Category Archives: Emotional Practice

A practice meant to alter one’s emotional state.

Practicing Aerobics, Frugality, and Sustainability

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About four years ago I started riding a bike.  Gas had got up to about $3.50 per gallon, and I was (and still am) driving a Honda Pilot – a 15 mpg gas guzzler.

When I was a kid, I was riding my bike with a friend along a busy highway.  We went up from the road onto the sidewalk, but my rear tire stayed on the road and I wiped out into the right hand lane of the highway.  Fortunately there were no cars behind me and I just got scraped up.  But it scared me, and I quit riding my bike on the road.

So I wasn’t an enthusiastic biker.  My desire to save money outweighed my fear of the road.

I had a heavy duty basket put on the front of my bike, and two saddle bag baskets installed on the rear.  The saddlebags are good for lighter weight, more voluminous stuff. The front basket can haul an amazing amount of weight, at least 50 and maybe even 100 pounds.  The mitigating factor is my ability to hold it steady on the road.

At first I used the bike for short trips to the grocery.  Gradually I became more confident and began to take longer trips.  I just tried to keep the pedals moving.  I began to enjoy it.

About the only time I take the car now is if I have a passenger, I’m pressed for time, or severe weather.  Otherwise I’m biking – joyfully.

I have gradually realized many benefits from riding the bike.  I don’t just ride the bike for exercise; I’m always trying to get somewhere, either run an errand, go to work, or visit someone.

That is, I’m accomplishing transportation I would otherwise need my car for, as well as getting exercise.  And that’s nearly every day.  I mean, how often do you go a day without getting into the car?

Meditation and Emotional Affect

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Affect is that term psychologists use when the rest of us would use words like attitude, outlook, or mood – a positive or negative disposition.

How’s your affect?  For years mine was passionate, anxious, and irritable.  I complained, criticized, and always expected the worst.

But now I am seldom anxious, accept myself where I am, and expect to bless and be blessed.  What happened?

Well I saw some good therapists, gradually became more self aware, accepted who I was, and began to meditate; more or less in that order.

But what I believe has had the greatest impact on my emotional state is meditation.  For years I was on medication for anxiety.  Now my only prescription is roughly ten minutes of meditation, three times per day.

The fruit of this meditation has been equanimity.  It didn’t happen all at once.  But with regular practice over the course of maybe 60 days, noticeable changes began to take place.

Moreover the meditation itself has been a process of experimentation, observation, and modification.  As you probably know, there are a myriad of ways to meditate.  Some work better for me than others.  I’ve tried:

  1. transcendental meditation,
  2. observation of the breath,
  3. various kinds of pranayama or yogic breathing,
  4. Chanting via kriya yoga.

The last has worked best for me; surprisingly so.  If my therapist had not assigned it for homework, I never would have tried chanting.  But chanting may not work best for you.  And there are many modes of meditation I still haven’t tried.

The empirical evidence is growing of the many positive benefits of meditation.  Moreover there is also growing evidence that positive affect leads to a higher quality of life in general.

I encourage you to try some sort of meditation, and to keep trying and experimenting until you find a method that works for you.  Especially if you, like me, suspect yourself of having a negative disposition.

Serenity through Practice

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It occurs to me that what this blog is all about is maintaining equanimity in the face of an increasingly chaotic world.  That’s what practice inevitably leads to: a sense of certainty and security that stems from knowing what this day will bring: that is, our practice.

I guess that may not seem like much comfort to someone who may be about to lose their job.  But perhaps we place too much of our happiness in a position contingent upon job outcomes, or job status.

Not that we shouldn’t expect happiness from our work, but that it is rather only a part of our happiness, and our happiness needn’t come to an end just because our job does.

I think you can draw a link between equanimity and certainty of practice.  Maybe the equanimity comes directly from meditation, but I suspect it comes as well from the expectation that, whatever else happens today, I can rest in the knowledge that I Will Do My Practice – and that’s powerful.

It grows in power as we grow in our practice.  As our daisy-chain of days practiced lengthens, so does our expectation of doing the practice and our confidence from having done the practice.

What make the Five Tibetans so powerful for me are not their rigor, not that they make me physically powerful, but rather their very simplicity and ease of accomplishment.  I know that as sure as the sun rises, I can rise to do the rites; and therein lays their power.  They are rigorous enough to keep me healthy, and short and simple enough for me to consistently do them every day.

To the extent that I can develop such a practice in each domain of my life, to that extent I will have an expectation of accomplishment: that the house is neat and clean from having a place for everything, and everything in its place; of emotional equipoise that comes from meditation; of health from yoga and bike riding; of financial health from budgeting, saving, and investing; of mental health from reading, writing, and model building; of spiritual health from reading scripture, prayer, worship, and fellowship; of social health from broadening and deepening connections.

These expectations are what serenity is made of.