Stop doing!

When my son Zack was small, and I was busy with the myriad things young mothers are busy with, he used to pull on my pants leg and say, "Mommy! Stop doing!" We all thought it was awfully cute. Now I'm beginning to think he was on to something.

In Yoga Journal today there's an article about the ways Americans think they relax. In part, it says: "The majority of Americans are doing what I call default relaxation activities, which yield lower levels of process benefits," says author Schor, who's also a professor of sociology at Boston College. Process benefits are the pastimes correlated with higher levels of human satisfaction. "Watching TV and shopping, for example, are shown to have low process benefits," Schor says.

Mathur, the meditation teacher, says, "In modern society, when we say we're tired, we usually mean our mind is tired." Often, though, we fail to listen up and give it a rest. Instead, we hunker down on the couch with the remote in hand. "With TV, you're adding input rather than clearing out or cleansing. In a way, your mind is going to be even more tired when you're done."

Liz Newby-Fraser, academic dean at the California Institute for Human Science, explains this in physiological terms. "Watching two hours of television is not relaxation. With TV, there are stimuli that activate the sympathetic nervous system, rather than the parasympathetic, which is associated with real rest."

Hmm. My sainted grandmother, a painter, used to say that sometimes you need to take a day and just lie on the couch. I'm thinking hard about all this, and wondering if I have the backbone to cut out some things in order to free my creative mind, as we do in Savasana, Dead Man's Pose, in yoga. It's a pose we hold at the end of a practice, in which we lie as still as death, perfect rest, mind empty, body tired and relaxed.

What could we cut out? Restricting television is no problem for me. Restricting time on the internet or listening to news might be a challenge. Exercise is necessary, of course, and play time, too. But why do I have so much trouble finding time to read? And why have I felt, particularly in the last two or three years, that my creativity is not at its best?

Worth meditating upon.