Only one breath at a time!

by Lionel WIJESIRI

Time 7.30 p.m. You’re at home. You have to complete a very important assignment for the office. The deadline is tomorrow. Home is in chaos.

Children are out of control. Wife is emotional (or husband moody). Dog is barking. TV is blaring. There’s a party next door in full swing. You can feel your heart rate steadily climbing. Is there anything you could do to make yourself feel better? You have no idea.

There is one simple solution. Close the door behind you and for a few minutes begin to focus on something you do all the time anyway: breathing.

Sit quietly, comfortably but upright, close your eyes and breathe deeply, in through the nose and outthrough the mouth. Concentrate on your breath, the sensation as it passes through your nose and into your lungs, the rise and fall of your ribcage as you do so. And here is the tricky part: try to allow your attention to be absorbed by only your breath and its sensation for, say, hundred breaths.

Lo! There you are. You’re changed. You’re no more irritated. With the background annoyance you can do whatever you want to do undisturbed. Believe me, it works. The technique has been tested and found right.

They call this system ‘Counting the breath’ just 20 minutes a session twice a day, morning and evening, can genuinely refresh and realign you with improved clarity of thought, increased creativity and generally greater contentedness. Think of it as a mental massage.

Today the study of meditation has entered research labs throughout the world. Scientists are exploring the brain states (using brain imaging tools) associated with meditation practice as well as changes in other body physiology.

The findings are intriguing, including evidence that meditation influences brain structure and function, immune response, stress response, attention and emotional regulation. Overall, adding meditation to one’s life appears to improve an overall state of well-being (happiness, if you will), reduce anxiety, and foster healthy relationships.

One recent study at Massachusetts General Hospital, USA found evidence that the daily practice of meditation thickened the parts of the brain’s cerebral cortex responsible for decision making, relaxation and memory.

Sara Lazar, the research scientist says that the gray matter of men and women who meditated for just 40 minutes a day was thicker than that of people who did not.

Still other demonstrations have been more striking: Japanese Zen meditating practitioners did not flinch at the sound of an unexpected gunshot near their ears, while Indian yogis could meditate themselves into such deep trances that they did not react to test tubes containing boiling water being pressed against their bare skin.

Not surprisingly, given those results, a growing number of corporations - including Deutsche Bank and Google offer meditation classes to their workers. West Point, the elite US military academy, runs courses in it.

Meditation is an effective tool for use only if you have a willingness to practise it regularly. You can use the breath to practise, hone your attention and develop a more mindful stance in life.

It is in the repetition of observing the breath, catching your attention as it drifts away, and returning it to the breath that awareness begins. Over time and practice, you may gain patience, then an embrace of a deeper understanding of yourself and your relationship to the world.

In a world where our lives are getting faster and faster, and technology is making more and more intrusions into our private time, meditation is the only practical way to provide us enough mental space to rediscover what our place in this universe..