Meditation, What It Is, and What It's Not
Plus disquieting lyrics, poorly executed acronyms, and a buffalo. Or a bison.
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Om. Om on the Range. Part One.
Kind of a non-smart headline on this item, I grant you. Just a pun that entered my head and now has entered yours. Wear a mask over your brain to prevent further infection.
This week’s episode is about meditation and its intended to spare the listener the long path I took to realizing its benefits. As I explain on the show, I’d gone to a meditation orientation session several years ago because I had heard it was good for stress and I had way too much stress. They had us do a lot of calm, guided breathing, and that was very nice. Then the guide talked about all the benefits of breathing, including the assertion that some people get so good at it that they can teleport around the world. Even in my calm state, I thought, “Well, nuh-uh.”
Then a couple years ago, shortly before covid, I took a class, at the suggestion of my therapist, in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction therapy. It’s a program pioneered by Jon Kabat Zinn and it’s not spiritual much at all. It uses some Eastern terminology here and there but it’s mostly about just calming the f down. It was great.
So I wanted to do an episode that made the whole enterprise less spooky. My Max Fun colleague, Laura House of Tiny Victories, has been teaching meditation for years and there just could not be a more down-to-earth, funny, and normal teacher than Laura.
We also booked Dr. Darshan Mehta, Medical Director at Benson Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Can you even imagine having a title that long? He knows this stuff from the medical side as well as anyone and he has a great line in the episode about how whenever meditation is written about in a major news outlet, there’s often an illustration or stock photo of a beaming white woman in a very specific yoga pose.
I sleep better since I started working on - or really just noticing - my breath.
Om. Om on the Range. Part 2.
No newsletter last week because I was driving a car for thousands of miles, pausing briefly to have an intensely emotional experience.
I was driving a car filled with stuff and people because my daughter was starting up at college in Washington. In a town in Washington. In a small city in the Pacific Northwest. Growing up as a resident of Washington and living there most of my life, I’ve always resisted referring to it as “Washington State” because why should that city with the Football Team be presumed to be the default Washington? I mean, just because it’s older and is the capital of the country? Okay, those are good reasons.
So I went out to Washington State.
This meant driving through North Dakota and Montana, lengthwise, twice. Yow. It was in North Dakota that I saw signs on the freeway for “Home on the Range”. I didn’t take the exit but wondered if I would have seen deer and antelope playing, and if so, which sport or board game? Would people be discouraged if I used the word “seldom”? Turns out Home on the Range, in North Dakota, is a rehab facility.
I did make sure to traverse NoDak in the daytime both ways. This was because I had driven it at night in the winter many years ago and it was horrible. The temperature had dropped to negative 20 degrees outside and I was the only car on the freeway for long stretches. I called my wife from the road because I had begun to wonder if I was, in fact, dead and this was a tedious afterlife and possibly Hell. “Just pull over at the next exit,” she said. “Get something to eat, stretch your legs.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “There is no exit. There would be nothing to eat. It’s so cold that if I stretched my legs, they might snap off.”
So yes, do that drive in the day.
State Songs
I was going to put this video of Washington’s state song in the previous item but then I heard the opening lyrics, possibly for the first time.
“This is my country. God gave it to me.”
It’s a bad song in every way: melody, lyrics, all of it. That’s why there was a semi-serious and nearly successful effort in the 80s to change the state song to this one, which was haphazardly assembled from scrap parts in Washington:
In terms of white guys doing semi-Caribbean accents, this was way ahead of The Police.
It’s kind of a punk song, really, but from a time when punk involved matching cream-colored jackets.
I’m Probably the Jerk Here
So there’s a new program in Michigan high school athletics called “Be Nice”. It’s meant to promote better mental health understanding and get more students the help they need.
These are laudable goals. I hope the program has every success. I really do.
It’s just…
Nice isn’t just a way to behave. It is also a pneumonic that helps coaches understand what to do: “Notice, Invite, Challenge and Empower.”
“It’s real simple. ‘Notice,’ notice what is good, what is right so I can notice what is different. ‘Invite’ myself to start a conversation, invite myself to let the person know what I noticed in them that I see that’s not typical behavior … ‘Challenge’ that person to talk about it. Challenge that person to possibly get resources and at that point I’m going to give resources,” Christy Buck, the executive director of the Mental Health Foundation of Western Michigan, told Snow. “‘E’ is for ‘Empowerment’ … empowering that individual with resiliency, acknowledging what protective factors they already have within themselves.”
To start with, they don’t style “Be Nice” as an acronym. So it seems like the mission is just to have people be nice. Which is, well, nice, but kind of toothless.
Then people are supposed to notice what is good so they can notice what isn’t?
Then they invite themselves to have a conversation with someone else about aberrant behavior? Again, good intentions, but a very thorny prospect here being undertaken by someone unqualified.
Challenge is next up. You’re supposed to challenge someone to “get resources”. Seems way too confrontational to me. Maybe GET them the resources or REFER them to a person? But then it would be Be Nige or Be Nire.
Finally, empowerment. And I don’t know what she’s talking about there.
Maybe there’s a better write-up on the Be Nice program. And certainly it’s well intentioned. And I REALLY hope it makes things better. Honestly. But it sure seems like a mess.
