MEDITATION & THE WORK OF LIVING
Three volumes. Ten years of writing. Forty years of practice.
By Marcus A. Edited by John G.
A book about what pulls us out of ease, and how a person finds the way back.
Three volumes, each one whole on its own, read them in any order.
Twenty-three sections, several hundred short chapters, no chapter longer than a sitting.
Six minutes a day gets you through the series in about two years.
THE THESIS
We do not suffer only because of the way we think. We suffer because of what was put into the mind.
It is conditioning. It is chemistry. It is early emotional imprinting. It is a nervous system that learned, often very early, that the world is not entirely safe.
Which means the usual advice was never going to work. If suffering comes only from thinking, and the cure is to think differently, a person could spend forty years trying to outthink their own wiring and arrive late in life with a little clarity.
There is another way in, and it runs through the body. Peace is not a belief and it is not a philosophy. It is a trainable biological state.
VOLUME I, THE FOUNDATION
Born Into Noise
Where the anxiety came from, why the mind fights quiet, and the two things that change it. Breath and posture. This is the volume that takes meditation out of the incense aisle and puts it back in the nervous system.
1.0 Start From Nothing
2.0 Meet The Mind
3.0 Know What Sets You Off
4.0 Change the Wiring
5.0 Breathe and Sit Straight
6.0 Question Prāṇa
7.0 Learn to Focus
ISBN 978-1-7354707-3-3
VOLUME II, THE WORK
The Ego Is Not the Enemy
Nobody has a big ego. Arrogance and defensiveness are a wounded self trying to regulate, and you do not go to war with that, you repair it. Then the harder question. How do you stop reacting to a life that keeps giving you reasons to react.
1.0 Rethink the Ego
2.0 Work the Mind
3.0 Get Out of Your Way
4.0 Live the Philosophy
5.0 Stop Reacting
6.0 Stay Present
7.0 Make It Your Life
ISBN 978-1-7354707-2-6
VOLUME III, THE LIFE
Go Where the Work Gets Hard
Regulating the nervous system is the floor, not the ceiling. This volume walks back through the rooms of a life without flinching, borrows what is useful from the East, uses the body, and lands where the practice always lands. Compassion, chosen on purpose.
1.0 Go Where the Work Gets Hard
2.0 Learn From the East
3.0 Turn Toward Each Other
4.0 Use the Body
5.0 See Where You Are Asleep
6.0 Look With a Quiet Mind
7.0 Understand the Biology
8.0 The Edge of Growth
9.0 Take It Everywhere Else
ISBN 978-1-7354707-1-9
HOW TO READ THREE VOLUMES WITHOUT DREADING THEM
Read straight through, the series runs about twenty-four hours. Nobody does that. At five or six minutes a day, with plenty of days skipped, it takes twelve to thirty-six months, and that is the pace it was built for. Every chapter is a complete thought. Open any volume anywhere.
Start anywhere. Each book stands on its own, the way each book in a series you love stands on its own. Volume III is not a reward for finishing Volume I.
Two minutes counts. If a teacher tells you a two minute practice does not count, smile, nod, then go laugh in a quiet room. A real teacher celebrates the one who starts again.
Leave what does not land. If something lands, live it. If it does not, let it go and keep reading. Some of the ideas here contradict each other, which is what happens when a person thinks honestly over a long time.
No equipment. No cushion, no app, no incense, no playlist. A chair, the edge of a bed, a breath you were already taking.
A PAGE FROM THE MIDDLE
At first, meditation feels like learning techniques. You sit down, you focus, you try to be calm. Then you realize the real work is much less glamorous.
It involves watching your mind do exactly what it has always done. Thinking, wandering, overreacting, replaying conversations, inventing new ones, and occasionally turning a single thought into a full cinematic experience.
You sit down to meditate and think, okay, just the breath. Then the Buddha appears. Then a lotus flower. Then somehow you are thinking about buying flowers. Then you are at the flower shop. Then you are wondering whether your partner even likes flowers. Then you are reviewing your entire schedule for the day.
This is not failure. This is Tuesday.
WRITTEN WITH PERMISSION, NOT AUTHORITY
I am not an academic and I am not a monk. I am an entrepreneur, a husband, and a father. I grew up in a highly anxious household and got sober at fifteen, which is where the eleventh step told me to meditate and I had no idea what that meant.
Forty years later I still call myself a practitioner, because that is what the teachers who have done this the longest call themselves. Before I wrote a single chapter I asked a teacher I trust whether it made sense for me to write about this at all. He gave me the green light at 12:29 in the morning with my phone battery nearly dead.
The series is published semi-anonymously on purpose. The subject deserves more attention than the person presenting it. Judge the work and how it is built, not me. I am flawed, and I am only midway through the same adventure you are on.
Drifting is human. Returning is the practice.