Month: June 2015

“Meditation” is being popularized by media, but the technique is not meditation but “relaxation.” The distinction arose with the 1975 book The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson, a Harvard University cardiologist who had devised scientific criteria to account for stress and anxiety signs and presented a scientific method for overcoming them in average people. Today, the business, corporate, and institutional sectors of the modern economy are touting what they call “meditation” to its employees. Reducing stress and anxiety allows employees to work harder for less, ignore ethical complications, and simply cope. (One U.S. commenter on Amazon lauds the book’s techniques for their ability to reduce stress and anxiety when on military night patrols during his tour in a war zone in the Middle East.) The methodology is relaxation, decidedly not meditation.

Since nearly everyone in modern urban technological society suffers from stress, anxiety, and forms of depression due to wrong livelihood, environment, relationships, goals, values, and social problems, proposing and teaching relaxation can be lucrative. Medical approbation makes the relaxation industry even more likely to be successful financially and in terms of swaying public interest.

Here is a representative example of relaxation masquerading as meditation, taken from no less than the Mayo Clinic website (but this is just an example and not intended to specifically malign the entity; examples are everywhere). On one visit to the website, the video was accompanied by an ad for Abilify, a powerful anti-psychotic drug (the website disclaims the ad as advertising, not endorsement). The problematic title “Need to relax? Take a Break for Meditation” alerts the viewer/reader to a contradiction. In the first place, no one can meditate watching a video (perhaps they can relax). Staring at a candle flame is not a meditation technique, but an advanced yoga eye exercise. And the ongoing breathing patterns and self-affirmations, while popularized in some circles, is generally a great distraction to true meditation because it requires mental interruptions. The valediction saying “return to a peaceful day” exemplifies the institutionalized use of relaxation to get workers (or equivalent) back to their jobs and carry on as prescribed.

The conflation of relaxation and meditation, of a pragmatic psychological method and a spiritual practice undermines the goals of both methods, but relaxation remains the more problematic in not seeking the more fundamental roots of anxiety.

TRANSCRIPT:

Need a few minutes to relax?

Get comfortable in your chair. Loosen any tight, uncomfortable clothing. Let your arms rest loosely at your side. Allow yourself a few moments to relax.

If your thoughts wander, just let them while gently moving your attention back to the relaxation. If you become anxious or uncomfortable, stop the relaxation by clicking on the pause button.

To begin, focus your eyes on the candle flame. Notice its simplicity and its beauty.

Take time to notice your breathing, gradually slowing down the rate of inhaling and exhaling as you become more comfortable.

Now relax and enjoy the feeling.

Close your mouth and relax your shoulders, releasing any tension that’s built up.

Inhale slowly and deeply through your nose. Let the air you breathe in push your stomach out.

Hold your breath in as you slowly count to four.

Breathe out slowly through your mouth as you continue counting up to six.

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three and four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Continue breathing in (four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

And out (three, four, five, six).

Remember, if stray thoughts enter your mind, gently return your attention to the relaxation.

Now, as you breathe out, silently and calmly repeat to yourself:

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is easy and calm.

My breathing is easy and calm.

It feels very pleasant.

If you’d like, you may close your eyes now and focus on the music, or continue to look at the flame.

Continue to repeat to yourself:

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

I am peaceful and calm.

I am peaceful and calm.

Continue to take deep, rhythmic breaths. Let the tension fade away each time you breathe out. Let the music soothe you.

If you’ve closed your eyes, gently open them and gaze at the candle flame.

Return to your day peaceful, more focused and relaxed.

Perhaps reflective of the cultural mentality and spiritual crisis of the turn of the 20th-century and earliest decades thereafter, all of Hermann Hesse’s fiction reflects an autobiographical exploration of self and destiny. The protagonist of each story and novel seeks, first, the limits of self, aesthetically, morally, and physically, in order to discover exactly what they are and what they should think.

This questing, with its mythical connotations, is what attracts readers to given works of Hesse, while his succession of works present protagonists in new and different settings using the same theme. Ultimately, each protagonist’s quest for self is not “out there” in the different physical settings of each story and novel but spiritually within the self. The self was always accessible had the character looked inwardly. But Hesse dramatizes the quest in the real world, in the circumstantial world that we all face by necessity, before resolving his hero’s dilemma. Each quest, like the mythic quest described by Joseph Campbell and others, must end in self, as it began, but in Hesse, the rediscovery of self is not the discovery of a new strength or a new awareness so much as what Hesse translator and editor Jack Zipes refers to as a return to “home.”

This aspect is particularly vivid in Hesse’s fairy tales, written in the first two decades of the 20th century. In “The Forest-Dweller,” a young man defies the prevarications of elders to venture outside of the tribal boundaries, and, discovering that he can survive after all, he never returns. In “The Painter” a man takes up painting as an avocation but while away from his apartment returns to discover crowds eagerly milling about his apartment to see the paintings of the now-famous artist. The crowd interprets the paintings wrongly, misunderstands their themes, even misidentifies the objects portrayed, but they bid and buy and trade them. The painter, in disgust, quits the place and does not return. And in “Faldum,” a stranger appears at the village fair performing magic that grants anyone whatever they wish, first arousing vanity but progressively stirring malice, greed, and violence among the townspeople who demand their wish. A young observer, deeply affected, wishes to be far away and lofty like a mountain, and he becomes exactly that, arising just outside the old town, dispassionately watching it grow and decline over the years, watching the forests and its denizens, and the river and clouds from his welcomed solitude and disengagement, finally sensing his numbing consciousness wane in the course of the sun, moon, and stars overhead.

These stories ranged from the early 20th-century to the end of World War I (which experience turned Hesse into a pacifist, another form of disengagement from the world, but that is another theme). In another story of that era (1907), titled “The Wolf,” Hesse presents the plight of the small group of misfits, a hated pack of wolves, eking out existence in a harsh mountain in winter with the whole of (human) society set against them, eager to exterminate them. Here, too, with the protagonist, is Hesse the writer, the solitary, the seeker after self, the seeker after a home. All of these stories have a contextual merit as literature but also a subtle appeal to the solitary, to anyone who seeks home in this world.