How Meditation and 5Mad changed my reading life
For the most part of my life, I was a bulimic reader: I divulged huge amounts of text. The daily paper and a number of magazines, many, many books, as well as online news, blogs, tweets and e-mails. Already as a child I had a respectable library. My parents, thankfully, encouraged my love for books. For every good test, I was allowed to go to the local bookstore to buy a new book. I was a good student so my shelves filled up accordingly. Today my house if filled with books, papers and magazines. This tradition continues with my children. They too read a lot and many of our conversation circle around the texts we are currently reading.
When I started meditating four years ago, I noticed how I filled every single empty moment with reading. Reading the Süddeutsche Zeitung while gulping down my breakfast muesli, checking tweets while waiting with my car at the red light, sinking down on the sofa in front of the fireplace after dinner with a book.
Meditation made me aware of my horror vacui. I simply hadn’t noticed it before. With a deepening meditation practice, I learned to zoom in on presence, rest in presence. Not escaping by thinking about the past or the future, or entertaining myself by talking, watching, reading. But just staying with what is. Often when I found myself habitually reaching for a book, I forced myself to simply listen to what was happening within me. I realized that my reading habit, as rewarding as it was, also shielded me from uncomfortable emotions, from experiencing boredom, fear and anxiety.
Deep and slow
Then, last summer, I was diagnosed with cancer. The diagnosis immediately changed the way I read. Unsurprisingly I became very aware of how I spent my time. For the first few weeks I didn’t read at all. When I restarted, I read much less and much slower than before. No longer did I scan the lines, accelerating with each paragraph, but I let the meaning of the words penetrate me.
When the tumor was destroyed and my fears subsided, my reading again returned to a quicker pace. But the memory of the „slow read“ stayed with me and internally I criticized myself for falling back into the old pattern. Thus starting 5 Minutes a Day was a welcome reminder to penetrate news in a more holistic way.
Exploring the border zone
Doing the practice on a (nearly) daily base, I notice that my ability to establish a real relation with world events varies a lot depending on the subject. Reading about the continuous crackdown on civil society in Egypt, really gets to me, as I spent the whole of March in Cairo speaking to digital-social innovators and studying their evolving eco-system of startup hubs, civil society activists, VCs and young social entrepreneurs. Before I would have read the news, thought „how awful“, shared it on twitter and then proceeded to the next news item. The same information on 5MaD penetrates my whole body. It is not accompanied with any images, but with a very precise „flavour“ of being sucked into a narrow, oppressive space. I can feel a certain anxiety knocking on the door. I can also feel how I am protecting myself against going „too far“, i.e. being overwhelmed by it.
With time I have come to discern a certain pattern in my responses to the headlines and images: I seem to be able to let them come fairly close to me and create a distinct relation to them. But there also comes a point where I draw a clear boundary between „the news“ and „myself“. This boundary is pretty exciting to observe — sometimes it takes the shape of an activist response, i.e. I develop ideas of what I could do about a certain situation. Other times I get bored and I wish to cut the 5 minutes short. And sometimes I am able to immerse myself deeper into the border zone, nudging forward, millimeter by millimeter. Taking a glimpse at the sheer enormity of a situation or a fact, I feel stretched, sensing a much larger „I“. An „I“ which can really hold and host what is going on in the world.
This is the second in a series of editorial - in this case personal — reflections on #5MaD, Joana Breidenbach is one of the editors. For comments and feedback tweet to @joanabp
Also read:
Introducing 5 Minutes a Day
How to practice 5 Minutes a Day
