Why an MBSR course is the one thing you should commit to this year
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, baby – just do it
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Alright guys, it’s a meditation evangelization post. It’s happening. Buckle up.
Since a huge part of meditation is acknowledging “what’s here, right now” – including any expectations or negative emotions we may be holding – let me take a moment to recall a conversation from last month’s women’s group, when one member (older, highly educated, sophisticated) remarked, “I know I should probably learn more about meditation, but whenever someone starts talking about it I’m like, can we please talk about anything else?”
So maybe that’s coming up for you right now. Maybe you are like, please discuss your dog or some charming and relatable homeschool struggle or chicken-owning or literally ANYTHING but sitting quietly with your breath!
BUT, my friends, part of the meditation journey for me has been committing myself more firmly to what I believe in and know to be true, and that is:
Meditation will change your life.
Now I wake up every morning, inhale a sip of herbal tea, and feel a profound inner peace as a I contemplate the rustling of mulberry leaves against a cottony sky…
Yeah no.
Yes, I still descend into my deepest darkest id when I can’t open the lid of a salsa jar, muttering and eventually shouting profanities, and yeah I still spend 257 minutes scrolling Instagram before bed when I have avowed in my journal every morning for the past six months that the phone is TOXIC and I will 100% read novels every night from then on….I mindlessly wolf down hastily prepared cheese sandwiches in the car, I am 6.5 minutes late to everything…I still do All The Things.
But – but – there’s like a teensy, tiny cushioning of acceptance around it. It’s like I can take one – sometimes two or three – baby steps back from the hot human mess and see, ah, yes, that’s the hot human mess.
There I am in it, trying to eat oatmeal while writing an email and listening to Elena perform Taylor Swift. I can see myself as part of a bigger sphere, a whole planetary sphere of trees fruiting and people grieving and babies making that magical intuitive twist out of the birth canal and lovers strolling with coffee and koalas sleeping and little slugs writhing in the dirt and you know, all of it.
Call it “oneness,” call it a little bit of perspective, but I’ve gained it – not all the time, but enough. I am not so caught up in the me me me of my story. I am devastated by my failure, I am certain I’m a genius, yeah, yeah, yeah, all that, but also this plucky cardinal is bringing a twig to its mate, and these fat fluffy cumulus are drifting by, and the whole big world is changing in a million ways, all the time.
I call it “the big space.” When I sit down to meditate, I enter that sphere beyond my life and the claustrophobia of my mind, ego, fears, and hopes. I am going out into the big space, into which we are all born, and to which we will all return.
I know that sounds epic, maybe grandiose, but let’s be honest: don’t so many of us need more of that in our lives? The sense of something bigger than ourselves, which is not judging or demanding anything of us beyond our being a part of existence? Don’t so many of us crave a relief from our own self-importance and narrowness?
You can find this in religion. You can find it in community. You can find it in art, or in flow. You can find it, also, within yourself, in meditation.
One of the most unexpected effects of meditating daily for years has been: I care more about myself. This is not “self care,” e.g., wine in the bathtub. It is also NOT the same as attending to my needs, sticking up for myself, etc. I actually do that quite well. Maybe, ha, a little too well. I have yet to be accused of being selfless and self-sacrificing, let’s put it that way.
But I am also extremely hard on myself. I am ruthless with myself about my failures, shortcomings, weaknesses, mistakes. My love for myself has for a long time been 100% conditional on me being a successful, admirable, upstanding, worthy, loveable being. And when I am not that being, well, I don’t deserve the love.
This is normal, right? Nothing radical here. The way most of us operate. The way many of us were parented and/or parent our children. But I have had a few moments, most notably during a walking meditation on an all-day retreat a year ago, when I was overcome with an immense love for myself that came not from anything I had accomplished or mastered or realized or achieved but rather from the most simple, basic part of myself: the flawed, trying, struggling humanness I share with everyone else.
I saw myself as I might have seen a cat in a bath, or a baby who’s just tried avocado, or a teenager who’s suffered his first breakup, or one of those Malagasy birds that puffs itself into a ball and then dives 50 feet in an elaborate mating dance. Ridiculous, tender, precious.
During my meditation course (I’ll get into the details here in a sec), my teacher used the metaphor of a cruise ship to describe the changes that take place within long-term meditation: you don’t feel the ship turning, but little by little that enormous, seemingly immovable mass shifts course, finding its way home.
I see this now. I see the effects of so many small, unseeable, largely unfelt changes over the course of years: a little more calm, a little more gentleness, a little more peace, a little more seeing. The ability to really recognize the yearning in my daughter’s face, to know in my body – my chest, my heart – that there are only so many times on this earth we’ll hear “I love you.”
One of the most powerful memories of my meditation course was on the last day, when a father of three, a high-powered lawyer in a major east coast city who’d been struggling for the duration of the course with work-life balance, broke down sobbing.
