Hypochondria, Immortality, Eskimos and the Mind-Body Connection: A few short insights about meditation.

1. While I’m meditating, I’m actively trying to pay attention to my breathing. In doing so, I’m uniting a physical activity (breathing) with a mental activity (thinking about breathing). This, I’ve been told, is something we rarely do, and partly for that reason, beneficial. Then it hit me. Meditators do this. But so do hypochondriacs. Isn’t constant, focused worry about your digestion or your pancreas, say, a way of uniting the mind and body?

2. Have you ever heard of anyone dropping dead while meditating? I haven’t. I’m going to meditate constantly once I hit eighty.

3. We probably have as many words in English for “thinking” as the Eskimos do for snow.

Here are just a few: Thinking, musing, pondering, wondering, worrying, fretting, cogitating, coming up with ideas, ideating, fantasizing, wishing, hoping, planning, estimating, dreaming, wishing, imagining, contemplating, pondering, analyzing, philosophizing, reflecting, considering, mulling, stewing, dwelling, planning, evaluating, weighing, marveling, remembering, recalling, musing, daydream, pretend…

No wonder that when I’m not thinking it seems like I’m doing something wrong.

4. Whoever came up with the idea for yin and yang must have got it while breathing. It recently occurred to me, as it must have to him or her, that we spend our whole lives pushing air out and pulling it in, over and over, in equal measure. The yin yang person just gave it a cool logo. Kudos.