I first started meditation because it was suggested by my sober support person (sponsor) in twelve-step recovery. I was 15, a boy, really. My sponsor had been sober for three years and was still navigating his own fog. My sober peers in 1985 weren’t exactly shining examples of humanity. Sure, they were sober, but they were also neck-deep in secondary addictions, smoking, junk food, sex, dangerous behavior, and, for some, criminal activity. Honestly, the group I latched onto in my early recovery was behaving worse than any of the potheads I hung out with before I got sober.
There I was, a zit-faced teenager, taking direction from a group of fairly new sober men who themselves were out of control and knew nothing about meditation. Meditation? That wasn’t even on my radar. But I was great at following directions, because I wanted to stay sober. I worked at meditation the way my favorite movie heroes seemed to. Embarrassingly, one of my inspirations was Jean-Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport. There’s a scene where he does a Chinese split between two chairs, flexing and looking deeply meditative. That’s what I thought meditation was, so I tried it.
I literally taught myself to do a split between chairs, which, surprisingly, I was good at. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. To this day, I clearly remember how nothing was happening in my mind. It wasn’t meditation. It wasn’t relaxation. I was just pretending to be Jean-Claude Van Damme preparing for a fight competition.
It was a bit before my time, but I had also watched reruns of Kung Fu with David Carradine, where the half-Asian, half-white drifter meditated during sunsets and solved problems in the Wild West. Total nonsense. I know the ridiculous role models we had in the West back then. I can’t even imagine what women had to look up to back then. None of what I was doing was meditative because I wasn’t reflecting on my thoughts or actions, nor was I finding any relaxation.
In the early ‘80s, I was introduced to a cult-like group in Beverly Hills, obsessed with a trademarked and expensive meditation system called Transcendental Meditation (TM). I met someone from this group in AA, and she instructed me to sit for twenty agonizing minutes chanting a sound she had given me. She warned me never to share the secret sound with anyone. I tried it for about 90 seconds, then sat quietly for the remaining 18 minutes, completely miserable. At that age, with my stack of unresolved anxieties, stillness was the last thing I could handle.
If you identify with the pain and torture of stillness, welcome to the human race. The body and the mind are designed for action, for thinking. Trying to quiet the mind may have benefits, but not for people like us. We need adrenaline. We need entertainment. We need to escape our minds, not drop in on them and experience the rambling noise of thoughts bombarding us.
When we start eavesdropping on the mind, we discover rooms in the castle: a room with childhood hurts, one with resentments, another with cravings, money, sex, popularity, fast cars, cash. There’s a room with self-loathing, “I’m ugly, I’m dumb,” and yet another with grandiosity, “I am the greatest, I know everything.” The castle is filled with anxiety, and the mind has hijacked our awareness, taking over our being.
So, meditation sucks without a good teacher or experienced guide who can explain the process. This three-volume series is that guide, and I’m a reliable teacher, not a master, just a teacher. Meditation is a daily practice of reflection. As we improve at reflection, we increase our ability to stay relaxed and focused on quieting the mind. Quieting the mind doesn’t necessarily mean achieving zero thoughts. It might mean achieving zero negative thoughts. It might mean learning to control the mind the way we learn to control muscles and limbs when we dance, play tennis, swim, or lift weights. We display control over our bodies and our fingers if we learn the piano. The mind is no different. It is healthy to practice moving through thoughts, redirecting, healing, rationalizing, and finding the sources of difficult thoughts and letting them pass, rather than clinging to them.
Meditation is the antidote to anxiety, which causes agitation in the mind, reactivity, and leads us to avoid these feelings by gravitating toward addictions to change our state. If we can quiet our minds enough to find relaxation, we’ve succeeded in meditation.
As we age and mature, working on our character and behavior, surrendering poor traits like lying, selfishness, and addiction, we go deeper into meditation and find rooms in the mind beyond the self. We discover a unique place called Now, rarely visited by anxious and triggered creatures like humans. We usually dwell in our thoughts, even when we appear to be focused on what we’re doing. We’re adrift in ideas, feelings, thoughts, and narratives. We constantly look into the future and worry or anchor ourselves in the past. Now is the hardest place to arrive at because we have so many distractions and endless triggers into our anxieties. Meditation is the place we go to master all that noise. It’s a slow process, with the first few years possibly yielding no results, no reward.
There are two kinds of meditation practices: moving and active, still present and engaged in relaxing through breathing while tuning into the Now. The other is a still practice, seated or in a pose that doesn’t cause discomfort. Discomfort will distract us. If seated meditation is uncomfortable, we can lie in the dead body pose, as long as we remain awake. The rest of this series expands on this chapter and will guide us through the many stages of meditation.
I can’t teach you about life after death, reincarnation, astrology, or how to cultivate super mind powers like ESP (extra-sensory perception), but I do teach you to relax and understand the nature of the mind, our anxieties, our chemistry, and techniques to discover meditation and its siblings: good breathing techniques, focusing techniques, and character development to clear away the wreckage of our past. Beyond that, you’ll have to master your Chinese split between two chairs and win the Kumite competition in Hong Kong to unlock the deeper secrets. Hah, just kidding. Enjoy the process and stick with it. It takes time, but stay with it. There’s something of value in it, but you must find it on your own.