By Frances Claer Raybaud
Do not expect me to wax poetic about gathas or belly breathing. This is merely a little piece dedicated to a class all Queens College Macaulay students are required to take. Honors 101, or Honors Colloquium, involves planning out the next four years of your life, studying techniques, and even a little de-stressing the old-fashioned way. That’s right, meditation. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Now, I consider myself to be generally a spiritual person. I mean, I’m not winning any awards for being Zen, but I do check my horoscopes once in a blue moon – even if it’s mostly posts on Tumblr. Imagine my surprise when the most stressful class on my roster- and this is my first semester, and I’m taking Arabic (for laughs, can you believe I took a class that gives you extra points on the Foreign Service exam due to its sheer difficulty for LAUGHS)- happens to be the class meant to help me with all of that. It has nothing to do with the quality of the class. My professor was marvelous, very understanding even when I on multiple occasions mouthed off. I just couldn’t freaking meditate. To demonstrate, here are a few of the meditations we were supposed to try out:
- Walking Meditation: Children, try walking at the pace of an elderly person on their way to bingo. Oh no, that’s not slow enough. Have you ever seen a dead turtle move? Oh, about at that pace. Just focus on how excruciatingly slow this walking is. As sloooow as possible. Yes, children. Even if you were raised in Manhattan and have been rushing to the subway and weaving through tourists in Times Square since you were 11 years old, just take a breath and slow down.
- Belly Breathing: Breathe in and out very fast, but don’t hyperventilate. Hyperventilate, but make sure not to hyperventilate. If you so wish, you can even bend your elbows and literally do the chicken dance that you recognize from that one episode of Jimmy Neutron.
- Body Scan: Think about your body. Relax, and bring attention to your feet, your toes, your ankles…moving up your body…do not be distracted by how nasty your shoes look today, or whether you’ve shaved recently, or the incredibly hot guy across the classroom, or that strange beluga whale noise that no one else appears to be hearing. Just focus on your breathing and your body.
- Okay, I can’t remember anything but the beluga whale noise now. It has still not been explained. No one else seems too concerned about what could literally be a beluga whale hovering outside the classroom crying for help.
We had to write logs, and every week for a month I had to painstakingly attempt to get through reciting a gatha to myself, which is this banal poem meant to help you focus on yourself. All I could think about (which was supposed to be nothing in particular besides my breathing) was that Sylvia Plath could have done better while clipping her fingernails. I got stressed just thinking about not thinking!
I think my main problem lay in that meditating literally feels like doing absolutely nothing. It is self-care, and I have never found taking care of myself to be that important. Why moisturize when I could spend time writing and just have ashy skin? Why get a flu shot if I need to study? I have break in a couple weeks, I’ll just get the flu then and lie around in bed. Honestly, why should I care about my mortal vessel when my soul is doing just fine? There, told you I was spiritual.It wasn’t until our last class that meditation finally got me. I’d been stressing about a million different things related to upcoming finals and papers, friends away at school who weren’t doing so hot, and even my hair, from which the green dye has been fading at a rather slow, nasty, meditative pace. My head’s the color of an overripe olive. So I was stressing hard, and rolling my eyes at the thought of another two minutes staring at my desk, and then my long-suffering professor had us stand.
It wasn’t until our last class that meditation finally got me. I’d been stressing about a million different things related to upcoming finals and papers, friends away at school who weren’t doing so hot, and even my hair, from which the green dye has been fading at a rather slow, nasty, meditative pace. My head’s the color of an overripe olive. So I was stressing hard, and rolling my eyes at the thought of another two minutes staring at my desk, and then my long-suffering professor had us stand.
We began stretching, hands above the head, neck rolls, shoulder rolls, the works. I was so busy concentrating on what I was doing that I forgot about everything I had to do, or hadn’t done. I wasn’t thinking about anything but my body and the breath. It was…calming. Like herbal tea, or Hozier. I didn’t even realize it was over until I cracked open an eye and noticed everyone was going to sit back down. I did it. I meditated. It was just stretching and breathing, but I was feeling remarkably less anxious about everything and almost tranquil. I immediately grew suspicious, but I hadn’t consumed anything recently that could have been drugged. It had to be the meditation. Unbeknownst to me, I had finally accomplished what I had been, if not striving, at least sort of trying to do all semester. Dr. Dedow was on the laptop, or I would have caught her eye and genuinely smiled at her for the first time in weeks. As it was, I had to settle for kicking Greg’s chair and hissing “I did it!”
And there you go, folks. Meditation is a mixed bag, and I might not work on it, but it’s enough knowing that it’s a possibility now. If I ever feel the need to flap my arms like a chicken, or think really hard about my knees, it’s an option.
