Note: This post describes a meditative side practice — and an additional benefit of meditation — to complement my Meditation Primer and the previous blog post “Pull-Ups for the Mind”. For best results, both should be read (and practiced!) before the below.
“In this life, when one looks at the Beautiful itself — absolute, pure, umixed — only then will it become possible to give birth not to images of virtue, but to true virtue.” — Socrates (quoting Diotima, via Plato’s Symposium, and slightly paraphrased)
Focusing on your breathing during meditation — standard protocol in almost all traditions — is semi-arbitrary. It’s not completely arbitrary, and using the breath as a focal point has many advantages: it’s internal to your body, comes and goes in a regular rhythm, and tuning into it helps tap into your parasympathetic nervous system. These qualities make your breathing an ideal focal point for starting out, and arguably it should remain the primary form of meditation practice for most people (as it is for me). But really, you could use any almost anything as the focal point for a meditation session — Tibetan Buddhists often use mandalas, for example.
One good option is to meditate on something beautiful. This allows you to expand your practice into the “real world” and also provides the benefit of helping you experience a fuller and deeper appreciation of the beauty that suffuses our world.
Remember, your mind will wander during these exercises, just as it does during “regular” sitting meditation — when you realize it has, just bring your focus back to the scene you are meditating on with concentration, clarity, and nonjudgmental acceptance (as described in the Meditation Primer). This practice isn’t about “analyzing” what you are looking at in a standard “art criticism” kind of way, but about really trying to see things on their own terms, with clarity and appreciation for whatever beauty is inherent in the scene.
Below are a few specific examples of specific place and situations which I consider ideal for this practice.
Nature
Whether you are in a small park near you house or standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, natural environments are especially conducive to a meditative frame of mind and usually highly relaxing.
Decide in advance what your focus will be and really try to “burn the picture” into your brain. You can do this in a truly focused way, and really hone in on (for example) the texture of bark on a tree or the geometries of cleavage on a boulder. Alternatively, you can take in an entire scene, widening your vision and trying to achieve a holistic kind of clarity.
The first option is usually easier, and often the best option for the everyday nature you might find near your house. On the other hand, when faced with a majestic scene like the Grand Canyon or Mount Fuji, you should definitely try the second option.
If you do both of these variations a few times, I think you’ll find that there is a distinct difference in the frame of mind that is brought about after concentrating on something minute and detailed, versus absorbing a wide-ranging scene with your entire peripheral vision.
Sunsets
One of my favorite forms of the above exercise is to meditate for twenty minutes or so around sunset. Watching the sky, or the quality of light on a wall, slowly change after sunset is a helpful for keeping you focused. It’s also a little surreal – changes are so slow that you can’t tell from moment to moment that it is happening, but over time it obviously does. It begins to mess with your mind in a trippy way: “did that just change or am I imagining it?”
Art
Static visual arts — such as painting, sculpture, and architecture — are another good focus for this kind of meditation, whether you are in front of an ordinary park statue in your hometown or Seurat’s massive “Sunday Afternoon” at the Art Institute of Chicago. A good piece of art is worth at least five minutes of focused attention.
And while you might not be able to sit in half-lotus position in the middle of a museum, meditation can happen while standing or even slowly walking around a sculpture to see it from all sides.
We humans have a tendency to immediately classify things we encounter, but the point of art isn’t to just say “Oh, Seurat is an pointillist” or “This is from Picasso’s cubist phase,” but to try and see the art on its own intrinsic terms. Likewise, this kind of an exercise isn’t about contemplating the symbolism or cultural context behind a piece of art, but to simply and truly appreciate the colors, forms, textures, etc the artist was working with.
“Points of Interest”
The biggest bang for your buck with this sort of practice is going to come from truly magnificent sights and sites, like the Grand Canyon, Chartres Cathedral, or the myriad wonders housed in the Vatican or Met.
These places are also where it is most valuable and important to have developed the ability to really engage with what is in front of you, and to spend some quality time deeply absorbing it.
One of my biggest pet peeves (please permit me to play the role of curmudgeonly gadfly for a moment) is to go to a famous sight and watch 99% of the people essentially ignore it. Most people visit the Grand Canyon, go to the famous fountains and piazzas of Rome, or stand in front of Picasso’s “Guernica” in the Prado, and — instead of savoring the reality and magnificence of what’s in front of them — they simply snap a picture and leave after ten seconds.
It’s a shame on so many levels. And in our new world of smartphone cameras and social media, the problem has only gotten worse.
I understand it, and — as a semi-obsessive amateur photographer — I have succumbed to it myself. It’s easy to fall into a false sense that by taking a photo of something you now “own” it and can look at it later.
But a photo is not the same thing as being there. So developing the practice (which can eventually become a habit) of slowing down and meditating on the beauty in front of you is a great countermeasure to the sad trend of outsourcing your memory to a smartphone.