Stepping Up to the Plate with Mind, Body and Spirit

The thing about me is this: I have a hard time controlling my own mind. That sounds ridiculous, I know. Who else has control of her mind, after all, if not the person providing the comfortable, well-appointed skull that contains it? I remember being quite haunted by this reality when I was a kid. I remember letting wicked, terrible thoughts creep into my brain (my parents dying if I didn't clean the kitchen; the house burning down if I was careless with money; fiercely believing that just because I thought something was true, it must be), and then freaking out at my apparent inability to keep a lid on my world.

At wit's end, I turned to meditation. Sincerely exhausted with being a victim of my own irrational, skittering thoughts any longer, I opened myself up to this "new-age mysticism" that my skeptical but increasingly desperate self had so long resisted, and realized it had some value to it, after all.

Today, I have a meditation corner. Between my bed and my dresser there's a little patch of floor on which I keep a bright pink mat. Hunkered down behind a mattress that is blessedly high enough to obscure me from a quartet of wandering children in search of their mother, I regularly take a few minutes there for myself.

"The mind has its own power, and right now this power is stronger than your present eagerness and determination to meditate," said the great Indian spiritualist Sri Chimnoy, in contemplation of the challenge that is taking control of one's own thoughts. "But if you can get help from your heart, then gradually you will be able to control your mind. The heart, in turn, gets constant assistance from the soul, which is all light and all power."

It was when I read those words that I enjoyed a little flash of hope. Yes, I thought, I do have that ridiculously stubborn head to contend with, but I have a heart, too. And just a heavy hitter of a soul.

So I plopped myself in my little pink corner and invited all of the players to come out to the field to see if we couldn't learn together how each can get a decent turn at the plate.

Learning to take control of my own thoughts has been one of the hardest battles I've fought. My brain buzzes as a rule, percolating with ideas, guilt and enough self-blame to power a locomotive. Meditating effectively was an exercise, more than anything, in learning to banish those swirling psychic eddies for a time.

And don't get me wrong. My discovery of meditation has done nothing to eradicate the onset of the eddies. I had a fight with my boyfriend the other day that just about crushed me. I heard such vitriol spraying out of my mouth it sounded like I'd been invaded by terrorists. And at the end of it all, standing in a field of shattered limbs and bloodied corpses, I took stock of the damage, and honestly didn't think I could rouse myself into regular life again.

But then I remembered meditation. I remembered my quiet corner with the pink mat and the promise of peace. Retreat, I told my flailing brain. Go spend some time on the benches. And then, as they've learned so well since first being called up from the minors, my heart and my soul claimed their spots at the plate.

And the crowd went wild.