Knitting as Meditation

It's so easy to enter a meditative state while knitting. Something about the rhythmic movement back and forth between the right and left hands, something about the soothing repetition of movements. Something about it... I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to write about knitting as a meditative art. People have tried to understand it in right brain/left brain terms. It has been compared to EMDR with its right and left eye movements. There have been lots of attempts to explain why it works, as if people need to prove its therapeutic benefits. I don't really care why it works, it's enough for me that it does.

I picked up knitting at a particularly stressful time in my life, not realizing that it had become a craze. Having learned it when I was young, my mind-body must have remembered the feeling of it and signaled my intuition that it was time to start knitting again. I find knitting to be so comforting and relaxing. I've known that it produces a meditative state, but it was just a couple days ago that I fully appreciated its power. When I was thinking about the similarity between meditation and knitting, I realized that you can't worry and knit at the same time! 

When you worry, the mind gets involved in a train of thought -- a story about what might happen, what could happen, what might have happened and so on. Worrying engages the emotions in a way that creates anxiety.  The use of your hands and the sight of the stitches being formed breaks that pattern. I challenge you to see if you can worry while you knit! To test this out, I knit a few rows actually trying to worry. I couldn't do it. I could come up with worry thoughts like "what if that pain is a horrible disease" and "what if I can't pay the bills next month", but no matter what thought I conjured up, there was no emotional juice that came with it.

So many of the phrases I use while leading guided meditations aim to do this same thing -- to disentangle the thoughts from the emotions, to allow the mind to break free of its usual patterns so that one enjoys a simple, open state of awareness. When I say things like "not minding the stories of the mind" or "let thoughts be a meaningless activity in the mind", I am encouraging the mind to do what it does while we knit -- disengage.

If you decide to knit to meditate, I think you'll find the effect is the most powerful when you do a simple knit stitch over and over. In knitting, it's called "garter stitch". You just knit and knit and knit and don't try to follow a complex pattern. It's easy to learn, and you may find you also love handling beautifully colored yarns with various yummy textures. You might even end up with some great scarves in the process!

OK, so you're behind the curve on the knitting craze. For all I know it's over. Who cares? Knitting makes a great meditation. And, if you are hesitant because you are of the male gender, please know that, to borrow a book title, "real men knit". Russell Crowe does it. Brad Pitt does it. The big, talk Ghi McBride character on Pushing Daisies does it. Just do it!

Mindfulness vs. mindlessness.

Because so many people seem to associate my guided meditations with Mindfulness, many of whom both use our CDs and listen to our podcast, I often find myself wondering exactly what Mindfulness is. I've often thought that my meditations have more to do with "mindlessness" than "mindfulness", and have thought of writing a post about that. It took a really interesting blog post in the New York Times today to get me to begin to tackle that subject. Check it out -- peoples' comments are really interesting to read: Being and Mindfulness - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com.

Well, I said "begin to tackle that subject" and I am literally only beginning to try to formulate by thoughts about it and don't know if I'll ever get past the beginning on this one. For one thing, having practiced meditation for a long time before ever hearing of Mindfulness Meditation, I've never really be able to relate to mindfulness instructions when I come across them, so how can I compare it with what I do?

Also, it seems like Mindfulness isn't just a technique of meditation, but is often (if not always) associated with an intention to be a certain kind of person or to behave in a certain way -- a way that is better than ones current way of being or behaving. My involvement with meditation has had to do with self-awareness and with inner peace, but I've never been involved in order to be a better person. If anything, my hope has been to learn to accept myself the way I am. I'm not saying that I don't want to be a "better" person. Who doesn't (depending on how each person defines that)? I just never saw meditation as a means to that unless it came as a welcome by-product to greater ease with myself and with life.

As I write, I am beginning to understand some possible distinctions between Mindfulness Meditation and what I do. I say "possible" because  as I said I don't really know Mindfulness Meditation. I also suspect that all Mindfulness Meditation is not alike. Certainly not every Mindfulness teacher understands and teaches it in the same way. Certainly not everyone who practices it understands it in the same way. Also, Mindfulness seems to involve more than a technique of meditation. It seems to involve a way of being in the world -- something you apply outside of a period of meditation practice. While I do think meditation "my way" creates changes outside of meditation, there is no specific recommendation to try to consciously make something happen in daily life.

So why do I feel my meditations have to do with Mindlessness rather than Mindfulness? My sense is that in Mindfulness Meditation there is a kind of noting of things. There is the idea that here I am being mindful. So in Mindfulness there is a awareness of "me" sitting here "being mindful". The difference I'd see is that in my meditations (the ones like "Simply Being" that don't have a specific focus), there is a letting go of what is noticed. Noticing is not noting. It's not a taking note of what you experience, or a labeling of it. It's more of a letting go of what is noticed. We aren't looking for anything. Noticing happens spontaneously. We are spontaneously aware of what is going on. We don't need to try to notice something. It just comes into our awareness. Or it doesn't. Doesn't matter. It's just a matter of letting go when we become aware that the mind has gotten involved, or tangled up with, what is being experienced.

As I write, I see the impossibility of conceptualizing what happens in meditation. And perhaps this is my difficulty with understanding Mindfulness Meditation. Perhaps it is the problem that is inherent when we try to put the meditative experience into words. It sounds like we mean something we don't really mean. I can certainly see that what I was just writing in the paragraph above could sound like something other than what I mean.

