Your Meditation Room
It can be as small as your bedside table or as vast as the view from the Blue Ridge Parkway
Recently I saw a friend whose home I had visited some years ago and I surprised myself by telling her, “Sometimes I think of your meditation room.” She smiled.
When stressed by too much news, at times I try to picture the simple room in her house with large, leafy houseplants, a yoga mat and soft lighting.
My imagination adds a pillowy couch and a bookshelf. The slipcover on my imagined couch looks like the one in this watercolor, below. I painted it in the small furnished apartment where I stayed while I looked for a house in Brevard almost 30 years ago.
I’m lingering in this remembered space because of the harmony my friend had created in her home. She probably still practices meditation there, perhaps after work or with windows open to the cool, early morning.
Many of us are anxious right now. The other day another friend said, “It’s so exhausting, constantly going back and forth between despair and optimism.” Some of us have to work at keeping national and local tensions in perspective. My doctor said, “Get more sleep.”
It’s relaxing to plan a meditation space, even if you don’t have an entire spare room to use. The main thing is to suit yourself. In the book The Second Half, journalist and editor Charlotte Mosley says,
You have the right to be what you want to be. … Your work is to find out what you want. Nobody else is going to tell you what’s good for you.
When a space is completely yours, it fits. You don’t have to adjust yourself to it each time you enter. You don’t have to “straighten it up” when you leave.
Still, there are some things that create peace. In another book, A Room of Her Own: Women’s Personal Spaces, there are candles, mirrors, plants, water, fragrances, books, fabrics, and workspaces. I’m looking for the qualities these things represent, not at the price tags! Creativity and comfort don’t have to cost a lot.
I can see that I’m not yet into the clean, uncluttered meditative space that I remember in my friend’s room. Online, there are lots of photos of nearly empty rooms with thin yoga mats and floor pillows. But they make me realize that time has passed and now I need a chair.
Terence Conran in The Essential House Book comes close to the Zen space, because his trademark seems to be spare, calming … and pure fantasy! Incidentally, I see he’s forgotten to place good reading lamps beside his easy chairs. Maybe Essential Clutter is another book.
But I like Conran’s simple, changeable arrangements of river rocks, a plant, a pleasing piece of pottery on a shelf or tabletop, against a plain wall. This I can do.
One of the most relaxing things I’ve known over the years are cats asleep in any spot, draped over anything, curled up or stretched out. Never mind what’s going on around them.
In A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and team, you will find principles for living spaces that fit real people. For example, his plan for a private garden in town sites it midway between the too-public front yard and the too-isolated back yard.
Alexander looks for the balance between social activity and the centered self.
No one can be close to others, without also having frequent opportunities to be alone.
Beauty, and a connection to the outdoors, nurture the spirit.
My own little room has a window to open, a comfortable chair and vintage table lamp, books, Edward Gorey and botanical jigsaw puzzles, familiar objects, a small painted mirror reflecting the light, pencils and paper.
Without digital devices in this tiny room, time feels slow and quiet. But there’s no rule against a laptop or phone. That would be stressful!
There’s another kind of meditation “space”, and that’s inner mindfulness. Since 2015 I’ve had to bar the door at times against the constant flow of information and misinformation chipping away at our democracy in America and in our state.
A public assault on truth and decency is an assault on personal stability. I have to remind myself to breathe deeply.
A calm place, times alone, and periods of creativity, walking, or hiking on trails are essential and healing, but they are not enough. Meditation is not about being alone. Revitalized, we can give permission to a friend to take time out themselves, before getting back into the fray.
I invite you to Comment, to share one part of your daily space that helps to create peace of mind.
Beautifully written and an excellent reminder
My favorite space is the quiet deck on the back of my house in Brevard which extends into a forest of trees. When we were looking to buy a house, my husband walked out on this deck and said in admiration, "This is it. We don't have to look any further." The dog likes the deck, too, where he can take sunbaths.