Tense teens, adults flock to meditation

“The light (from the digital clock) has this power over me. It just gives me a moment to collect my thoughts, gives me a little bit of sanity before anything else.”

She is not the only one looking inward to cope with the outward. Teens, like the rest of America, are embracing meditation as a way to strip off stress.

The practice has gained endorsement and attention from all kinds of people.

Doctors advise patients to do it. Some corporations suggest workers give it a try. Habitual practitioners swear by it. Baseball players seek it to gain an edge on and off the field. Even lawyers see it as a remedy for burnout.

One group wants to fast-track it into schools, making meditation part of the curriculum.

Once considered hippy-dippy by many, meditation is going mainstream much as yoga did a few years back.

An article extolling its benefits that once might have been relegated to the alternative press recently commanded the cover of Time.

The Bay Area is a magnet for first-timers and devout practitioners of meditation. The area is home to a number of retreat centers, including the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, the San Francisco Zen Center, Green Gulch Farm near Sausalito and the San Damiano Retreat Center in Danville. Most offer programs for teens.

On Friday, the East Bay contingent of the Transcendental Meditation program, which became popular in the United States in the 1960s, announced it is joining that group’s national effort to bring meditation into schools.

“It works better than anything that’s been tried,” says Valerie Janlois of the TM program in Danville. TM helps teens focus, boosts self-confidence and retention, she said.

The interest is heightened for teens probably because the culture regards it as hip and there are numerous programs available, said Diana Winston, a Spirit Rock instructor and the author of “Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens.”

“There’s an interest, and it’s almost being seen as a market,” the Albany author said.

While that might go counter to Buddhist teaching, it’s not a bad thing, given a culture that bombards teens with material goods that promise to make them happy and beautiful, she said.

“Thank God, it’s not a new pair of jeans.”

Meditation can have both subtle and profound effects on teens. By practicing Buddhist meditation, teens can concentrate better and develop more self-awareness and compassion and kindness for others, she said.

One of her students confronted an eating disorder; another quit smoking marijuana. Sometimes the uninterested learn to love it the most; one reluctant 13-year-old became a nun in Asia when she was 18.

Meditation isn’t the exclusive domain of Eastern theology or, for that matter, religion. Some practitioners don’t follow any particular religion. Others are in mainstream Christianity.

“Meditation has been a part of the Western Catholic church for centuries,” said the Rev. Raymond Bucher, the executive director of San Damiano. The retreat center will host a Christian meditation seminar in December and holds free meditation sessions at 7 p.m. Tuesdays.

Meditation can teach teens much about life because it disregards quick fixes to problems and emotions, said Dr. Peg Grimley, a psychiatrist with the John Muir-Mt. Diablo health system.

“In our culture, if we have a bad feeling we want to get rid of it,” she said. Meditation encourages people to sit with those good and bad thoughts, observe them and then watch them go away.

That can be a powerful tool for teens, she said.

The stickler is making it a habit.

Sophie Simon-Ortiz started practicing three years ago. The Berkeley High School senior said she really loved it, but a chaotic schedule made it less of a priority.

“I’ve been going through a lot more right now, and when I try to meditate recently it’s been a lot harder,” she said.

Galen DeForest attended a Spirit Rock teen retreat in Lafayette this summer and said meditation has always been challenging. He prefers the intense conversations he shared with other teens at the retreat over the 30-minute blocks of seated and walking meditation.

“It’s pretty difficult,” he said. “It’s hard to keep your mind focused, and you have to keep it unfocused at the same time.”

Meditation holds a special significance for some.

Noah Levine says it saved his life. He detailed his spiritual journey from hell and back in the memoir “Dharma Punx.”

The 32-year-old San Francisco resident hit a dead-end in his teens. Bored, angry and strung out on cocaine, heroin, alcohol and pills, he kept landing in Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall. He hated life so much he tried to cut his wrists with a comb.

“I committed so many felonies that it was, kind of, get clean or be in prison for the rest of my life,” he said. “Or die. … I was getting locked up every other week.”

Levine started to meditate while in the throes of detox in juvenile hall. He cursed the notion originally, regarding it as nonsense.

Finally, he took a deep breath, then exhaled. That’s all it took. He knew instantly that something profound was happening.

“I knew from that moment on I was committed to doing it for the rest of my life,” he said.

He’s been off drugs and alcohol for 15 years, and now teaches meditation in juvenile halls and the state prison system, hoping it can turn around the lives of others. He attracts a crowd of 60 or more at his weekly Wednesday meditation sitting at the Cultural Integration Fellowship in San Francisco.

He, too, says meditation isn’t easy, even now. It certainly was hard during his first retreat when he was 19.

“I thought: ‘Wow, this is really difficult and I want to leave most of the time.’ But I know this is the only hope for me … to really find what I’m looking for, which is more than ordinary suffering, which is really freedom.”