The Idea of “Meditation”

How to get into it?! No, this post is not about that.

The previous post “Ideas All Over” conveyed an idea that Meditation helps in filtering and getting what I want. It missed one crucial word. That is “me”. Meditation, Pranayama, Yoga and practicing music to entertain myself, these are the things that help “me” among a few others. It may not be your thing, or it may be. For you to figure out. I think any practice can be your thing, if you really want to do it; plus be disciplined in execution.

I pondered a bit about why some people are able to meditate and some people are not. It is hard to know without talking to enough number of people. Tried to make guesses and these are based on talking to a few people and my educated guess. In short, it is due to expecting too much too soon.

They think meditation

1. would be panacea for all their problems
2. is about sitting at one place and controlling thoughts
3. should help in focusing for hours together when one wants to focus on a topic
4. would mean not having emotions like fear, sadness and anger. Hence if they end up showing these emotions despite meditating, they panic.
5. should show all these in a week or two, or at the most a month.

the list might go on. But none of these is realistic expectation.

One thing that my guru told me and my spouse, that is found to be true over years (with “me”), is

Meditation improves resilience

Most difficult questions have most brief answers, and they are beautiful too, aren’t they?

In addition he told a few things to remember

1. Don’t expect results. Do it twice a day for best results, at the same time.
2. Normally meditation results are quantum jumps once in a blue moon. Slowly the result is building up, and one fine day you realize it (oh, no, realizing does not mean ‘nirvana’-I don’t like this word, it is realizing that change within, at a very practical sense). This is an important point to take in true spirit. It means, it could take 3 months or 6 months or 2 years or 5 years or 10 years. Once you realize the first change in yourself, you are more aware and perhaps the next such points might happen sooner.
3. A little bit on resilience: Being angry, sad, happy all these are natural to humans and animals. Without them there is nothing to life. It is explained very well in a book called “Happier” by Tal Ben Shahar, why having emotions is important and what would happen without it. My guru never said I should expect not to have them eventually. What he said was, that the practice should help you to be detached from them, they don’t last too long. I have experienced this. At least this one is not like point 2.
4. It acts on subconscious mind.

In addition, I want to stress all these points in another way, with more material. Meditation is more effective if you supply your conscious analytical mind with positive resources. In my very first article in medium, i.e. Art of Learning Data Science, I mentioned a course on happiness by Prof Raj. His theme is “If you are smart, why are you not happy?” It is a bit offensive theme to those who are proud of their intelligence, and many might not dare to take the seeming challenge. It takes courage to do introspection and improve. OK, so what about that course?

The course “A life of Happiness and Fulfillment” is very comprehensive, because Prof Raj has made the outline as “Seven deadly sins against happiness” and then he has given best practices to overcome them. He has generously given credits and presented material from all the good sources of the world. He has taken short videos with Dan Ariely (Author of “Predictably irrational”), Marshal Goldsmith (Author of “What you got here won’t get you there” / “triggers”), and Mihaly (Author of “Flow”) and many more people and presented them.

I will not list those 7 things he mentioned here, as I want to encourage readers to find out more by visiting the course page. Two takeaways I keep reminding myself the most often. The first sin, “The most common enemy of happiness is devaluing happiness”. In the practice to counter it, he says “prioritize, but not pursue happiness”. Pursuing is like monitoring happiness levels and going after it. It does not help to keep monitoring/journaling the happiness levels. Checking if meditation has achieved the results expected is somewhat same as this. Now, I know, many techniques like CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) ask the people under therapy to do journaling. It may be necessary for a while to identify thought patterns, or to understand what triggers unhappiness or what are the happiness enhancing activities. However, on an ongoing basis, if you keep counting the moments of happiness and unhappiness, you are inviting unhappiness. The course tells you in detail why.

One important sin that I find most engineers and highly educated class commit is “Wanting to control outcomes and other people”. I have something to add to what is presented in the course. I think when we want to control situations/outcomes, it is not just the present ones we want to control. We get into cognitive fallacy of being able to control the past. We wish how we could change something in the past so that present was different. I constantly do that and have difficult time getting out of that thinking. We also try to control future. When we do a data science project, we can not help visualizing how this will be adding value to the places for which this kind of projects might matter the most, and how we will be influencing those interviewers. First part is OK, second part is of influencing them is not OK, because it is more on them and not in our control. Besides, these are not real for today. Reality is, “I am right now”, at 5:58am on March 18th, 2018, writing these words, fighting my thoughts on how it might influence (indirectly control?) readers-no, kidding. I enjoy writing and hence I am writing.

I would like to write another paragraph on this second thing, because from LinkedIn posts/comments/private messages, I see a lot of my data scientist friends being desperate for outcomes. We are all too busy to commit the first sin anyway :). Some student friends have genuine problems due to debt and they are worried of not receiving job and then getting into visa issues. These are legitimate worries, however, what can you do about it at this point? Accept they are natural is the first minimal thing. Start thinking one level up. This is possible if you do not try to control the future, and only focus on what you can do at present. Think about why a company should be compelled to hire you and how can you close the gaps. What are the cheapest/fastest ways to close those gaps. How to be more presentable. What are the non-technical skills that are needed. When you know what to look for, your eyes will land on that eventually. For example, using “and” is more appealing in a conversation than using “but”, remembered to write this, as I changed from but to and in this same paragraph above. It is easy to develop them, if you go after good quality advice rather than reading or watching every random article/video available over there. Quality comes at a price most of the times. For people like me who want a shift in the middle of their career, non-technical skills are not as much of a problem, but we have lesser opportunities. For example, many companies offer internships only to the students, and having families, our mobility is limited. I see kids and family as a blessing. Having another income source and being debt free is relaxing. Companies think that they will have to pay high due to our non-relevant experience. I understand all these problems, the situation is not anyone’s fault.

I am done with what I have for today. Sometimes ending a post formally is really difficult, and this is one such. I would thank readers for encouraging me to write, and wish you all a happy weekend.

Disclaimers: I do not teach meditation. If I were to teach it as a business, perhaps this post wouldn’t be here. This is not a recommendation to do meditation. I repeat, this started as a post trying to explain why meditation may not give results immediately or may not work for everyone. Trying to do meditation without an authorized person’s guidance is a bad idea. Two people apart from my Guru have told me that doing meditation, without doing Pranayama before and after might result in triggering mental illness among people who are genetically inclined to it.