Stress and Meditation

A few days ago, I attended a one-hour seminar on how to manage stress. The seminar was sponsored by my employer, probably realizing that the employees were overworked and stressed out.

It turned out to be a sort of infomercial for a more rigorous stress management training course that the speaker and his company were offering; nevertheless, it did turn out to be interesting enough and did have few good pieces of information.

The seminar started with a mathematical formulation of stress, which interestingly simplifies the problem:

S = A – E

S = stress level,
A = amount of Activities one has to do
E = amount of Energy one has.

So, you can reduce your stress by either reducing your Activities or increasing your Energy level. Being an Employer sponsored event, of course, the focus was on increasing Energy and not reducing work. Aside from good eating habits and exercise, which are obvious ways of increasing energy, the focus of the seminar was on breathing and meditation. I always associated meditation with lower energy level and I thought I would need some level of stress to drive me finish whatever work I might be doing, so I listened with some level of skepticism. However, we did go through a 20min meditation session which for me, who really never have tried it before and it was sort of awkward to try in a large room full of people, did turn out to be a very good experience. I was surprised on how much this short meditation helped me focus my energy on what I was doing for the rest of the day and I did feel I had more energy. It reduced the noise of random thoughts and focused my mind, which according to the speaker, was the essence of creativity, to be in the present moment, here and now, without being distracted by the thoughts of past or future.

It sort of reminded me of a poem by Wallace Stevens, which I have recently come across, of all places, in a Persian weblog! I usually do not enjoy poems that are too symbolic or have complex metaphors, but in an attempt to translate it as an exercise in English to Farsi translation, I read an article about it which helped me understand it better, and I liked it. It is sort of related to this introspection and meditation state in which we can collect our mind and focus our thoughts. If you know Farsi, you can read my amateurish translation of it here.

"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour". – Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
[Out] of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.