Balancing Act

This week we’re reviewing Meditation for Beginners. Sometimes it’s important to focus on your mind … the other half of the mind-body connection. Also, my body is still feeling pretty clobbered from last week’s reviewing of Kickbox: Core Cross Train.

The Meditation for Beginners DVD has three different segments. One segment prepares you for meditation, one jumps right into meditation, and the third segment is a longer workout which includes both preparation and meditation.

Meditation Preparation is a 10-minute yoga sequence led by instructor Rodney Yee. The yoga is all done sitting on a chair, and is designed to prepare the body for meditation.

I found this one reasonably easy to follow, considering my previous frustration with Rodney Yee’s teaching style. Maybe it helped that the segment was so short. He did not mirror the moves, but you did everything on first one side, then the other, so if you got it backwards, it was easy to get back on track.

The only real issue I ran into in this first segment is that I didn’t have a chair like his, which would allow me to sit backwards in the chair with my knees still close together. It would have been nice to have all the poses be independent of my taste in furniture.

Mindful Meditation is a 16-minute guided meditation led by Maritza. This was more what I was expecting from a meditation DVD.

She spent a very short amount of time at the beginning of the workout talking about modifications (basically just the sitting positions you can choose from, because there’s not really any movement). Throughout the segment, she gives instructions on what you should be doing.

I got a big kick out of the words she chose for her instructions. For example, when we were getting into position at the beginning, she instructed us to “organize yourself to become still”. This was one of my favorite turns of phrase, although I was also quite enchanted with “if the mind wanders away, gently escort it back to the breath”.

Despite the instructional pluses, I had a lot of trouble getting into this meditation. I don’t know if it was Maritza’s thick accent, or her unique way of phrasing the instructions, or the frequent long pauses with no music or talking, to the point where I wondered whether the segment was over. Also, at several points you would hear a single bell tone, which in every yoga class I’ve ever been in, signals the end of the relaxation period. I kept getting “pulled out” of the meditative state, by one thing or another.

The third segment, Refresh the Mind, is a 23-minute segment led by Rodney Yee. It starts with about 9 minutes of yoga preparation and flows right into 14 minutes of meditation. There were quite a few Yee-isms (instructions that were vague and didn’t make a lot of sense to me), but frankly, there’s not that much movement in meditation (not even in the yoga preparation parts), so it wasn’t too difficult to follow.

I did like the chair-based preparation better, so it was kind of disappointing that this third segment was not split into separate preparation and meditation segments. It would have been nice to be able to mix-and-match the preparation and meditation segments.

The whole DVD felt a little disjointed; there was no introduction, no explanation about which segments to use when, and the segments ended rather abruptly with no credits. It almost felt like totally different workout DVDs that had been repackaged together (something GAIAM is famous for), but I couldn’t find any evidence of that in the fine print on the DVD case.

In theory, I’m rating the DVDs on this site based on how difficult they are for uncoordinated people to follow, not based on how much I like to do them … but in practice, the ratings have been kind of a mix of the two criteria. This will be a real test of which criteria I weight more heavily, since the DVD is not that difficult to follow (it’s mostly sitting still and breathing, after all), but I just don’t like to do it that much.

I think I’ll balance the two criteria, and give the DVD a middle-of-the-road 3 stars. I feel this properly expresses my ambivalence about the whole thing.