You know how it is when you’re not really paying attention…You’re just going about your life and some bit of information keeps crossing your consciousness? This is what happened to me with meditation.

For the past few years the benefits of meditation were repeatedly brought to my attention via disparate sources: a segment on NPR, watching a friend’s path take her there, advice from a mentor, etc.

When Janaki’s workshop was offered, I was ready to learn more. It was the “making it a daily practice” aspect that particularly appealed to me.

Since the workshop, I’ve practiced meditation nearly every day at least once. It’s been about three weeks and I’m enjoying the subtle changes I feel. Somehow, I’m more centered and grounded. I take the few seconds necessary to think before I speak or act more than I did before. For me it’s directly connected to the breathing. I take a deep breath into my diaphragm and my mind relaxes and opens.

A dear friend of mine who also participated in the workshop told me with such surprise and gratitude on her face that she hadn’t had a single fight with her daughter since she began meditating. Before then and for the past few months, she’d been struggling in her relationship with this bright and challenging nine-year old. The child even kept a folder in her room labeled “The Mommy Files,” which was full of my friend’s “wrongdoing” according to her daughter. My friend reports that through her practice of meditation, she realizes that those fights were only able to happen because she was reacting to her daughter and taking things personally. Since then, she listens more and reacts less. Consequently, they rarely conflict now.

Janaki Pierson (front row, third from left) facilitated the two-day “Introduction to Meditation” workshop, November 11-12.

It seems to me that everything we experience in life is understood and made manifest in our minds through our filters. The practice of meditation is the quieting of the mind, and somehow, the more I practice quieting my mind, the more space I leave for being open and present. If my mind were a linear spectrum, then at one end there is experience through filters and at the other is open, present experience — things as they are — reality unadorned and untransformed by embellishment or interpretation. This includes quieting all judgment.

It’s all a lot easier said than done. Especially shutting off the judge. Meditation brings to consciousness for me the simple fact that she’s there. I try to make friends with her. I know she thinks she’s working in my best interest, so I pull up a chair and ask her to sit down — tell her that I don’t need her right now. In the past, I’d offered to move her and her people to the Bahamas for an extended vacation but it never worked. She’s very controlling and doesn’t want to miss anything. So, the chair image is working better for me. She seems pretty content to sit there and observe without comment.

Janaki’s presentation of the concepts related to meditation were completely accessible. She’s quite a lovely human being in that she exhibits her humanity with each story she tells and each interaction she has with others. I felt that she taught by example as much as by imparting information through words.