Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset. ~ St. Francis de Sales

So over the last thirty years I have taken up meditating a dozen times. I like what it does, it takes some work for me, but there are definite benefits. But it seems that it’s also something I can easily get out of the habit of doing fairly easily. Well I’ve taken up meditating again, each night before I go to bed. Meditation definitely helps me sleep better and is one of the main reasons I return to it, again and again.

As with most things that I do, I try and read up on it, get some deeper insight into how best to do things. So I was reading an informative piece on meditation and it came up with a question, what do I do if my nose itches? The answer was of course you can scratch it, but first, try to scratch it with your mind. This completely pissed me off, I mean seriously, scratch it with your mind? I saw some amazing things when I was studying Qigong. Things that I could not easily scientifically explain. The most basic one was during our Tai Chi training our instructor would bring two scales to class. Before we practiced our forms he would have us step on the scales. Now two scales means that if you weigh 180 pounds, each scale should read 90 pounds. But inevitably it didn’t, people are unbalanced most of the time in the most fundamental sense. So you’d get on the scale and they would be 92/88 or even 95/85. Then we would do our Qigong exercises and practice our Tai Chi forms for the hour and then he’d have us step back on the scale and they would be 90/90 every time, actual physical evidence of the change that had occurred.

Sure, it’s likely related to tension in the body altering and inhibiting blood flow on one side of the body and the exercises and forms releasing the tension to even things out, but it was a pretty spectacular demonstration. Impressive yes, magic no, but still pretty damn cool. But Tai Chi and Qigong are not Jedi mindtricks you’re not using the force, so the line scratch it with your mind just seem to be the infusion of a lot of new age, hippie dippy horseshit and it annoyed the hell out of me.

Then the fact that it annoyed me so much got me thinking, why is this irritating me so much? And I realized that this was a tension deep in myself that I needed to address. I’ve been under a lot of stress at work over the last six or eight months and it has, to use a highly scientific term, made me prone to being cranky. I’ve been way too reactive to everything good and bad, I need to release this tension. And bam, like that I’ve got a very focused idea to use in my meditations each night. So I’ve been working on letting things go, an eternal battle for harmony that we all undertake. The nice thing about being older, is that it’s not my first rodeo and I have the tools to work on this. It’s part of the reason that one of the ways that I celebrated my birthday for the last couple of weeks was to really shutdown for a week and slowly start coming back to my routines.

Those few days of giving myself permission to do nothing and not holding myself to account for doing nothing was a great start. I’ve been able to reduce my reactions over the last couple of weeks. Not letting the idiots in traffic, or in line at the grocery or even at work set me off. Don’t get me wrong, I still speak up for myself, I’ll never be a doormat, but I’m reducing my reactivity. Which in return seems to be reducing my stress and no great surprise, I’m sleeping better.

My sleep routine that has been evolving for a time is now pretty well dialed in and seems to be working for me. Since I’ve gotten into the groove with this little routine I haven’t had a bout of insomnia, hoping I didn’t just jinx myself. But it’s pretty simple, being good about shutting down my work on electronics (laptop, phone) about a half hour before bed. Doing some back and other stretches and wrapping that all up so I can watch a little TV for 30 minutes with no other lights. Then, right before bed, five to ten minutes on my meditation cushion meditating. After that, in bed, reading a chapter of whatever my current book is before shutting everything down. Finally, I use two white noise machines to distract my mind as I lay down. This little routine seems to allow me to fall asleep pretty quickly and it’s been consistently working.

The point of this post is not an exposition on sleep routines or meditation practices, or even how to help yourself become less stressed and reactive. What it’s really about it paying attention to those things that irritate you. Dig deeper into them, because there’s a reason for why they are particularly irritating, there is something deeper there that you should dig out, you’re pscyche is screaming something at your conscious mind, but as your psyche often will, it doesn’t quite send the information in a straight forward fashion. So my friends, take some time to think about those irritations, and scratch them with your mind. ~ Rev Kane