Katie Ruppel, wrapped in blankets, lay on her back in a bed and slowly began to feel her midsection go numb. A tiny, five foot nothing woman worked quietly around her, activating her chakras, the seven points of stored energy within a body, and watching as Katie moved beyond her conscious state. A Peruvian boy playing a clarinet floated by on a cloud and soon Katie was following, flying through clouds with a flock of birds. She was a bird. The Peruvian boy’s music continued to pull Katie up though the sky until the sensation of flying turned into the sensation of swimming. Then she was a dolphin and felt the water hit her skin as she skimmed across the ocean. It was exactly what Katie wanted when she and her roommates decided to road trip to New Mexico on a soul searching spring break.
The trip introduced the girls to Prissy, the tiny Alternative Medicine Sound Therapist. Prissy combines a series of different colored flashing lights with a series of different sounds which act together to free any blocked energy stored in the body. When the energy is unblocked, the body will experience a natural flow which triggers a deep relaxation and altered state of consciousness. Prissy begins her sessions by interviewing her clients to understand what sort of experience will benefit them the most. She gets a sense of her clients’ energy blockage based on their current levels of stress and anxiety. Katie’s stress and anxiety levels are on par with the typical 21-year-old college student. However, these levels remain untreated by Katie who prefers party time to bed time. Katie is a bit wild. Her peers know her for her tiny five-feet-one-inch stature and big Greek personality- if you know her then you’ve heard her favorite exclamation, “Opa!” Katie’s idea of relaxation involves more dancing, laughing, and drinking than most. So it’s only appropriate that when the opportunity arose, Katie didn’t just ask for the usual -she asked Prissy to help her fly. And when she did, her out-of-body experience introduced her to the powers of meditation. Achieving peace and decompression by escaping to another world is what Katie finds to be the most enjoyable part of the practice. And she’s hooked.
Meditation is the practice of cultivating inner peace and stability by training your brain to decrease its restless behaviors and strengthen its focus. By allowing thoughts and emotions to come and go freely without reacting to them, the mind becomes conditioned to stay focused on the present. Since her trek to New Mexico, Katie continues to meditate daily. According to The Mayo Clinic, there are two basic types of meditation: Concentrative and Mindfulness. Concentrative meditation centers around concentrating on a particular thought or sensation. Letting other thoughts come and go without breaking your focus on that particular thought is key. Mindfulness meditation is about staying completely absorbed in the process without letting worries about the past or future interrupt. Both types of meditation have similar goals and benefits which include increased brain wave coherence, greater creativity, as well as decreased depression, anxiety, and irritability. These benefits are those often missing and always needed in a college student’s lifestyle.
As a typical college student scurrying to keep up with classes, her job at the school’s newspaper and her enormous craving for fun and adventures, Katie relies on meditation to help unclutter her mind and keep her focused on the task at hand. It’s not surprising that this girl needs to practice meditation to find peace in her busy world. What is surprising is how effectively she meditates. Her bright eyes, loud laughter, and silly demeanor are easily masked by calm as she talks about playing her chakras like a xylophone. She explains that practicing meditation allows her to control the types of things that happen to her. For example, staying positive, accepting what comes her way, and separating herself from negative emotions like fear and anxiety keep her in control. These are the most basic concepts of meditation. You must turn your mind into an island. Your thoughts become waves, crashing into you and then retreating naturally. You cannot hold on to any one wave just like you should not dwell on any specific thoughts or feelings. What’s left is clarity, illuminating everything like the sun.
Every morning before school, Katie sits in an upright position so that her spine and head make a straight line. Closing her eyes, she takes a deep breath and imagines the color white flooding her body. White represents purities and good feelings as well as recent happy happenings. On the exhale, Katie breathes out chaos and impurities as well as anything negative currently perverting her state of mind. She encourages me to try, arguing that it’s the cheapest most efficient way to relieve stress and stay healthy. According to Mayo Clinic, “meditation programs have been shown to enhance memory and learning, decrease feelings of stress and anxiety, improve sleep quality, help control blood pressure, improve back pain and fatigue, decrease anger, and improve overall well-being.” These are all things a modern day student would benefit from.
Although finding ways to relieve stress is a pastime of mine and improving my sleep quality is really up there on my list of goals, I assumed there was a religious aspect Katie wasn’t mentioning and I wasn’t sure how much religious belief I would need. A common misconception is that since it is based in religion, practicing involves worship of some kind. It turns out that meditation is an aspect of many different religions and cultures and has been around for thousands of years. Historians speculate that primitive hunter gather societies experienced meditation while staring at the flames of their campfires. Meditation developed into a structured practice over time and spread throughout the Asian continent, becoming more popular in the West when professors began researching the benefits of the practice in the sixties and seventies. Although Katie attended Catholic schools her entire life, she considers herself agnostic and knows little about Buddhism or its association with meditation. Still, she likens meditation to prayer and explains her belief that “God and energies are the same thing. I just don’t attribute mine to anything besides myself.”
