VIPS

I found that the first few minutes of meditation were often a settling-in period filled with a lot of mental chatter. The most common type of chatter was Planning Mind. “Don’t forget to send the check today.” “You still haven’t replied to Cynthia’s email.” Sometimes these thoughts included important information that I was afraid to let slip away. I was tempted to keep a pad nearby to jot things down, but this would have defeated the whole purpose of learning to acknowledge and dismiss fleeting thoughts.

A close cousin was Worrying Mind. “How can I possibly get everything done this week?” “Did I say the wrong thing in that email to Paul?” This was the superhighway to anxiety. I couldn’t get rid of these thoughts quickly enough.

Writing Mind was an occupational hazard that often barged in after planning and worrying subsided. A stray thought from a creative challenge would surface and demand that I puzzle over the wording of a specific phrase or sentence. This constant desire to narrate my thoughts spoke to a ridiculous sense of self-importance.

The most escapist form of distraction was Dreaming Mind. “Wouldn’t it be fun to move to Spain?” Sometimes songs start playing out of nowhere. These daydreams were the most seductive distractions.   

In these Quaker meetings, after the chatter subsided, I would hit a stride where I could focus in a sustained way. Random thoughts would continue to surface, but it was relatively easy to acknowledge and dismiss them. Meditation allowed me to see the ways my mind would wander with a sense of detachment, and begin disrupting those patterns before they became too entrenched. This deep groove would last for a significant part of an hour. Finally, I would feel my attention begin to fade, and I would wind down in the last few minutes of the meeting, almost like a runner walking off a big race on the other side of the finish line.

This was so satisfying that I wanted more. I began attending a much smaller meeting on Wednesday evenings with a core group of five or six others. Nobody ever said a word. We just sat together in meditation for an hour. Occasionally we would chat afterward for a few minutes, but mostly we knew each other only through our time spent in shared silence. This meeting became one of my favorite times of the week.

This rhythm of working and meditating lasted about eighteen months, and it taught me to live with myself. Learning to sit comfortably with my own thoughts and feelings for an hour at a time turned down the volume in my brain. It wasn’t so loud and chaotic anymore.

And then my life changed. I moved back East, found different work, made new friends, and gradually drifted away from meditation. Occasionally I missed it, but it mostly became something I used to do. I took a course in Buddhism in my mid-thirties that rekindled my good feelings about it, but I didn’t begin practicing again.

Photo by Valeriia Bugaiova on Unsplash

More than twenty-five years after that initial lesson, I spent a weekend with my dad at Johns Hopkins Hospital near the end of his struggle with leukemia.

While he napped one afternoon, I wandered the halls of this sprawling facility until I came across an interfaith chapel. The room was small, nondescript, and empty. I took a seat on the floor and began focusing on my breath. If ever there was a time that I wanted to be completely present and free of delusion, this was it. Sitting for ten minutes after so many years felt good. Like a former college athlete returning to the gym, I was out of shape, but I still knew the basic moves.

A few months later, I reflected on my relationship to stress. I couldn’t definitively pinpoint its role in my dad’s death at 73, but decades of a high-pressure lifestyle certainly hadn’t helped him. My self-assessment did not reveal an entirely healthy picture. I traveled a hundred days per year, and even when I was home I didn’t take much time off. This was a battle rhythm I had set for myself, and for the most part it worked. But I was beginning to see it as something less than a badge of honor.

I had kept up with the growing mountain of research on the benefits of meditation, but I didn’t need to be convinced: this practice had pulled me out of a deep hole once before. So I began sitting for ten or fifteen minutes every morning when traveling. The effect was dramatic. Suddenly, it was easier to remain focused throughout a long day. Stray thoughts no longer stole my attention. I was less tired and cranky.

Meditation is not a tool to achieve an outcome; it is a practice of being present in life.