On Wednesday nights, I bike my chaotic, noisy mind to the Schoolhouse Wellness Center and participate in one of the healthiest things I do all week: an hour-long meditation workshop.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world meditate daily, including a growing number of Americans. But what exactly is meditation? To get an answer for interested readers, I spoke with meditation instructor Chad Gorman over coffee over the weekend (at the always-great Terroir General Store in the Beauly Building).
Chad, a professor of illustration at Rochester Institute of Technology, also serves as the campus Buddhist chaplain and has practiced and taught meditation for over 20 years. He explained that “meditation is about being aware and observing your mind and its behavior, and not getting swept away by the habitual feedback of constant sensory input.”
In short, we all are. We think constantly, bombarded with relentless thoughts through work, phone calls, family, and the entire world around us. All of this creates a huge amount of unnecessary noise in our heads. If we could just take a few minutes a day to get it under control, we could breathe a sigh of relief.
“Meditating helps you see how short-lived and ephemeral thoughts are,” Chad explained, “Things aren’t as end of the world as you think they are, so you watch things move along. Meditation is moment-to-moment, present awareness. As soon as you think or see something, you know, oh, I’m thinking about something, oh, instead of ruminating, I’m thinking about something else. So it breaks the cycle of thinking.”
I learned a great lesson on this recently when I attended Chad’s workshop and heard the noisy sound of the air conditioner in the background. Chad was describing a meditation designed to quiet the noise in your mind. Suddenly, as if on cue, the air conditioner stopped. The monotony of noise was suddenly replaced by silence. There was a meditation, a transformation from a noisy mind to a quiet mind.
I asked Chad to explain what people can expect from his workshop.
“During meditation, you can stand, sit, walk or lie down – there is no wrong way to position your body. As I lead the meditation, I invite you to observe the thoughts you are having and how they relate to sensations in your body. In a guided meditation, you don’t just go blank. You actively follow a sequence that brings you back to the present moment, not where you were five minutes before you walked into the room.”
One thing I learned from Chad is that meditation is not about silencing the mind. It’s the mind that generates thoughts, just like the heart beats on autopilot and the lungs breathe. Chad teaches us that when a thought comes, we need to label it with a word or two so we can move on without getting hung up on the thought: a paper deadline, homework, worrying about the kids, feeling hungry, etc.
Meditation, as most people know, comes from Buddhism. So I asked Chad if meditation is a religion and how non-Buddhists feel about meditation. He explained, “Very few of the people I teach meditation to are Buddhist. You rarely meet Buddhists unless you go to a temple. So meditation is not just for Buddhists, it’s for all faiths.”
In fact, Chad describes meditation not as a religion, but as a practice like learning a hockey shot, a golf swing, or a musical instrument.
“It takes practice to observe the mind. It takes practice to breathe in a certain way. It takes practice to follow the breath through the body. It takes practice to notice how anger feels in your body. What does happiness feel like in your body? Do you feel anger as pressure in your chest? Do you feel love as pressure in your chest? What is the difference? A child touches the stove and you are angry at them. But you are not angry at them, you are worried about them. It’s about understanding what your emotions really are.”
If you’re interested in meditation and want to know what it’s like, there’s no better time than to stop by Chad’s session. Chad will be hosting sessions every Wednesday this summer from 6:30-7:30pm at the Schoolhouse Wellness Center (241 Garden St., Lockport, just off Vine Street and one block above the Erie Canal). Sessions are free. Check out the Schoolhouse Wellness Center Facebook page for the latest schedule updates.
