“Breathe in gently and deeply through your nose. Exhale slowly and fully through your mouth. Clear your mind and allow your breath to find its natural rhythm.”
That’s the instruction for most mindfulness meditation. You may have tried this in yoga classes or by listening to your favorite meditation app. By focusing on your breaths, you can clear your mind of nagging, ruminative thoughts: “How will I get both kids to soccer practice and dance, when they start at the same time?” Or, “Why wasn’t I invited to Kathy’s happy hour?” Or, “The dermatologist said this bump is benign, but what if she’s wrong. Could this be cancer?”
In this time of political turmoil, where a chasm of disagreement and diatribe fills our news outlets and diabolical floods and fire overtake our planet, we need relief, but we don’t know how to find it.
Studies show that mindfulness meditation can alleviate an array of symptoms, both physical and psychological, that arise from stress, anxiety, depression and chronic pain. Thoughts that loop around in the mind like a whirling dervish on speed can quiet when you meditate. For many people, focusing on their breathing can release their worries.
But what if you can’t quiet your mind by attending to your inhalations and exhalations?
“It doesn’t work for me,” voiced some patients in my private psychotherapy practice. No matter how hard they tried, worrisome thoughts would intrude and undermine the potential benefit of this kind of passive mediation.
“Let’s try more active approaches to quiet your noisy head,” I’d suggest.
One can practice meditation either passively or actively. Effective passive mediation works by letting your mind empty of cluttering worries, like turning off a nosy kitchen fan or muting blaring music emanating from your teen’s bedroom. In active meditation, you fill your mind with positive thoughts and sensations to crowd out the negative ones. (This works best for me.)
Nature walks are an excellent example of active meditation. By enlivening your senses as you walk in local neighborhoods and take laps around your local park, you can subdue your troubling thoughts. Yes, “smell the roses” or the lilacs, gardenias, honeysuckle and lavender. Look at the variegated greens that populate lawns and parks, making a palette of verdant delights. Feel how soft flower petals are and how rough the bark of manifold trees.
Another active way to subdue looping woes is by memorizing poems. Before you put your hand out and say, “Stop. I can’t do that. My memory is terrible,” try it. Memorize two lines at a time, and before you know it, you’ll be carrying an array of lovely images, soothing rhythms and moving metaphors in your head and heart.
If your anxious thoughts start racing into the worry zone with a series of “Oh noes” or “what ifs” such as, “Oh, no, I forgot to return the permission slip for my child’s field trip,” or, “What if my boss promotes my colleague over me,” pull out a poem from your mental anthology or choose a new one to memorize. One couplet in, your breathing will calm, and your mind will clear.
Choose a poem you like, learn two lines each day by adding the new to the existing ones, and by the end of the week, you’ll be the proud owner of a shiny new poem. Personal favorites include Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son,” and Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes.”
I’ve learned to substitute poetry for my “What ifs” and “Oh, noes.”
Joyce Kilmer gave us:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
Langston Hughes’s gift is:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair
It’s had tacks in it.
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare…
Don’t you sit down on the steps,
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard;
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Mary Oliver exhorts:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
Did you feel tension leave your body while these splendid words and images filled your mind? Now, memorize these excerpts or your favorite poems, and chase away the blues.
Patricia Steckler (pattisteckler@gmail.com) is a retired psychologist who was in private practice for 40 years. She lives in Bethesda and is a 2019 graduate of the Johns Hopkins science writing master’s degree program.
