Before you start reading, inhale. You don’t have to close your eyes or get up from your computer. Just inhale through your nose for a count of four, feeling it rise in your stomach, then exhale through your mouth. Done? That’s the one thing that no one, no matter what happens to you in this life, can take away from you. As long as you’re living, you can breathe. What happens outside of that is out of your control. While just taking one breath isn’t necessarily meditation, it’s a start.
Think You Can’t Try Meditation? Think Again
Meditation doesn’t always make you a paragon of physical health, but especially for creative people, it can be a way to access a different part of yourself. I felt inspired to spend more time on spiritual matters by the death of David Lynch. Lynch practiced Transcendental Meditation, but he also smoked a pack a day of American Spirits, drank tons of wine, and stayed up all night making disturbing films. Not exactly a wellness influencer, per se, but an advocate for meditation’s benefits.
But “Transcendental Meditation or “TM” involves having your own mantra and sitting in silence, repeating it to yourself in your thoughts as you allow them to flow through you, without judgment. But while it’s easy to talk about these ideas of spiritual peace and a pathway into your inner world—how do you actually put them into practice?
A Non-Judgmental Approach to Meditation
It sounds like a lofty task, to go inward, particularly for those of us with chaotic work lives and therefore chaotic minds. RYT 200 yoga instructor and reiki master Paige Creamer, who teaches at The Om Lounge in the Strip District and East Liberty, wants to assure people that they can start meditating. Before she ever practiced asana yoga (the physical element of yoga most people are familiar with), Creamer found meditation. Her father was terminally ill, and she was “really not feeling well” when she began working with a TM teacher who gave her a mantra and taught her to focus on her own body.
“There’s a meme-ification of it all, a Pinterest aesthetic board of sayings like ‘you are your deepest well.’ But meditation is a real, actual, experience that you can feel in your body, I try in my work to show people that you can access that. It’s not a concept, it’s something real,” Creamer said. “My favorite approach is to go through a body scan and find the place just beyond myself. You can try feeling the inside of your mouth or imagining looking at the inside of your throat.”
Meditation for “Neuro-Complex” People
Creamer describes herself as a “neuro-complex person with complex trauma” and saw finding a mantra as a way of having one thing just for herself. She wants people with similar backgrounds to know that self-judgment and spiraling will defeat the purpose of the process. “If you say you’re going to meditate every day for one minute, and then you don’t, you say ‘Oh, I can’t do that.” That’s just another story,” she said. “Ask yourself ‘Am I really mad at myself that I didn’t meditate yesterday?’ You didn’t lose out on any resources. You didn’t become a bad person overnight.”
Her recommendation is to focus much more on the bodily experience of meditation than on whether your mind was quiet or whether your practice was fastidious enough. You can look at a candle’s flame or do an “eating meditation” where you chew every bite with intention.
Creamer also hopes that her own experiences can help other people feel more comfortable meditating. “I know that change can happen because I’ve changed,” she explained. “I know that oneness is there because I feel it. It’s not only for Instagram influencers at Bonnaroo.” She remembered a friend who works as an HVAC technician coming to her saying that meditation had become a key part of his daily life, since he spent so much time in people’s homes and felt he needed some control over his inner life. Inner peace shouldn’t only be for professional-managerial elites that can afford to spare the time for it.
Where Can You Go to Meditate in Pittsburgh?
So, you want to start meditating. While you don’t have to go anywhere other than your own home, having a teacher for guidance can be helpful. The Om Lounge, where Creamer teaches both yoga and an “embodied experiences” course, is an approachable but accredited space for it. The Deep Dive Dream Center in Oakland offers free or low-cost group meditations, with discounts for students.
Additionally, Pittsburgh has a Transcendental Meditation center in Squirrel Hill, where Marty Caplan teaches TM courses. The classes are offered on a sliding scale based on household income. To look for resources of your own that you can do at home, at no cost, The Insight Meditation Society offers free online meditations and Dharma talks.
Some ways to find meditative experiences in Pittsburgh don’t involve teachers or formal settings, either. The pitch-dark James Turrell installations at The Mattress Factory can allow you to sink deeper into your own mind. Likewise, there’s something calming and reflective about the Hillman Hall of Gems and Minerals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Or, while it isn’t a traditional form of meditation, going to see a movie in a theater can be a way to force yourself to sit still and quiet your mind. But if you’ve made the choice to try to seek out meditation, you’re already on the right path. Creamer’s advice? “Let practice speak for itself. You are the space for it all.”
Story by Emma Riva
Photo by Ray Albrow
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