Meditation in the MRI Machine
I'm just back from DHMC, where I spent an hour in the MRI machine having my brain scanned for any hint of a tumor regrowth. I'm 7 years out from surgery, and I don't actively worry about this tumor coming back, because statistically, they rarely do. Not actively worrying doesn't mean that worry doesn't lurk in the wings, however. Judging by last night's dreams, worry was alive and well in my sleeping brain right up until my alarm went off at 5:30 this morning. Still, it wasn't until the doctor at my follow-up walked in with a wide smile and declared my scan "pristine" a few hours later that I felt my whole being truly let go of the murmurings of anxiety that have been tugging at me for the past couple of years.
Funnily enough, my time actually in the machine was quite lovely and peaceful. There is raucous, jackhammering noise throughout, but it kind of drowns out the tinnitus that otherwise can distract me when I'm meditating. And that is what I do in the machine, from the very first brain scan back in 2011—meditate. I can't escape the noise, so I employ a technique that I use daily to manage my tinnitus: I go right into it. I dive into the center of that sound and I let it permeate me. I envision the sound saturating and illuminating my brain tissue to expose what is there. My defenses drop, I am open, and I let myself be seen.
In that space, I feel simultaneously entirely vulnerable, and entirely safe.
Even though I meditate daily, I consider myself a beginner. As with yoga, I would like my practice of meditation to be a place where worry drops with a thud at my feet, leaving me free to reside in a place of unbounded awareness. But there is a lot of junk that clings stubbornly to my psyche. Meditation for me includes a fair amount of mental wrestling.
This morning, right before I went into the tube, I remembered that part of letting go is not pushing away whatever arises. Letting it have its voice helps weaken its hold.This process is so much easier within a physical practice, like yoga asana. Moment to moment, a physical practice demands our focus, persistence, attendance. The mind is given task after task in partnership with the body. At the very least, worry is temporarily muted. With a really good practice, the effect has staying power. I'm finding as I get older, that the effects of meditation have even more staying power.To me, they will always be companion practices.
Whatever your practice, yoga, meditation, contemplative traditions of all kinds:
Be Soft in Your Practice
Be soft in your practice, think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go on its way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you there.
—Sheng-yen
Love,
Leslie