MEDITATING

There has been a lot of talk and talk about meditation, especially in recent decades, and I would like to relate my own experience.

Meditation is a practice that leads us to calm the mind, which is always and perpetually overwhelmed with thoughts, and to shift, to focus, our attention on a single element external or internal to us.

There are many benefits of meditation the first of which is its ability to help us calm down and thus reduce stress.

With stress reduction and calmness, there is also an actual benefit of meditation, and that is the reduction of the sense of pain, including physical pain.

This is a much debated point in general; however, with regard to meditation I want to express what I have experienced first-hand over the years and especially in recent weeks.

I started meditating many years ago. Sometimes I reduce the time I dedicate to this practice, sometimes I do not find any time at all, sometimes it actually helps me.

A few weeks ago I started meditating again for a few hours a day in an attempt to reduce the stress of often negative thoughts related to an unexpected surgery I had to undergo.

The surgery was then very long (more than 7 hours) and brought with it a whole series of very painful after-effects. From the first day after surgery, especially during the night, which was always very long, I wore my headphones and did meditations that were intended to take me beyond that room and beyond that bed, mostly, at times, just to reduce the sense of pain.

While I was in hospital I read statements by the pianist Giovanni Allevi, precisely about the benefits of meditation for dealing with pain (given that we always have to rely on medication as well) and I fully understood his words.

I believe that meditation helps us to become aware even with our fears, with our pains, which we can manage to manipulate, if I may say so, by intervening from the inside and creating a special bridge across. Meditation has been very useful to me and still is in these post-operational days because it calms my mind, it reduces the stress caused by uncertainty and pain, it leads me to focus on parts of me that live in boundless environments. This is a concept that probably few people understand, except those who meditate or those who know that the ability to travel beyond the physical place in which we are confined is typical of meditation.

To meditate is to look within and into ourselves.

If we can make space in the midst of thoughts and feelings and stress, there is a peaceful and harmonious world. Peacefulness is an integral part of our mental set-up.

To get rid of stress, pain and worries we need at least a couple of things one of which is an open heart; the second, very important, is to silence the mind. It is often mistakenly thought that meditation is only part of certain religious disciplines and religions. Instead, meditation is simply making contact with a part of us that is as natural and true as possible by bypassing the superstructural web of thoughts and ideas that constantly populate it. If the mediation is done correctly it allows us to feel active energetic and joyful. Meditation is basically a spiritual practice, or rather a practice to reach a higher level of consciousness, that level of consciousness, calm and harmony that I mentioned earlier.

To make a long story short, meditation is a practice that helps us to affirm the mind, to keep calm when it threatens to fail us completely as in the case of situations of pain, uncertainty or deep stress.