Meditation/Mindfulness is a can of worms IF you go chasing the science. 'Tis very hard to tie down in way of effects as 'feelings' aren't statistics.
As a lifestyle I tend to be a tad hostile to because of the oft association with ethereal metaphysics.
Gautama Buddha -- I'm looking at you, kid.
But I've always appreciated the Zen-ness of conscious movement.
Static or sedentary meditation is so unlike me and my fidgets.
Since I do come from an age when Biofeedback was the fashionable rage -- at least in my 'hood -- I defer to the physiology of conscious slowness, breath and heart rate.
While working in mental health, I'm no stranger to relaxation therapies, which are essentially guided meditations.
But over time I became interested in drone sounds and especially Sufi rhythms -- plying at me from Bandung to Timbuktu. This drew me to an interest in frame drums -- especially the Daf.
I love the Daf because it is not essentially religious despite its pitter-pattering.
Then I moved onto soundscapes. And that, my friends, was a revelation which is now an addiction. Anything with water -- rain, stream or sea -- turns me 'off' in the nicest way. 'Tis a great way to dose off...accompanied by meteorology or aquatics.
Recently, with my uptake of a sort of martial artzy tai chi form thru my stick (fighting) interests, I found a certain Zeniness in Afrobeat. This surely indicates that music and mediation are not strange bedfellows.
Yes, despite Afrobeat's up-beat and funk.
Just ask the Sufis or them whirling Dervishes. Music can rule the brain waves.
Of course, nowadays, 'meditation' is a commodity. It's like musack for the soul. With voice-overs, pipe organs and twittering birds. En route, it has been packaged as lifestylism.
But what I found -- subjectively -- is that the movement regimes I was pursuing -- the 'forms' -- plus the audio -- were enriching my awareness, focus and concentration.
Indeed, I reckon moving meditation exists in another altogether different plane from the sit-down/cross-legs stereotype we are so often presented with. Moving is not nothingness. You dive into your body rather than transcend out of it.
As a once-upon-a-time addicted jogger you can kick in moving your bod forward after about 2 ks once habituated.
Tai chi, for instance, is often called moving meditation -- but that attribute is so often misdirected with all the mumbo jumbo of chi energy flows.
I may be no Taoist, but I too can listen to my own body.
For decades I have preferred to call this listening 'movement awareness'. (Yes, I do know my Feldenkrais catch phrases too). For me it is the dialectics of human motion.
"In thought and movement
How express and admirable"
Says Hamlet --the dilettante -- but he does have a point if it is your thought and your movement under consideration.
My long time aesthetic mentor -- Bertolt Brecht -- was obsessed with the beauty of human labour and wrote poems about it. In a meditation-like way he asked us to step back and 'alienate' ourselves from our here and now.
Rather than some mystical ether, he sort to showcase the human condition under capitalism while celebrating our humanity and potential.
That's the trick, isn't it? The German word is better: Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt. That's preferably translated as estrangement effect.
Stepping back: sort of objectifying.
Anyway, to cut a long story short...I guess I've been a long time Verfremdungseffekt aficionado. Despite myself, I've kept experimenting with many means to turn on the V-effekt.
Even unconsciously...or rather unwittingly.
Recently I came upon a lateral take on meditation which described it as 'detachment' -- and I think that's a great take on the DIY.
So here I am -- today -- in pursuit of estrangement -- doing my martial artzy stick drills when it recently occurred to me that I'd passed another tool option back in the day: Jawharp-ery.
Back then, I took up the jawharp(aka jewsharp) on my way to the harmonica. But the jawharp is a sort of Daf drum(?) in the mouth.
This revelation has occurred because I'm deafish and should always be wearing hearing aides. To compensate, I switched my listening pleasure to vibration earphones so I can listen to music and podcasts better.
Indeed eared up like this is how I do my stick drills.
There is no 'sound' as such, but rhythms and pitch pass to my listening brain through vibrations in my skull. Better than airwaves.
What a revelation!
With the jawharp your head produces the sound cadences because you have this lump of metal or bamboo stuck (and plucked) in your mouth chamber.
And jawharp meditation is a thing across many cultures: both for the player and listener BUT primarily for the player.
How about that!?
"For even a Jew’s harp may be so played as to awaken all the fairies that are in us, and make them dance in our souls, as on a moonlit sward of violets; But what subtle power is this, residing in but a bit of steel, which might have made a penny nail, that so enters, without knocking, into our inmost beings, and shows us all hidden things?"--Herman Melville
Imagine, if you will, you could pick up a tool -- an instrument -- and switch yourself ASAP into meditative mode anywhere, anytime.
