Meditation and ME . . .

​I have been interested in meditation since my undergraduate days when I was a philosophy major  at the City College of New York.  Because I lived in Brooklyn and CCNY was in the northern part of Manhattan, I spent a great deal of my life on the D train. During this trek, I tried to keep up with my schoolwork. Though not always able to concentrate, I still remember many trips in which I tried to make sense out of (or just commit to memory )Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-  Philosphicus.  I also tried to understand, without great success, many other Western thinkers and several Asian spiritual traditions.       

My original intention was to apply to graduate school in philosophy.  I did not: probably because several graduate schools warned in their application materials that there was little paying work for philosophers.  In any event, a short time later, I attended law school and ceased to pursue my interests in philosophy and meditation. For the next twenty years or so, I was a very busy litigator, legal advisor and then mediator.   

My life changed in the early 1990s when my beloved mother, a survivor of the Holocaust who had been widowed at a young age, became ill with an auto-immune disease.  My husband Andy and I moved Mom from Brooklyn to DC to be closer to us, and I turned my attention to my mother. Soon thereafter, I stopped doing trial work and became much less busy as a lawyer while I became much busier looking after my mother.   

At this point, I had the time and the motivation to return my attention to my study of meditation  But my perspective had changed.  Now I was less interested in the philosophy of meditation, and more interested in meditation as a tool of what was then considered “Complementary and Alternative Medicine.” I wanted to understand the ways meditation could be used to help people who were unwell (as well as people who were well), the reasons that meditation worked, and the way in which one could prove to Western scientists that meditation is effective and safe.  I also started a regular practice of meditative exercises from several different traditions. 

Since that time, I have continued to study, practice, and later, to teach.  Along the way, I have read widely – from wisdom literature to scientific studies, and intend to share some of my experiences a well as what I have read on this blog.  Stay tuned to this channel . . .