Plate o' Shrimp

Confessions of a Meditation Snob

This week at school went very fast. I have labs two mornings a week and generally have three mornings that I can use for extra study time, but I lost two of those this week because of irregularly scheduled small group work for various classes. I feel like I am keeping my head above water, but that the water is definitely tickling my bottom lip. I signed up for a complementary medicine “selective” last week and had started to question the wisdom in participating as I watched many of my fellow classmates drop out of the workshop because they were already feeling the pressure mounting. Even though I am in med school, it will surprise none of you that I am hoping to get a 4.0 this semester—though considerably less confident about doing so than I was at UNM or SFCC. But I had a long talk with myself about not indulging my OCD and went to the workshop. Hearing MDs and members of the non-allopathic medical community speak about the intersections of those worlds reminded me why I got in this game in the first place. There was an MD from UT who ran an integrative medicine center who spoke about the empirical studies being done by allopathic physicians that verified the efficacy, utility and cost effectiveness of complementary therapies. There were also lectures by a researcher who used audiovisual stimulation to treat ADHD and biofeedback to treat test anxiety. The other presenters included a medical anthropologist who did his research in south Texas and Arizona gave a great presentation on curandismo and an OD who talked about the holistic approach of osteopathy. The afternoon concurrent workshops were less useful. My reflexology workshop consisted of a handout of basic reflexology points and the opportunity to squeeze an unknown class mates foot—in my case a young man who appeared to be of East Indian decent who was in second term and who assured all the anxious first termers around him that we would be okay, but that we should “just memorize everything.”
The second afternoon workshop was on the benefits of meditation—and the orientation and meditation instruction was VERY different from my experience of Zen. The presenter did talk about fear and greed being blocks to connecting to the divine.. but the basic instruction was to consciously connect to god or the divine that is everywhere… and well nobody ever told me to do that at HMZC. And the recommendation for an optimum meditation period was 3 minutes! I noticed my inner Zen snob rebelling against that!. It was also very hard for me to reach out for something and not simply follow my breath, count to ten and notice when thoughts came up. I struggled to connect to something larger than myself, noticed that I struggled, and noticed that I felt lonely and sad that I noticed that I struggled and had difficulty connecting to something larger than myself.

But I have come back refreshed and feeling like I have taken a holiday from my own academic version of checkbook mind—constantly measuring myself against my own expectations of how far I should have gotten and my hallucinations of how much more or less my classmates have accomplished. After comparing notes with a fellow med student across the hall and sharing with her my experiences in the meditation workshop, she asked me if I could teach her to meditate and I said yes. It would be really nice to have someone to sit with on a regular basis.

So life feels sweet—if a little bitter sweet. I have bouts of loneliness, times when I feel I just won’t be able to keep up with the MASSIVE amount of information I need to take in. And there is a certain amount of fatigue I feel, being the good Meyers-Briggs style introvert that I am, a little run down being around people who seem great yet who but for a few exceptions I don’t quite know well enough to totally relax around or who don’t know my whole story. Everyone calls me Sarah here and I still think of myself as Sa.
Yet what I am studying is just amazing, the instruction is for the most part very good and the instructional support is innovative, integrated and ever present. And in a strange way I feel privileged to be able to take on all these stresses. Stress and massive change come into most people’s lives as unbidden and unwelcome visitors-- I chose the shape and form of mine and that, my friends, is divine.

posted by Sa @ 7:48 PM