The power of rain

For some time now, I’ve been searching out new methods to try and find some kind of remedy for periods when I feel depressed or anxious and recently I started attending a weekly group meditation session lead by a local mental health committee. This was part of a program that was designed to use guided meditation as a tool to help those of us deal with periods of depression, anxiety, and any other mental ailment and for the next 10 weeks, a group meditation session would be held every Monday, lead by two instructors. After the first group session, everyone there was given an assignment for the week, which was to simply do their own solo meditation for 10 minutes each day until next group session a week later. These meditations didn’t have to be anything special or elaborate; we just had to take ten minutes of our day to put all our worries and stresses to the side and simply focus on being in the present moment.

At first, I was completely intent on completing this task, however, as some stress factors came forth during the week I neglected to do my meditations. Pretty soon it was Sunday night and with the next session just around the corner I did not feel particularly good about myself. I decided the best way to try and salvage something from this weekend was to get at least one more meditation in before the seminar the next day.

I had always found the sound of rain quite soothing.

The weather on Sunday night consisted of heavy rainfall. I had always found the sound of rain quite soothing so I decided I would try my meditation with the sound of the rain outside. I went into my room, closed the door, turned off the lights, opened my window, turned on my lava lamp (for good measure) and put on a 10 minute calming music track. I then pulled up my desk chair in front of my window, sat down, closed my eyes, and after a few breaths, I relaxed my body and began my meditation. I could hear the rain hitting the pavement. It made clearing my mind of all stress quite easy and I was elated to find myself not thinking about the future or the past but just simply being in the present moment. This is where things got interesting; every so often a car would drive by and disrupt the sound of rainfall. For some reason, this would cause a wave of negative emotions to wash over me; emotions of sadness, guilt, regret, bitterness, frustration, anger and everything else I would feel during periods of anxiety and depression. I have no idea why this occurred and at one point I even shed a tear or two. However, once the car drove past my house, its sound would fade away into the distance, allowing only the sound of rain to be heard again and my mind would once again become clear.

During those moments of clarity, I was hit with a profound thought that these emotions will always be there for one reason or another; I can’t stop them from happening no more than I can stop the cars from disrupting the sound of rain; they will always come and go like the cars but like the rain, the good things; the important things; the things that deserve our value in life will remain unaffected and will always be there when the disturbances in life pass. Though this little revelation hasn’t completely resolved my issue, it offers some real food for thought.