The Real Impact of Meditation

The Last Week

If I’m honest with myself, I’ve fell short of my initial goals, though I was most definitely displaying unconscious incompetence when I made the goal. I had thought it modest to be meditating for around twenty-five minutes everyday during the last week of this learning experience, but I’ve since learned what a naïve goal that was. As I had mentioned in last week’s post, less than half the students in my class made it all the through the class, and the best of us left in the class were meditating only three to four days a week. It’s incredibly difficult to strike such a balance in your life that everyday presents a half an hour for sitting. You have to remove all forms of procrastination. Everything needs to happen in the allotted time, or your schedule will eventually trample all of your free time (particularly when you’re working a new (somewhat stressful) more than full-time job and working on a degree).

            Yet this last week I’m counting some victories. I’ve been working hard on what my teacher called affirmations, which are goals that you plant in your subconscious while meditating. The affirmation I’ve been planting for the last several weeks is to be more confident, particularly at work. This week it seems to have paid off as I received a promotion. And I have been able to work meditation into several days a week, which is nothing to shrug my shoulders about.

            It was sort of a bummer that the class ended a week before the wrap up for this experience in our learning theories class. If the class was continuing, I’d be in class right now, but I’m on my own with the meditation now. As I mentioned before, many of my best sessions were in the class, so I’ll miss having those rewarding sessions. Still, I've learned enough to continue practicing meditation on my own, and I will work to improve on my dedication to the discipline because I've found a lot of value in it. 

Reflection

At the end of most of my learning experiences (particularly school semesters), I contemplate what knowledge feels like it’s stuck and will be useful in the future. While the change in behavior and knowledge caused by meditation may be a little more difficult to fully quantify than, say, the knowledge gained in a physics class, I’ve undoubtedly gained some skills and conceptual knowledge. But taking the long view, my meditation practice over the last several weeks will probably have the biggest impacts on areas of my life outside of actually sitting.

            As I have said before (in more ways than one), meditating is really about self-discipline and it connects to every aspect of your life. Meditation is the activity of a high-functioning person. If you don’t have control over all of the major components of your life, meditation is nearly impossible. And even when you’re being the person you want to be in all of your commitments, it’s still requires a high level of resolve to sit for a substantial period of time. So, while I have enjoyed my meditation sessions, I feel that the most powerful skill I’ve learned is to delay satisfaction and follow through with a commitment. Going forward my central goal with what I’ve learned is to transfer these skills into others contexts.

            Looking through my blog posts, I can say that I’ve experienced a bit of all of the learning theories we’ve learned about this semester. I’ve learned a lot about motivation and self-efficacy. I worked on something difficult with other people who also found it difficult, and I survived. I followed through on my commitment, and it makes me feel prepared to take on more difficult learning tasks (ballroom dancing perhaps?). I also learned a bit about how helpful an expert can be when learning a new skill. Particularly when the expert has the connection to make the items she is discussing make sense to a novice. Anna was an expert that was still in a constant process of learning new things. Her favorite part of our classes was always listening to her experiences, and she professed to teaching the class primarily to encourage her own practice. The class experience felt more like a shared exploration than a lecture, which was very helpful for skeptical and struggling learners that needed support more than new terminology to add to a schema. I’m grateful to her for that.

            At this point my central goal is to make meditation at home as fruitful as meditation in the class has been, which is a very clear case of situated cognition. There was something about the way that Anna structured the class (which always had dim lights and a slightly warm temperature) that directed us to an easy transition from the struggles of our daily routine into a state of relaxation and depth. Trying to provide myself the same experiences has really struck home for me the difficultly of transfer and the power of situated learning.

            If I’ve learned anything about myself over the last few weeks through meditation, it’s been that I don’t have to become the master of everything that I attempt. Sometimes it’s just okay to show up, try your best, and make progress where you can. I’m not used to half-successes. I typically do something to its fullest, or I drop it completely, which is really not a positive habit. Skills can transfer, and there is a value in failing at a task. You learn a lot about your limits and capabilities.

Being My Own Sage

This week was the last time that our meditation class met. We had lost more than half the original participants (there were four of us this week; we had started with eleven people seven weeks ago), so just making it through the class sessions was somewhat of an accomplishment. But it was also a reminder of how difficult and important staying motivated is to learning to meditate.

Still, with only a few remaining soldiers, our last class was really great, and it makes the fact that the classes are done even more sad because I’ve really enjoyed our meetings. The central reason I’ve enjoyed the class so much is because I’ve had several of my best meditation sessions there. And now I have attempt to transfer the empowering weekly experiences I had in class to home, by myself, which is difficult for more reasons than one.

Anna (our meditation class teacher) is a great meditation guide, which is part of the reason that all of

us felt we had our best sessions in class. With Anna leading our sessions with suggestive language and the voice of experience, it was always easy to fall deep into relaxation and a Zen-like flow. But it’s difficult to have similar experiences without her guidance (and fellow classmates).

Though I must admit, Anna has been preparing us for this transfer. Three weeks ago, she provided us with a self-mediation script outline, which she assigned us to complete and record an audio recording of. I tried it, but I found it really silly to listen to myself saying the kinds of things that Anna says in our sessions (e.g., “let yourself fall deeper and become more relaxed” and “just notice what it feels like to be…”). I laughed out loud listening to myself. But Anna insists that it is incredibly empowering to record your own guided meditation instructions. It’s something I may try again later.

Anna also made another point that seems to apply to transfer. Although some may have been discouraged by the low-rate of class graduates, she has said several times, “this may not click for you now, but maybe in a year from now you’ll think ‘oh yeah, I’m going to start trying that thing I learned in that class!’”  It’s a very practical view, which I is really hard to assess—the long-term impact of learning. I think it illustrates part of the difficultly of measuring transfer because eventually prior and current knowledge blend together. Initially, a learner may not connect the story of the attack on the city with the problem with the stomach tumor, but if you had to deal with the stomach tumor problem several times of the course of a year, the solution might come to you.

Anyways, it’s now up to me to be my own motivation and guide, so I’m hoping that I can continue to find time to improve my meditation sessions. I feel that the activity is worthwhile.