Just saying...It's the behaviourist in me.
As a player you listen to the vibrations resonating in your own head. And that, my friends, is the same principle of your Daf and your Tibetan Buddhist bowls.The percussive response.
Says I, anyway.
And there has to be a Pavlovian effect over time and with practice.
The other attribute of the Jawharp as mediation is the breathing pattern -- which, along with the drone -- is why it is so popularly paired with the didgeridoo. That's the duo:didge and jawharp.
So long as you don't fall down the Trance music or shamanistic rabbit hole -- big in the jawharp scene, especially in the Russian federation -- you are doing real good by your noggin and parts south of it.
As for the 'science' of meditation ...'tis a real mixed bag of maybes and a few proven facts... But I suspect that what you take into a meditative session in way of expectations will tend to rule what you could get out of it.
Looking for 'Om' is one thing, but if that's not your bag, it's a case of suck in and see -- while noting that living and moving about are physiological phenomena.
Now if you consider your movement can be 'detached' then you are in another dimension of activity experience. I have no patience with all this TM stuff because while no doubt personally useful it is subsumed by the principle of threshold that asks you to sink deeper and deeper into yourself to the exclusion of all else.
That may be great personal therapy, but such essentialism is a turning away from reality into the chemistry of brain waves. A sort of nothingness that tries to transcend society.
Movement on the other hand can be rooted in purpose.This is partly why so many movement meditative regimes have martial arts functions as they are justified by other serious needs. Worth a read is Zen and the Art of Archery if you want the spiritual take -- but the same processed phenomenon has been templated to other activities and sports: Zen of Running, Zen of Golf, and the well known 70s manifesto, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The everyday labour of your omnipresent anonymous peasant or worker has never (aside of Brecht) been something of Zen philosophical study. Brecht was much influenced by the Zen focus as much as an aesthetic as a means to move. But to tie it down as a DIY isn't so easy.
But I thought the option was best summarised by Jean Paul Marat, the radical of the 1789 French Revolution, who caught the substance when he said:
The important thing is to lift yourself up by your own hair; turn yourself inside out; and see the whole world with fresh eyes.
If you do some Feldenkrais homework you'll get a materialist angle on this especially as Moshe Feldenkrais was a leading early exponent of Judo in Europe. The Feldenkrais system is useful because it merges the conscious movement or posture with the physical changes wrought seemingly without awareness. It is indeed detachment in motion.
If you are still a bit bemused by this, read the inspiring book by Norman Doidge The Brain that Changes Itself -- and get into neuroplasticity.
The last chapter of Doidge's book articulates a challenge to remake our brains by dint of the organ's dialectical experience of the world -- the brain's ecology. How this may work was a major focus for the researches of Soviet Marxist and neuroscientist, Alexander Luria. Without giving in too much to my Luria love, the nitty gritty physiological process of brain learning and adaptation leads not so much to Om-ness but meditation as detachment.
It isn't so much meditation as mediation.
Doidge's thesis depends a lot on Luria's work as does many of the interventions explored by the late Oliver Sacks.
The brain is a living organ, not something you would seek to switch off. So, in a way, 'detachment', and 'mindfulness' and Verfremdungseffekt tells us more about its command than the 'meditation' cross-legged stereotype we default use in standard discourse.
Of related interest is Zurhkaneh (Pahlevani and zoorkhaneh) which, while one helluva workout, has meditative qualities related I suspect to Sufism.(Although the ritual predates Islam). Zurkhaneh is a communal activity, building on the social structure of a neighborhood, rather than the individualistic workout found in
Western gyms. Zurkhaneh combines martial arts, aerobic and some yoga moves to the accompaniment of live music.
For those into Indian clubs and Persian Meels the meditative effect of this kind of exertion is well known. Although, regrettably, they don't use the Daf -- although I suspect the Daf is maybe played in Zurkhaneh clubs in Kurdish areas.
Zurkhaneh (in Farsi, literally "house of strength") describes a place where Iranian men train for physical fitness. The Zurkhanehs originate from pre-Islamic times. The rhythmically laid out excercise units - predominantly based on gymnastics, with some use of club-like dumb-bells - are accompanied by a percussionist (Morshed) sitting on a raised platform. While drumming the Morshed recites original verses from the "Book of Kings" (Shahnameh) by the great Persian poet Ferdowsi. Since the Iranian-Islamic revolution religious content can also be part of the sung text.
