The type I'm particularly aware of, having done some work as a fundraiser in the area of complementary medicine and breast cancer, is mindfulness meditation. Its benefits are potentially wide-ranging and I like the idea of learning to focus on the present, rather than fretting about the past or worrying about the future.
Looking at options of what was available locally, I noticed that an easily accessible adult education college had a 5 week course on mindfulness meditation, with an hour and a half every Monday evening. I signed up and started in June.
The first session was frankly disappointing, partly because it was far too crowded. The previous course members had lost their last session because of the bank holiday so it had been decided that they should join ours. It was an unsatisfactory solution to a clearly foreseeable event (as you can see, I have a long way to go with learning to be non-judgmental).
The tutor radiated calm and composure, which was encouraging, but English is not her first language and I found it difficult at times to understand what she meant when she was trying to explain metaphysical concepts. The same difficulty applied to her written handouts, eg "He universe will always won't to help and your duty to yourself is to have an incredible capacity for self observation and course correction in real time observing and listening while in stillness are keys".
I also bristled when I read "Our power is so strong that whatever we believe comes true". Oh really? So if someone with cancer believes they don't have it, it will disappear? To be fair, she may have been thinking more in terms of having the power to choose how we react to events, and how we think and feel, which makes a huge difference to the impact they have on us. Choosing to be positive, accepting and calm rather than negative, sad and angry - and making that a habit - can be life-changing. If we could all consistently do that, the world would be a much better place, but it still wouldn't mean that whatever we believe would come true.
Possibly due to my hackles rising, I found that my neck and back started hurting fairly soon after the meditation began. As the tutor gently intoned "Your shoulders are smiling. The back of your collar bone is smiling", I was thinking that this really wasn't for me. However my challenge as stated refers to taking part in a course, so I resigned myself to four more weeks of this.
Fortunately the second session was a significant improvement on the first. Simply having some flowers in a water bottle on the floor helped to create a calming atmosphere:
With only ten of us in the group, now that the previous course had finished, it was easier to relax. I felt physically more comfortable and more receptive mentally to ideas about the importance of showing compassion and kindness to oneself and others. As the tutor talked about being non-judgmental, I noticed that one of the participants who had seemed rather spiky the previous week was now visibly more at ease and had an engaging sense of humour. I liked her more and more each week and realised I had been far too quick to view her as someone I was unlikely to get on with. It was just that she had had a particularly difficult time at work and at home during the first week, was irritated by the overcrowding and felt even less inclined to open up than most of us did. Being less judgmental was something I really needed to embrace and practise.
At a rather gruelling three hour session at the dental hospital a couple of days later, I tried using the breathing and relaxation techniques, and found them very helpful. The effect vanished once the pain kicked in, but the rest of the time I was able to drift along and was almost dozing at one point, which - for me, at any rate - was remarkable.
The third week marked a further improvement, as we were beginning to gel as a group. With only 8 of us there, we had just enough space to use mats on the floor and lie down for one of the two meditations. I didn't find that very comfortable - probably not helped by having wolfed down a roll and an indulgent tiffin bar half an hour earlier for dinner - but I enjoyed the sensation of allowing the floor to support my entire weight. It was interesting how that impression, gently intoned by the tutor, gave a feeling of safety and being nurtured.
Unfortunately things went pear-shaped in the penultimate session. It had been a very difficult week and I was hoping that the guided meditation would help me to put some distance between me and my worries - acknowledging they existed, but no longer feeling rather overwhelmed by them. Instead the first half hour or so was spent listening to a few in the group discussing politics (mainly Brexit and Trump). I was surprised the tutor didn't try to move the discussion on but as a non-UK European she was perhaps interested in hearing their views. Eventually she suggested that if people were more compassionate and less quick to criticise politicians, they would feel less harassed and defensive, and the outcome would be better for everyone. Initially that seemed unlikely with someone like Trump, but it's an interesting idea.
The conversation then drifted towards the experience of intense grief and how it had affected us at the time and since. It was the last thing I felt like discussing and I found myself thinking "Beam me up". One person recalled a very poignant experience and how she had felt as though she was holding her grieving friend's soul in her cupped hands, beating gently like a butterfly. She was clearly sincere but the image grated with me as being too airy-fairy, and my longing to leave intensified.
At last we began the guided meditation but for me it was an unlucky choice of subject. We were asked to visualise a rucksack, into which we packed unhappy and troubling memories of times when we felt we had let someone down, and not been kind or compassionate, or when someone else had been like that to us. Once the rucksack felt really heavy, we should imagine helium balloons attaching themselves and wafting it up and far away. By the time the meditation ended I was still busy packing, immersed in misery that I would far rather have left in the past. It was lovely, though, as I opened my eyes and saw how a number of the others in the group were looking so much more relaxed and assured.
The final week was a definite improvement, steering clear of issues that were too emotionally troubling to be appropriately dealt with in that environment and focusing instead on a long, deep meditation. I still couldn't subscribe to the advice that we should lean against trees to absorb their energy, and the phrase "it has been scientifically proven that" continued to make me twitch with scepticism, but I certainly found the meditation and the breathing techniques helpful. So too was the gentle insistence on being kind both to oneself and to others.
For the future, I think it would be worth making the effort to practise meditation - for a few minutes each day - and also to see whether there are any useful videos on YouTube. I watched one that had been recommended and found it unappealing, with its tone of rather smug evangelism by the US businessman and owner of the brand. Between that and the tree-hugging type, and given the many hundreds available, there should be some that are just what I'm after. If I can become less judgmental, I shouldn't have a problem finding them.
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