peacefulness isn't a lozenge

I was lining up groceries on the conveyor belt when some candy on the rack caught my eye. STRESS LOZENGES — 30 PER BOX. I had to chuckle. Peacefulness isn’t a lozenge. Peacefulness isn’t something you buy in a box and swallow. It’s something you do, a little bit every day, over and over and over until it becomes a habit. In other words, peacefulness is something you practice. That’s where I come in.

For the last five years I’ve served as attending neurologist at a brain injury rehabilitation center, prescribing medications and therapeutic programs to people recovering from brain injury. For the last five years I’ve also led a weekly meditation group at the rehabilitation center.

Getting anyone to start and maintain a daily meditation practice is difficult. When the brain has been injured, and the attention centers have been wiped out, and memory is poor, and language doesn’t work as well as it used to, and limbs are crooked or paralyzed, the task becomes even more of a challenge. In fact, for many of my patients, a formal meditation practice is simply out of the question.

What about those people? Is there an alternative? Couldn’t a daily practice be built around an exercise like meditation? Wouldn’t that be useful? Wouldn’t that be peaceful? Having worked with people across the spectrum of neurological ability, from the minimally conscious to the walking wounded, my answer is, wholeheartedly, yes. The trick was finding the right exercise and providing the proper encouragement.

Through trial and error, working in small groups, I discovered that by modifying the practice of meditation, by stretching it a little, I was able to make a daily peacefulness practice more accessible to the patients I was treating. Of course, once I’d stretched meditation beyond a certain point, I couldn’t really call it meditation anymore, so I coined a new phrase: Peaceful Habits.

More formal than casual relaxation techniques, yet looser than traditional meditation, the seven meditation-like exercises forming the core of Peaceful Habits are designed to work with, not against, the short attention spans and other cognitive impairments commonly seen after a brain injury. As a result, the exercises are as simple and as tangible as possible, making them useful for anyone trying to establish a daily peacefulness practice, whether there is a history of brain injury or not.

Perhaps you’ll find Peaceful Habits useful too. Maybe your attention span is short, and you’re easily distracted. Maybe your memory is poor. Maybe you aren’t as flexible as you used to be. Maybe a formal sitting meditation practice is beyond your reach right now, and you’re looking for something simpler. If you’d like to bring more peacefulness to your life, and you’ve decided to take the first step, Peaceful Habits is a kind of “training wheels” to help you start and maintain a daily peacefulness practice. It’s definitely more helpful than sucking on a lozenge.

Some people just aren’t cut out for a formal meditation practice. This is a cold hard fact. But that doesn't have to be the end of the story. One can imagine it, instead, as the beginning.