
Today I'd like to share something rather personal, which I haven't done for quite a while on the blogo. Sometimes I don't know why I put things like this out into the world, I can only hope that someone, somewhere can get something from it.
Over the past few months I've tried seemingly endless amounts of remedies for my health. Some have healed for short amounts of time while others have been rejected just as quickly, but the hardest thing to work on has been my mindset. I keep asking myself what I am going to learn from this difficult time and why my summer had to be spent sitting inside rather than roaming around in the sun. Perhaps it's to save my Irish skin from melting like plastic on an iron but even if it's purely for vanity reasons, I still have had a lot of difficulty being so isolated.
I've always prided myself on being independent and capable of solitude but the past four months have tested that to the limit. Until recently I would have nights where I'd want to melt into my mattress or scream loud enough to cause all of my neighbors alarm. Then I started meditating.
A friend of mine from home, Matthew, has had long discussions with me about his use of meditation as a way of centering his mind and spirit and it's roots in the Buddhist belief system. Libby offered to lend me some meditation tapes, and a recent episode of "Friends" that I watched found one of the characters being hypnotized by such a tape to break him of his habits. Instead of basing my meditation strictly in any one set of beliefs or a soothing voice on tape, I chose to build my program as I go along. I've had a little help from my wonderful witch doctor (I only joke, he's just an incredible healer) Choi, in the ways of gathering the energy of the surrounding world and utilizing it to heal the mind and body.
Of all places to meditate, New York has to be one of the most difficult. If I sit in my apartment, I'm bombarded by the noise of the TV next door and if I sit outside everything is sirens and construction. I've found though, that I enjoy the process of sitting outside and working on eliminating the stresses around me. My meditation destination has become my fire escape where I can hover four stories above the ground and make out faint outlines of stars all while hearing the bustle of the city beyond the courtyard below. By closing my eyes I can begin to escape the draining distractions of the outside world.
At first I feel completely foolish and my mind is racing at the absurdity of sitting on my fire escape doing breathing exercises but then I slowly melt away that layer of self consciousness and give in to meditation. There is the added layer of the difficulty for a dancer to sit still. I realized how little time I spent with all the noise cut off, no TV, or music, or cell phone, and just sat and really spent some time completely alone. With each breath in, I gather the positive energy of the world and with each exhale I banish the unnecessary negative energy.
Perhaps I won't come away from this sickness feeling like I've been taught some profound lesson but even something as minor as learning how to calm myself in a rough period seems like an invaluable asset. As people we thrive so much on creating drama, whether it's the way you treat your friends, your cab driver, your waitress or even something as trivial as comments on a blog, when it is almost always utterly unnecessary. There is a difference between being passionate about your beliefs and being unwilling to budge. In a book I recently picked up that my friend gave me a while ago called "Living Buddha, Living Christ," the author talks about how we all believe that we have a monopoly on the truth and that our unwillingness to listen is almost always the root of our problems. I find this to be the case with both myself and many others that I know but through meditation I am working on releasing the negative energy without drama.
To end, I'd like to share something that I wrote after I came in from meditating the other day. I don't really know what it is, but here it is.
Sometimes I sit on the fire escape
And meditate for unknown amounts of time.
If I don’t check, it could have been hours
But perhaps it was just minutes.
I close my eyes
Touch my hand to my chest and
Feel the beat of my heart
As it pumps me further forward
And I envision all the noises surrounding me
And their different attributes.
The motorcycle’s throttle is my anger
The air conditioner, my monotony
The rest is white noise and for all I know
I could be hovering fifty feet above the ground
As long as my eyes are closed,
I can’t be sure.
What I feel could or could not be.
What I hear might be imagined.
But if I open my eyes and see the steel bars
Of the fire escape,
Suddenly it’s a literal prison
I can’t escape.
The motorcycle is just a bike
The humming and the beating
And the roaring just surround me
And don’t inhabit me as they did just minutes ago
Or was it seconds?
Has anyone else tried different meditation exercises?