Meditation During Coronavirus

In times of intense experience, when we find our minds and emotions spinning out of control, meditation can be an enormous benefit. I’ve been doing this for over twenty years, and I’ve found it hugely helpful. I’m a Buddhist, and there are ways to make the practice religious—but it need not be. No one asked for this unsolicited advice, and I try not to promote even quasi-religious stuff. But this is a weird time in which many of us are having quite a hard time. Mindfulness meditation is a pretty helpful antidote, and so it also seems kind of wrong *not* to mention it, too. So here goes.

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Basic mindfulness meditation allows us to attune ourself to the activity of our mind so we are no longer a victim of it. The basic idea is that in watching experiences arise, we see two very revealing habits. One is the way in which we create our own realities. We do this by taking external circumstances and telling ourselves a story about them and then relating to that story as if it is reality. The second is not seeing the cycle of reactivity that feeds this process: we have a thought or experience, don’t see our emotional response to it but instead react, loading fuel onto the experience. So for example we read news about the virus and without realizing it, we begin a narrative that accelerates the anxiety, anger, or depression we initially felt.

Mindfulness meditation allows us to interrupt that cycle at the moment the first experience happens. Instead of feeding the emotion, we just put our attention on the experience itself. During this chaotic time, emotions are bubbling just beneath the surface, and we usually ignore them and do something we think will alleviate them. In mindfulness meditation, those bubbling emotions become the object of our attention.

The way you practice this meditation is pretty simple. Start by settling down in a comfortable position (usually sitting). Firmly place your attention on the activity of breathing. That could be what’s happening in your lungs, diaphragm, or nostrils—doesn’t really matter. You’re just looking for a place to firmly rest your attention. Try to establish your attention for a minute or two, focusing pretty firmly on the breath. If you become distracted, just bring your attention back the moment you realize your attention wandered.

After a minute or so, lift the single-minded focus on the breath and allow other experiences to arise. If you’re having strong emotions like anxiety or anger, don’t push them away, but allow them to unfold. They’ll probably spark that spin-cycle process of troubleshooting, our habitual tendency to try to manage our emotions by fixing something in the world. That’s fine. Let all of that unfold, just watching it. Don’t indulge the habit of troubleshooting, and instead bring your attention back to the bare emotion sparking it all.

If you get caught up in the narrative (in my meditation, this happens often), bring your attention back to the breath, placing it there firmly for a few breaths before widening your experience again. This is the most important part of the practice. Since we have spent a lifetime feeding the narratives, that’s become our habit. Here, we create a new habit of attention. So letting go of the distraction and bringing our attention back becomes the antidote. Over time, the spaces of presence and awareness increase, and the power of the spinning mind weakens.

What happens is we begin to see through our habits. We see that the emotions have lives—they abide and then dissipate naturally. If we don’t feed them, they lose some potency. Even if we go through a session and the emotions are still quite intense, we’ve begun the process of relating directly to the emotions rather than the story we tell about them, which is a radical experience. You can do this for as little as ten or 15 minutes a day and see an immediate lowering of the intensity of the emotional storm.

Stuff keeps happening in life to provoke more emotion, so this is not a magic trick that immediately brings sustained bliss. But most people experience measurable relief. And of course, the more often over the course of the day you can practice mindful awareness, the more relief you’ll experience.