day focus on non-judgemental pleasure-inducing non-thinking. Especially because studies have shown that an average adult’s mind tends to veer towards the negative. At least once a day embrace the emptiness in your head instead of trying to drown it in chatter and harmful thinking. Now if you are anything like me then trying to get to a quiet place is a real challenge. A trick I was taught to use was to then find a song phrase, prayer or verse that can anchor my mind. If the emptiness is too intimidating then meditating on the Word of God is the answer, it is after all what we are encouraged to do when we are told to ‘be still and know that he is God’. So I have decided to give this a try. For a few minutes a day I am going to quieten the voices in my head and become an airhead, focus on a song or a verse …think less, feel more… and actually enjoy it.