• Photos
  • Bio
  • Contact Ian

Ian Sidden

Subscribe

  • Email
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Craft
  • My News
  • About the Music
  • The Rest of Life

Meditation Is and Isn’t Relaxing

When Your Mind Makes Space for the Scary Stuff

February 24, 2018 By Ian Sidden

When I meditate, I tend to focus on the easy inflow and outflow of breath as well as the relaxation of muscles unnecessary to the pose. If I’m sitting, then what’s required? If I’m lying down, then what’s really required? Let go of everything unnecessary, and a kind of clarity enters the picture. Thoughts come and go, often feeling like passing clouds obscuring present awareness. With practice, they are easier to let pass, and that is genuinely relaxing.

And then what? At least for me lately, I’ve begun hitting bedrock fears. The mundane thoughts having been let go of, my mind makes space for what feel like deathbed fears. The fear of my own mortality. The mortality of the people I love. The awareness that everything will end and is in the process of ending right now.

This is not relaxing, and I have ended several of my meditation sessions in the past few months in tears. And I don’t exactly know how to move beyond this other than by staring at it and using the same meditation techniques that got me to this point. Observe. Let go. Observe. Let go.

Even if letting go feels wrong, even if it feels like failure, I have to trust that there is something on the other side beyond these fears that’s worth it.

If there was anything I learned from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, it’s that we are going to face these fears at some point by choice or by circumstance. Best to try and work through them ahead of time as best we can. Even if it’s not relaxing at first.

Filed Under: The Rest of Life Tagged With: fear, Meditation, mortality

Meditation Practice

November 7, 2015 By Ian Sidden

 

IMG_3581

Since I began my morning routine, I’ve dedicated at least ten minutes most mornings to a sitting meditation practice. This is very simple; I sit cross-legged on a pair of pillows and gaze out my living room window. I do not close my eyes. In front of me sits a small Siddhartha Buddha that my mother gave me on a crystal clock that was a gift from a former voice student. Once there, I “meditate”, and a meditation-timer-application on my phone chimes at certain intervals.

In general, I follow the meditation instructions laid out in What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula:

You breathe in and out all day and night, but you are never mindful of it, you never for a second concentrate your mind on it. Now you are going to do just this. Breathe in and out as usual, without any effort or strain. Now, bring your mind to concentrate on your breathing-in and breathing-out; let your mind watch and observe your breathing in and out…Forget all other things, your surroundings, your environment; do not raise or eyes and look at anything. Try to do this for five or ten minutes.

This is a basic concentration exericse. I’m not very good at it, to be perfectly honest. I began meditating off and on about ten years ago, and even so, my mind wanders. I do catch myself reaching for my coffee sometimes or staring at some detritus on the floor before I snap out of my mental wandering and return to the task at hand.

What has changed is my sense of the objective. Before, I was looking for some far out experience. Maybe I might feel euphoria or have some blinding insight or even a hallucination. Nowadays, I’m just trying to be present and dodge the self-congratulatory or self-deprecating thoughts that tend to arise and take me out of my immediate surroundings. Whether good or bad, those self-referential thoughts vainly arise to build some kind of edifice of the self that is permanent and unchanging.

When they become too much, I’ve learned to shut them down momentary with a loud mental “HERE” that reconnects me to the present. When I’m successful at this, it proves to me the words of Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche:

As water clears when undisturbed, mind clears when undisturbed.

And from this point, if I ride this state of calm well enough, any insights tend to feel minor and obvious, and they are known without the mental trumpets blaring congratulations. It’s more of an internalized “huh” or check mark, and then I move on, knowing more clearly that many meditation practicioners have tread similar paths before and know things that I currently don’t but someday might.

I write this in hopes that, if you have considered meditation, you give it a try. Now, I do have a Buddhist perspective, but you don’t need to worry yourself about that. Meditation is not strictly Buddhist or religious in nature. You don’t even need to sit cross-legged unless you want to.
It’s very basic, and I suppose at it’s core it’s just you trying to be patient with yourself for a set amount of time with as few external distractions as possible.

This should be possible, but as I can attest, it’s harder to do once attempted. Many people after giving up the practice say something along the lines of “Meditation isn’t for me. I’m not the type. I tried, and it didn’t work.” But that’s more or less true for everybody. Sitting quietly with yourself is challenging, and it’s especially challenging if you have some goal in mind for what you want meditation to do to you.

There’s no real goal except those that you set for yourself, and any waypoints I’ve reached have felt very mild. I will not list any potential external benefits of meditation beyond saying this: there is something worthwhile about it. But it’s not a drug. It’s not going to fix your life in one go. It’s not going to make you a bunch of money. It can be easy some days and hard on others. It can be deadly boring. It is challenging. It can be sad or happy or frustrating. It can be nothing at all.

It’s just life, more quietly lived, in the present, in your own head, where you always are.

Filed Under: Craft, The Rest of Life Tagged With: Meditation

About Ian

Ian Sidden is currently a baritone member of the Theater Dortmund Opera chorus. Read More…

Latest Posts

Premiere: La muette de Portici

Tonight at Theater Dortmund, we’re having our premiere of Auber’s La muette de Portici. However, it will be a closed performance.

The Stress Feedback Loop

Anything can turn into a habit if we practice it enough, and we walk around with habitual physical stress making us feel and sound stressed.

“Im weißen Rössl” Morning After

Last night, we had the premiere of “Im weißen Rössl” at Theater Dortmund. I don’t think I’ve ever heard our audience laugh as hard or as consistently as they did last night. The creative combination of the cast and Regie team has really made magic here. For my part, I enjoy singing the tunes, and […]

Solving Problems

One lens to view your task as a performer is as a problem solver.

Premiere: Madama Butterfly

Tonight is our premiere of Madama Butterfly in Opernhaus Dortmund. I’m playing Cio-Cio-San’s Uncle Yakusidé, and I’m very excited to be a part of this production.

Copyright © 2021 · WordPress