musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Time-travelling with my eyes closed


Okay, okay you’re right: I close my eyes a lot, especially when I don’t need them (sleep springs to mind). I think the practice started many years ago as a bet with my wife, though: she challenged me to sign up with her for a Transcendental Meditation (TM) seminar in Vancouver. TM was all the rage at the time because of the Beatles’ visit to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India.

I’m not sure how they felt about their meditation experience, but I certainly enjoyed mine. I got a unique, secret mantra of my very own that I wasn’t allowed to disclose to anyone, because it was designed for me; it put me into a closed-eyes theta-wave trance, or something. But, because I was sworn to secrecy about the mantra, I was never sure if some of the others at the seminar were actually issued the same one.

I think the secrecy was important, however, because my wife cheated on the secrecy of the TM mantra vows: the very next day she shared her mantra with some of her friends who weren’t able to attend the meeting. Of course it didn’t work for them; if you reveal a special magical thing like that, it loses its effectiveness; it becomes just another nonsensical, meaningless word. It frays relationships, too -it did ours at any rate.

Still, of late I’ve been drawn to the benefits of closing my eyes whenever time permits; special things can happen when you do that -even without the mantra. You can lose yourself without a goal in mind. Mind you, retirement can do that to a person as well: my friends call it napping; I still call it meditation.

But, strange thoughts can arise unbidden if I’m not careful with my TM. Perhaps my mantra has worn thin after all these years, though. Maybe, like a car, it needs an overhaul every so often and the warranty on mine is probably racing me to an expiration date.

Or maybe it is peevish about my occasional apostasy: sometimes, when I get tired of repeating the special mantra over and over, I relapse into a silent and more relaxing concentration on my breathing, or the tip of my nose -something totally unmagical. I seem as equally refreshed when I awaken from those as I imagine I would be after listening to a symphony or a piano recital downtown somewhere. Anyway, it’s hard to listen to a concert in your head when you have to keep mantra-ing -and besides, I think I keep falling asleep even if I pretend I’m actually meditating. Just closing your eyes exposes a person to a lot of fraud…

The other day, a close friend told me she does her meditation a different way, however: walking. Actually she used another foreign-sounding name for it, but I don’t think it matters what she called it. To do it, you simply have to pay attention to what’s happening to you, to your feet, and the feeling of each step as you walk. Her favourite place to do it, she said, was in a labyrinth.

I was intrigued with the labyrinth idea, I have to say. I mean who wouldn’t yearn for a journey where you can get lost between high walls, densely trimmed hedges, and dead-end paths? And as a surprise for those who actually make it to the inner part -there’s a Minotaur waiting for you at the centre, eh? Remember the little boy trying to evade Jack Nicholson in that labyrinth in ‘The Shining‘…? Okay, maybe that was a little extreme…

Anyway, on closer questioning, she disputed my romantic idea of wandering through a complex maze.

“A meditation labyrinth is not a maze, G,” she said, rolling her eyes sternly. “It’s not a puzzle to be solved…” Her face softened briefly as she noticed my disappointment. “That kind of labyrinth has only one path and often has no walls; the way is usually clear. It may simply be some little concrete slabs which zigzag across a lawn, for example.” She noticed my disillusionment, I suppose, and sighed. “The centre is merely where you can linger, meditate about the journey you’ve already undertaken, and then retrace your steps…”

“So why not just go for a walk somewhere?” I said. “You can stop by a tree, or a lake to think about things just as well, can’t you?” A forest path seemed a more interesting place to think about things than a series of slabs in a field.

She shrugged. “A trail through the woods could work, I suppose…” She hesitated for a moment before continuing. “…But often the things around you on a trail -the birds singing and flitting about on the trees, the sound of a creek burbling nearby, or maybe the wind rustling the leaves… all of these have more distractions than a labyrinth laid out in a field, or church yard where you can linger on a marker-stone and meditate there for a while. The idea is not to be distracted, I think…”

She saw the scepticism on my face and smiled. “I think you have to believe in metaphors, G; a labyrinth is a kind of metaphoric journey you take through your thoughts, through your problems, and through your Life, for that matter.” She sent her eyes to perch lightly on my cheeks before she called them back home again. “I mean, it’s not for everybody,” she added, hugging me before she turned around and walked away.

Strangely, I felt refreshed by our conversation, and I wondered if I had inadvertently stumbled into an epiphany. There was no blinding light like Paul supposedly experienced on the road to Damascus; no blindness either. Just the sound of her voice describing something I had little interest in pursuing.

But even though I remained unconvinced by her fervour about labyrinths, I had joined her in what she felt was important; I had engaged in the process of listening to a friend who had shared something significant to her. She had, in fact, distracted me from my own problems and captured my attention as she described her feelings. I mean, isn’t that what music does? Or exercise?

The conversation had drawn me into a ‘present moment’ that we both shared. And as I listened to her, she was the world; my thoughts about what she had said lingered as a sort of anodyne to the everyday stress; for a moment, I felt as if I had lived in a different world –her world- and I felt better for it.

Isn’t that also what meditation does? Perhaps we all meditate more than we think…

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gozzter

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