This Week’s Tweak: Be The Pebble (an anti-stress contemplation)

Long term readers are aware of the American Pseudo-Buddhist influence which underlies much of my thought process. (It’s good stuff, that Pseudo-Buddhism, especially when served over steamed rice and chased with saki -or so I’m told.)

You may also familiar with my unrelenting book addiction, fueled by frequent trips to the Half-Price book store, that dark-alley drug dealer that forces me to snort, smoke and mainline wholesale words and ideas indiscriminately.

So you’d probably expect me to have a pile of dusty books about Buddhism, Zen, and the like, right? Right!

Last week, heeding the call of addiction, I dug through the stack and plucked out an unassuming white paperback. I flipped through its pages and landed on a rather nice little meditation. Being the sharing sort (and feeling a bit lazy today) I thought I’d share it as this week’s mind tweak. Explanation of just why it’s a tweak follows, but first…

Ahem.

From The Zen Path Through Depression
by Phillip Martin

Sitting comfortably and feeling your breathing in your belly, practice settling into your meditation.

Imagine that you are a pebble settling in a swiftly flowing stream, falling down through the current until you have settled with your full weight on the sandy bottom. Feel the weight of your body as it presses down on your seat and the back of your legs and your knees. Concentrate on your breath as it settles down into your body and tethers you to the ground on which you sit.

If you feel an urge to stand up, or feel energy lifting you up, think of this as just the current, temporarily lifting you off the bottom of the stream. Then quickly settle back into the bottom.

As you fill with your breath, notice how the energy of it pulls you down and you settle where you are. As your outbreath empties you, feel how you grow heavier and settle again.

Keep your awareness in your belly and on your seat. If your thoughts pull you up, simply think “Settling,” and return to your belly and your seat. Notice how your intention to keep settled anchors you to the bottom.

Lovely, isn’t it?

Martin goes on to offer a walking adaptation of the concept, envisioning the forward motion of each step as that of a pebble being pushed along the bottom of the stream, resettling at each footfall.

What makes this a “tweak”?

On the most basic level, any time we visualize things from a new and different perspective, it gives our brain a work out, connecting various systems in unique ways.

And meditation is known as a discipline for a reason - It takes a great deal of focus and intent to learn and maintain a practice. Long before neuroscience started talking about mental-exercise as building the brain’s equivalent to “muscle power”, meditation teachers talked about training the mind like training a muscle, explaining that it was *supposed* to be difficult and uncomfortable, like lifting progressively heavier weights. The sense of difficulty means you’re actually working your brain in new and challenging ways.

Long term anxiety, stress and depression are bad for the brain, and there are gazillions of studies out there showing meditative practices reduce all three factors. Other studies suggest that long term practices don’t just protect from stress, but actually build and change the brain physically.

And this type of meditation, in particular, helps to lower stress levels not only through the act of meditation, but by training the mind to approach stress differently. Instead of anxiety producing disturbances that demand action, we can see life’s challenges in a positive, less disruptive way, knowing that we will naturally settle down again, that the disruptions to our peace actually move us forward through our lives.

So go. Be a pebble.

Settle, be moved, and settle again.

MindTweak: My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. — Sylvia Plath