I recently attended SA Katie’s Table Talk on meditation. I didn’t have any experience with meditation, and I was curious to see what it was like. Katie started out by giving all of us a brief overview and history of meditation, which was interesting since I did not know how it had spread to mainstream Western culture. Finally, at the end, Katie led us through two different guided meditation sessions. The first was a mindfulness meditation, while the second was a visualization. I definitely preferred the first script, as I am not very good with visualization in general. However I noticed that Katie’s visualization script actually helped me visualize better. When told to imagine a mountain, I initially pictured a rather generic mountain image, like the ones often seen as company logos. It was just a simple snow-covered peak, without anything else on it. In fact, that’s all there was–just the peak. Katie’s visualization script, however, led me to imagine what the base of the mountain looked like, and I started to actually add in vegetation. Yet it took a lot of concentration for me to maintain this image, and the second my mind started to wander, I ended up losing it. In the first meditation we did, I was able to follow along much more easily.