So I went to visit John Freese, a Fort Worth native, former film student, and current Buddhist Monk. Freese, who studied under the teachings of the Vietnamese Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh, encourages everyone to meditate. “You don’t have to believe in god or have any religious vow to meditate,” Freese explains. While Freese spends the majority of the year working with his guru in India, he teaches meditation in Fort Worth during October and November, raising money for his life in the monastery. His classes are free but many of his students give generous donations.
Freese’s class was an interesting one. Although we’d exchanged a few e-mails, and I’d excitedly noted that his valediction of choice is “peace,” his calm demeanor delighted me. He does not look like a monk – his tucked in polo, khakis and leather belt gave him an ordinary look. But his face gave him away. His wide and attentive eyes and carefree facial expressions reminded me of a big kid. I wanted meditation to make me as laid back as he was. I asked him how film school went. “I liked majoring in film but the job market seemed too stressful,” he explained. But I had a hard time imagining him stressed. I sat down across from an older woman with long, grey, wispy hair. Her fingers were covered in rings and her voice matched Freese’s in its lackadaisical quality. A small red headed woman coached me on how to avoid sleeping appendages by propping cylindrical pillows underneath my knees.
Freese rang a small bell and the meditation began. The three of us sat across from one another, eyes closed, legs crossed in a loose Indian style, with our hands resting in our laps. Freese sat in a chair at the head of our circle. He sat up so straight that I imagined a string connecting his head to the ceiling with Buddha acting as his puppet master. He coached us to concentrate on our breathing and the in and out movement of our hara, a point two inches below the navel and two inches inside the body. In Japanese Zen, the hara acts as an anchor or a point of concentration that will help the mind stay focused on breathing. The sounds of shopping center customers, beeping and honking cars, the air conditioner, wind chimes, and our breathing moved in and out of my consciousness. Freese told us to accept the noise without focusing or dwelling on it. As we continued counting the rhythm of our breath, I began to feel a tingling sensation in my lower back and butt. Suddenly the desire to wiggle took over and I lost track of the counting. I wanted to stand up, shake my body and yell loudly.
When I asked Freese what the most common misconception about mediation was, he explained that most people want it to be an escape. It’s really the opposite; you must directly confront everything and there is no place to hide. I was experiencing first hand the work that meditation takes. Thirty minutes pass both quickly and slowly as I struggle to sit still and concentrate on being uncomfortable. Finally, Freese asked us to stand. We began a meditation walk, slowly inhaling as we stepped forward with our left foot and exhaling on the right foot all the while concentrating only on our breathing and the feel of our feet on the ground. This walk felt exhilarating compared to forcing my body into stillness. After class I talked with Freese about my problem. He explained that the uncomfortable tingly sensation I felt in my legs and butt was completely normal. Part of practicing is to recognize the pain and let it be. Accept it and move on, always continuing to concentrate on your natural breathing. “It’s about letting go of conditioning and finding my true self,” Freese explained.
Experiencing more peace and clarity as well as being more in touch with yourself and the people in your life are eventual side effects. Amongst all of the health benefits of meditation (lower blood pressure, decreased stress and anxiety, better sleep patterns, decreased anger and depression) perhaps the most desired outcome is to deepen attention and focus on the present moment. Living completely in the moment, unaffected by thoughts and worries about the past or the future, allows for clear understanding of self and therefore enhances decision making. I thanked Freese and bowed to my new friends and our invisible altar (there is no room for an actual altar in the yoga classroom). I wondered if he knew exactly what his teachings seemed to promise me and I hopped he would be happy to see me again because I planned on taking advantage of his time in Fort Worth.
So far Katie and I are practicing meditation daily so that we don’t get too caught up in the stress of school. Since my official Freese class, I’ve shared the walking meditation techniques with her, and we made a vow to practice as we walk around campus. I’ve been late to a couple of classes but when I get there and sit down my mind is ready to focus only on the lecture. I want to take on life as each moment comes, unafraid of what may have happened in the past or what negative things I think will happen based on past experiences. Also I plan on eventually taking my meditation to a dreamlike, altered state of consciousness like Katie’s flying adventures. I’m thinking of channeling wild horses instead.