He had taken his kids out for doughnuts in his truck at 6 am on a vacation to Vermont. They sang and giggled and drove around the New England countryside as the sun rose. He had been so desperate, he said, to go mountain biking with his friends, to have time to himself, to get work done, to just get past this struggle, and that morning he saw how happy his kids were. How young they were. How quickly it would go. He saw, finally, what was right in front of him.
Not past. Not future. His children, now. This grown, accomplished man, with so many accolades to his name, and this is what he wept for. This is what meditation can give you.
So, the nuts and bolts:
You really can’t do it alone, folks. I mean, maybe YOU can – if you’re the type of person who gets up at 5 am and makes matcha and sets an intention for the day, then by all means, go for it. But for most of us flawed beings who struggle to remember to both feed ourselves and buy the dish soap, you’re gonna need some help.
Meditation is extra, extra hard to do without training, because it runs so contrary to pretty much everything we’ve learned our entire lives. We are socialized from birth onward to DO and to be praised for DOING. The more the better! Job, kids, PTA bake sale, personalized Christmas cards, party for 47 people! How does she do it? We ask with admiration. No one asks, how does she just be for an hour?
Meditation is actually quite rigorous and demanding – it’s not simply yoga or a nice bath or a rare bout of focused attention to your kid’s baseball practice. None of these things are bad, and you can do them all as part of a meditation – but it’s incredibly helpful to learn form and technique first. It trains your body and mind to enter a different kind of space.
What I recommend is a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. If you do one “wellness” “health” “fitness” thing for yourself this year, make it this. So many people sign up for gyms or start strength training or give hot yoga a try and all of this is wonderful but – what about our minds?!?
Our brains need exercise, too. You can flex those abs all you want but if your mind falls into the same ruts over and over, what’s the point?
This is how I thought about meditation when I started: I run every day and cherish that practice for my physical body, so why don’t I devote the same attention and energy to my mind?
Okay, you ready? You psyched? This is how you do it:
If you don’t mind virtual sessions, sign up for the MBSR program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. This is where Jon Kabat-Zinn pioneered mindfulness in the 1970s and where the MBSR – now taught worldwide – originated. It is an exceptional program with students from all over the U.S. and the world. I loved having a very diverse, international cohort. My teacher was Ginny Wholley, and I cannot recommend her enough.
The time commitment here is serious: approximately an hour a day for meditation throughout the duration of the program, in addition to 2 ½ hour sessions each week with the teacher, and one all-day retreat.
But if you’re at all struggling with mental health, or wanting to work on that domain this year, or if you’ve been meaning to try meditation for a long time, invest in yourself. It will teach you to meditate. It will instill a practice in you.
You will have that training to draw on whenever you need it and it will, I promise you, make it so much easier to meditate in the long term. You still may struggle to find time, but you will know what to do. You will already have that space in yourself.
I think of this as a brain reset. The course reveals yourself to you. It focuses quite a bit on “the quarter second between stimulus and response” – how do you habitually respond? Do you overreact? Shout? Shut down? Create a particular kind of story?
It also makes you so much more aware of your body: how does anxiety show up for you? Tenderness? Fear? How does your body tend to respond? Where do you feel things in your body? What is your body telling you?
It’s like relearning an ancient language so many of us have lost in a time when we outsource most of our knowing to experts and systems. Relearn yourself.
If you don’t have time for the full MBSR, my one other recommendation is the 10% Happier app. It’s not free – it’s $70/year – but it features some of the country’s top meditation teachers and the guided meditations are beautiful, simple, and elegant.
You could commit to 5 to 10 minutes a day and get so much out of this. I use it pretty regularly – at least 3-4 times a week – in addition to my regular practice. They also run courses that teach you a lot of the nuts and bolts of meditation.
So that’s it, folks. This is what I would say to you if I were standing in the rain on a street corner with a little table of pamphlets saying MEDITATE NOW! What I would say if we were hanging out at a party having a fine old time and you unfortunately asked, “MBSR? What does that stand for?”
I believe in it, I really do. I believe it will change your life. Even if it just gets you to look up from your email for five seconds and see a person you love standing there, their eyebrows, the delicate fuzz at their hairline, the familiar flecks in their eyes, the feeling of your heart as it beats on this chilly winter afternoon – isn’t that worth it?
You're a meditation evangelist! I've been meditating daily for almost 20 years. But part of my practice is letting go of the results, so I couldn't really tell you what the benefits are. LOL. I just know that when I stop meditating for a week or so, b/c of travel or illness, I feel like I'm going a little crazy and wonder how anyone lives like that.
I used to practice transcendental meditation... until I had kiddos. I have been looking for some support around mental health. I will look into this. Thanks for sharing.