Coping With Stress Naturally

. . . oscillating, and inducing trance

whirling Dervishes

I’m an eighty-year-old Vietnam combat veteran. In 2015 I and several other vets, mostly Vietnam vets, launched a 501C3 called the Interfaith Veterans Workgroup to prevent veteran suicide in Delaware. We knew nothing about how to do that when we started, but after considerable research, and with the help of the Project Welcome Home Troops, we learned that a seated meditation practice called SKY breathing (an acronym for Sudarshan Kriya) was helping many veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress. As a personal experiment I took up SKY breathing, and later also learned a very simple form of movement meditation, called T’ai Chi Chih. Now I meditate first thing every morning, alternating between SKY breathing and T’ai Chi Chih. My blood pressure has dropped a bit, and I can keep my cool even in heavy traffic.

If you have practiced eastern-style meditation for a while, then you have experienced what my freshman-year philosophy professor called non-thetic awareness. That’s awareness without content of any sort: no ideas, no images, no sounds, nothing. You’re just aware that you’re aware. Your ego disappears, and with it whatever might have been weighing you down. That leads to a calm and pleasant state of consciousness. But it doesn’t last long. Inevitably you start to think about something once again because that’s what the brain does. It thinks. Gurus (teachers) advise you then to gently invite your thinking offstage. Usually, it does go. That’s because, if you’ve been practicing meditation for a long while you develop cognitive muscle. You can quiet “the monkey brain.” It feels like a runaway train. Even when thinking does resume, though, it’s not the same kind you had before you took up meditating. It’s calmer, and sometimes surprisingly creative.

I say surprisingly creative because things can just float up into consciousness like a leaf in a rain barrel, and you wonder, “where did THAT come from?” THAT happened to me last week near the end of a twenty-minute session. I recalled two incredibly old memories, both from before I could walk or talk. The first one was: My mom and her cousin took me to the zoo in my stroller and rolled me up next to the lion’s cage. It was feeding time, and the huge maned beast was pacing back and forth, eager for lunch. Suddenly he let out a roar so loud and so long that neither of my custodians could hear me screaming with fright. Talk about traumatic stress!

The other memory was quite the opposite. It had to do with how I was able to calm myself. I don’t recall using a pacifier, which works for many babies. I had a sort of security blanket instead. Not a conventional baby blanket, but something smaller that I could worry with my tiny hands, a freshly laundered diaper. Because it smelled so good I would clutch it right under my nose. Then I’d take a corner and place it over my right nostril and breathe in and out through my nose so that the diaper flap would float away from my nostril and then softly press down, closing it. In and out, in and out would go the flap. This habit was mesmerizing. I’d fall into a light trance, calm and copasetic, like the trance I was presently in, meditating, a trance induced by breathing very deliberately at a steady rhythm. Eureka! I realized that both kinds of meditation I practice, one seated, one moving, involve oscillation, that is, a regular swinging to and fro either marked by my breath or the movements of my body in repetitive patterns. There are many, many ways to meditate. I wondered whether most of them might involve oscillation. Indeed, it’s oscillation that induces trance, and I don’t mean the kind of heavy trance that sideshow hypnotists use to manipulate subjects and make people laugh, but rather the subtle kind that one just naturally falls into, riveting one’s attention in a pleasant way, filtering out the noise of everyday sensations and thoughts.

I began to compile a list of common oscillating behaviors that can induce such a natural, light, and benign trance. For example:

• rocking in a rocking chair

• swinging in a playground swing

• walking

• jogging

• bicycling

• swimming

• rowing

• kayaking

Then I added some uncommon ones to my list:

• reciting a mantra

• autistic persons stimming (rocking gently back and forth, perhaps to tame an overload of sensations)

• moving one’s eyes from left to right repeatedly (as in EMDR therapy for treating post-traumatic stress)

Finally I added these, practiced in company with others:

• group drumming

• tribal dancing

• Hasidic Jews praying at the Wailing Wall, swaying repeatedly

• whirling Dervishes

There does indeed seem to be a connection between engaging in oscillating behaviors and experiencing a natural relief from stress by way of trance, an altered consciousness. What could account for this connection?

Well, here I can only speculate, but perhaps Vedic cosmology may help. According to ancient Vedic sages, there is no true solidity in the universe. Matter is an illusion. Creation occurred by way of sound, cosmic vibration. All that exists is energy, energy that pulses and is manifest in vibrations at various frequencies. Perhaps when one engages in oscillating behaviors one puts oneself in harmony with the underlying vibrations of the universe and feels in sync, at peace.