The first time I used guided meditation was at a mental health class at the Las Vegas VA Mental Health Clinic. Six of us sat on hard chairs in a circle as the psychiatrist in charge led us through relaxation exercises, down a mental tunnel, and then to a beautiful beach on a tropical island.
Most of the people in that room could see the water swell and feel the breeze against their skin. Some reported hearing seagulls or seeing dolphins. They had a full sensory experience. Me? Mine was totally different.
I should start with – I have eyesight problems. I’ve been wearing glasses since I was seven years old when my teachers realized I couldn’t see the blackboard. We had the old blackboards and used chalk and erasers. One child would get the exciting opportunity to bang the erasers over a trash can, releasing white chalk dust everywhere.
I would have to walk up to the blackboard to read the teacher’s assignments. When my teacher finally told my parents that I needed glasses, I had had fuzzy eyesight for almost a year. My parents knew I could read. I was one of those precocious children who could read at a sixth grade level in second grade. My dad tested my eyesight by trying to get me to read the road signs as we whizzed by them. I couldn’t see to read them so he finally admitted that I was near-sighted.
My dad always believed that you could heal yourself from near-sightedness if you’d read less and exercised your eyes. He believed that he had healed his own sight by doing just that. It is funny to remember him in his later years with glasses perched on his nose. HIs willpower couldn’t heal his eyes when they degraded to needing reading glasses.
Because I had weak eye-sight, my other senses like hearing and touch were more enhanced. I could hear people talk from two rooms away. I could feel when the emotions in the house went from happy to angry. It would cause my skin to pimple and my heart to drop.
So when I did my first guided meditation, I didn’t see anything. I felt relaxed and with my eyes closed, I saw blackness all around me. I sank into it and felt as if I were in the womb. When I finally reached the ocean, I didn’t see it, but I felt myself float in the darkness as if I were in an isolation chamber floating in warm salty water.
I felt a dolphin bump me and I put my arm around him. He pulled me to shore as I heard the voice of the psychiatrist as she started to bring us back to the classroom. When I opened my eyes I was so relaxed that I wanted to fall asleep.
Of course our guide wanted to dissect our experiences. I did not tell her that I saw nothing and that I experienced it through my other senses only. I didn’t see the point in explaining what I felt.
Most of the people in the world are visual. They described what they saw and not necessarily what they heard or touched. The magic is that we have five senses. Each of them gives us information. When we combine them, we get magic. We can know things through our senses besides sight like where another person is in our spaces. We know where the couch, TV, and dog is in relation to ourselves.
So what happens when our “sight” fails us? I’ve had personal experience with this. Not only am I nearsighted even after laser surgery, I also have astigmatism. One eye has more astigmatism than the other eye. This means that when I don’t have my glasses on, some objects can disappear from my sight. It also means that when I put a cup down on the edge of a table, I might be setting the cup on air. I’ve broken so many coffee cups that way.
I’ve learned how to adjust to where I put the cup down, where I put my feet, and where I put my hands. I’ve stubbed my toes so many times because I’ve tried to walk through a chair leg. It hurts. It is also disconcerting.
Yet I have great color vision. I do get it that astigmatism has something to do with the shape of the eye and that color vision is about the cones. The first time I realized that my color vision was better than most was when a guy walked into my workspaces wearing an orangey-red shirt and red pants. I laughed. The guys in the electronics workspace with me asked why I didn’t like red on red? I tried to explain that the guy was wearing two different colors and I was the only one who could see it.
Now in the electronics spaces the guys had to have good color vision, but in this instance they couldn’t tell the difference.
So what is the point?
Each of us sees the world in different ways. Just because we have a common language, we are not seeing the same things. We are not feeling the same things. We are not experiencing the same things even if we are sitting on the same chairs with the same psychiatrist going through the same guided meditation.