So I'll just stop. I began to try to write about Mindlessness vs Mindfulness, and I found that I can't really. But I think you might enjoy the New York Times piece I mentioned, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences with this subject. So for that reason, I'll go ahead and publish this post about what I can't really put in writing. I think this has liberated me from any compulsion to explore how what I do is different than Mindfulness (if it is). It doesn't really matter in the end. I'm happy with what I'm doing!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and welcome your comments.

Deep Rest Guided Meditation

I'm convinced that adequate rest is the most important factor for our health and well-being. We're a culture of "doers" and so we might think of exercise first. I'd say exercise is a close second to rest, but being well-rested is the foundation of everything -- our physical, psychological and spiritual well-being. Being well-rested means getting enough sleep at night, and it means taking breaks when you need them during the day. It means not pushing yourself until you're over-tired. With this in mind, it's surprising that it's taken me this long to create this new podcast episode "Deep Rest Guided Meditation". Even though many of the meditations will help with getting rest, this meditation goes further with it. The whole focus is to rest completely -- to let go of everything going on in our lives and allow the whole system to get a deep rest. Just beginning the meditation with that intention starts the process in motion.

It's so easy to overlook the importance of rest, even though it's essential to absolutely everything we do. Most of us have a sleep deficit. Most of us don't get enough rest. If you have to wake up with an alarm, you are probably not getting enough sleep.

To suggest that you get enough sleep and enjoy the luxury of being really well rested is quite a radical thing to do in our culture, and yet with enough rest you'll not only feel better, but make better decisions and get more done. Sleep deprivation accounts for all sorts of accidents and mistakes.

Hopefully you will come out of this meditation feeling more rested and refreshed, but there is also the possibility that you will feel even more tired. That's because of the accumulated fatigue under the surface. We tend to override that fatigue in our rush to get things done. When you relax in this meditation, you may begin to notice just how tired you actually are. If that is your experience, find a time when you can do the meditation and have extra time to rest afterwards. Try to get more sleep.

I promise you that getting enough rest will not mean you get less done! I know when I'm well rested, I can be more creative and productive, not to mention enjoying things more.

Do you have to be spiritual to meditate?

In a very interesting, enjoyable blog post, "K" describes her experience with our meditation podcast. Her post is fun to read, and it raises a lot of interesting questions. First of all, she begins by saying "I am not what you would call a spiritual person". In view of this, she was surprised to find herself listening to the meditations. That raises the question as to whether only spiritual people meditate, or whether meditation is necessarily associated with spirituality. And then, of course, there's the bigger question of what spirituality, or being spiritual, means. At one point K asks "Was I actually meditating?" (when listening to the podcast). This brings up yet another question -- "what is meditation?" These are all interesting questions to explore. My feeling is that asking these kinds of questions can lead to worthwhile self-discovery. One thing I loved about K's post is that her bottom line was that whether or not meditation is spiritual and whether or not she is actually meditating -- "there's no way I'm giving it up". For whatever reason, regardless of whether what she's doing is spiritual (as a supposedly "non-spiritual" person) and regardless of whether what happens as she listens to the podcast is meditation, she likes it. And isn't that what really matters? There are so many ideas about meditation and what it is to be spiritual. Often these ideas can become stumbling blocks that keep us from what we are really looking for. They can become "shoulds" that get in the way.

I'd love to hear from you -- how do you define spirituality and meditation? Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person, and if so, why? What makes you spiritual? Do you feel spirituality and religion are one and the same, or are they two different things? Do you feel you have to be spiritual to meditate? Do you feel that meditating makes you spiritual?

Meditation Myth -- Is there is a "real" meditation?

I came across a list of meditation myths on the web. Funny thing is some myths on that list are not myths to me, they are truths. It all depends on how you define "meditation". There are hundreds of kinds of meditations. The question is, can you say that one meditation is "real" or "true" meditation? The person who created the list I read apparently thought so, because the term "real meditation" was used. I'm quite sure I've use that type of language myself -- in fact I remember saying something about "true meditation" on a podcast. And yet, I feel it can be really misleading to say one meditation style is real or true.

Anytime anyone makes a generalization about meditation, they are referring to a particular style of meditation. It's not like there's a real meditation and the rest are somehow false. The person who wrote that list comes from a particular tradition. Within the understanding of that tradition, it makes sense to speak of real meditation. If you want to learn meditation within a tradition, then knowing what that tradition defines as right or real meditation will be important to you. That particular list of myths will have value for you. But if you are not so concerned about tradition, but more concerned about what works for you regardless of its origins, then you would approach a list of myths in a whole different way. You would look at it so see what made sense and what is useful for you.

It's only through some reference to tradition that you could say a meditation style was real. Either you are saying the tradition is somehow an authority or that you yourself are the authority on what is real meditation. Sometimes people feel that a meditation that comes from a long tradition is more real and true than a contemporary form of meditation. It makes sense that something that has been tested through time may be trustworthy. But no matter how long a tradition has been along, you are ultimately relying on someone else's interpretation of that tradition. Who is to say that the person teaching you now understands what was meant when the tradition was started centuries ago?

Everything a teacher says is coming from his or her understanding. The bottom line is that there are really no absolutes in meditation. To me, the bottom line is that what's real and true is what you find to be real and true in your own experience. What a book or a teacher says can only be a catalyst for your own self-discovery.