The meditation that isn't

There is a small practice I have, most afternoons, that is technically neither meditation nor restorative yoga but that has, in some way, become more useful to me than either. The practice involves lying flat on the floor of the small meditation room, with the eye pillow on the eyes and the blanket over the body, for twenty minutes. There is no breath instruction. There is no body scan. There is no specific posture beyond the lying down. The instruction is, essentially, do nothing.

I have written about deep waking rest elsewhere in this journal. The practice I am describing here is a small specific version of that. The difference is that the deep rest practices I have described before all have some structural element — a specific pose, a specific breath, a specific attention. This one has nothing. It is just the lying down, the soft blanket, the dark of the eye pillow, and twenty minutes of permission to do nothing.

Why this works as well as it does

I am not entirely sure. Most of the structured practices I have spent years on are, in some way, work — the body is doing a specific shape, the mind is doing a specific attention, the breath is doing a specific rhythm. Even the most restorative of those practices has, somewhere, a small element of effort. The mind has to remember to come back to the breath. The body has to maintain the pose. The instruction is being followed.

The unstructured version removes the small effort entirely. The body is simply down. The mind is not asked to do anything. The breath does what it does. The twenty minutes is, in some way, the only twenty minutes of the day where nothing whatsoever is being asked of any part of me.

The deep rest that this produces is different in quality from the deep rest that the structured practices produce. It is somehow more thorough. The body, given complete permission to do absolutely nothing, drops into a state that the structured practices, with their small remaining elements of effort, do not quite reach.

On whether this is just sleep

I have wondered about this. Twenty minutes of lying flat on the floor with the eye pillow on could easily, for most people, become a twenty-minute nap. In my own case, this does occasionally happen — perhaps one session in ten ends in a brief involuntary sleep. The other nine sessions stay in a state that is awake but profoundly inactive.

I do not know what to call this state. It is not meditation in any disciplined sense. It is not sleep. It is something in between — a kind of awake stillness that the body finds when given the right conditions and given enough time. The state, whatever it is, is restorative in a way that nothing else in my day quite is.

When I do this

Most afternoons, around three or four. The timing is partly accidental and partly tactical. The mid-afternoon is the small low point in most people's daily energy curve. A short period of deep rest at this point lifts the rest of the afternoon and the early evening considerably. I have, on the days I do this, two productive evening hours that I do not have on the days I do not.

The total time is twenty-five minutes — about five minutes to walk to the room, settle, and arrange the props, and then twenty minutes of the practice itself. I set a soft timer to keep the time. The session ends when the timer chimes. I get up slowly, fold the blanket, put the eye pillow back in its small dish, and walk back to the desk.

What I would say about this

If you have a structured meditation practice and have not, in some time, given yourself a practice with no structure at all, try this for a week. Twenty minutes of lying flat with no instruction. No breath count. No attention practice. Just permission to do nothing.

The first few sessions may feel undisciplined or insufficient — as if you are getting away with something rather than doing the work. This feeling passes. By the end of the week, the small permission to do nothing will start to feel like its own kind of practice, and the deep rest that it produces will start to make a noticeable difference in the days that contain it.

Not everything has to be a practice in the formal sense. Sometimes the body just needs to be given a small protected window in which to do exactly nothing, and the doing of exactly nothing is, in the end, what restoration actually requires. The other practices are the small structured approaches to the same thing. Sometimes the unstructured version is, simply, the closest to what the body was asking for.