Meditashunned

Well whaddya know. A whole Oprah show about being happy. Once again it has become very clear, that I am not the only one suffering from this unhappiness plague. And after taking her quiz about what makes people happy, covering everything from jobs to sex to where I live, I came to one conclusion: If I want to be happy, I have to meditate or be Goldie Hawn. And since I’ve tried everything to become the latter with no success, I figured I’d try the former. 

Now I’ve attempted this whole meditation thing before. It’s a crucial aspect of yoga and probably the one thing that challenges me most when I’m on the mat. My significant other, “P”, does this every morning as well and finds great benefit in it, as I know thousands of other people do. But for me, meditating is just mega-frustrating. (And I hadn’t even attempted it at home yet.) But if Oprah says that just ten minutes a day will make me happy, then what the hell. I mean c’mon, if Oprah told me to guzzle gasoline, I’d probably do it. And what’s ten minutes?

I turned off the television, sat down cross-legged on the hardwood floor, and resting my hands on my knees with my thumb and pointer touching, I closed my eyes. I know that meditating is all about the breath. So that’s what I did - focused on the breath. I inhaled deeply through my nose and then out again. In through the nose, and back out. This wasn’t so bad. It was just breathing after all. I felt the air fill my lungs which naturally straightened my back. And as I felt the cool air come in and the hot air escape, I thought about how a buddhist monk once told me to imagine inhaling a white cloud of positive energy and to exhale the big, black puff of evil negativity. I wondered how if the good is inhaled and the bad is exhaled, what inside of us turned the good to bad? What smoke monster did I have lurking within my body? Was it like this corrupt cloud converter that worked like a machine inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory? And was it in my chest where the air was processed or was it in that convoluted brain of mine? And why did I go to that buddhist monk in the first place? Shit. I was thinking, not meditating. GO AWAY THOUGHTS!

Back to it. I had to focus! Really big inhale. Now really big exhale. Damnit! Now I’d blown snot out. Should I get up to get a tissue or would I have to start over then? Should I use my sleeve or did real meditators just leave the mucous all over their face? QUIT THINKING AND JUST MEDITATE! Quick sleeve action and I was back to it. Inhale. Exhale. In with the good. Out with the bad. I remembered that a friend told me that she took a meditation workshop and one of the techniques was to imagine pins zig-zagging through the breath in your body, poking holes in it from your head to your toes. So I zigged those pins right through every bit of air, so much so that I thought all my good air (or was it bad air?) must look like swiss cheese by now. Mmmmm....cheeeese. Cheese would be a great post meditative snack. How long did I have? Man it had only been six minutes! Shit! Now my eyes were open looking at the clock! How did that happen? Ugh. 

Ok. Four more minutes. I could do this. I squeezed my eyes shut and focused. In and out. In and out. I rubbed my thumb and fore-finger together to try to bring me into the present moment. I had a wicked hangnail I was dying to tear off, but no. I couldn’t. Not now. That could be my reward when I was finished. That and the cheese. Keep breathing. In and out. In and out. I eventually felt myself loosen up and relax a bit. Did that mean I had done it? Was I finished? How would I check the clock again without cheating and opening my eyes. I decided to count ten more full breaths and then I’d let myself check the clock. I’d begun to slump like Quasimodo, so I straightened up to make sure I did it completely correctly for a good ten breaths. 3. 2. 1. Oh good. I’d gone a whole extra minute. Did that mean I only had to do nine minutes tomorrow?

As I hopped up off the floor, thankful it was over, I wondered how I was supposed to feel. How long did it take for the happy to set in? Just a day? A week? A year? I wished it made me as instantly happy as this cheese did. I contemplated the possibility that the meditation had made me think about the cheese, and so maybe, in a really odd six-degrees-from-Kevin-Bacon-sorta-way, did the meditation actually bring me this little piece of cheesy happiness?? Yeah yeah. It’s a stretch. So I guess I’ll just keep trying this whole deep-breathing, snot-blowing exercise.  And in hopes that I find other happy tips, I’ll keep watching Oprah. And that makes me f**king happy.