I'm not sure this work applies to every human being on earth. It's something I encounter in myself and find essential to my own development, so I share it knowing that some people don't carry much pain or trauma. Some never explore the depths of their own psychology and stay perfectly happy and relaxed. Others, like me, have to dive deep. I'm lucky. I don't spend much of my life down there. I go in, I feel something, I cry, I remember, I release. I grieve. I breathe. I come back to gratitude and joy, back to the present moment, and I feel I've set down a piece of something I was carrying, maybe tension somewhere in the body, maybe a tightening of the diaphragm. Each trauma holds in the body in ways more mysterious than anything we can explain.
What I know is that meditation is a beautiful gift, a hidden process nature handed us that we still have to learn. It probably isn't instinctual. Raised alone, never having seen it, you'd almost never find it on your own. We observe it, we hear about it, it gets passed down from one generation to the next.
No matter how tough we like to think we are, life is extremely difficult. It has its wonderful, blessed moments, and then it has the brutal ones. If your circumstances are harder than most, you simply have more work to do. More breathing, more meditation, more writing, more service, more therapy, more study. That's the choice.
When we go into this work and find a space, a meditation center, a yoga school, beside our bed, a prison cell, a beach in Hawaii, a helicopter, we're looking to be quiet for a moment. Shut down all the systems. Stop analyzing. Stop remembering. Stop bracing for later. Stop running the narratives. Stop all the stress the mind manufactures. And we keep breathing. In the early years we wrestle the next thought as it forces its way up. Then we smile and try again. Keep breathing. Keep softening the mind.
We may find there's darkness to cross before the light. A tunnel in our own minds where endless painful moments still live, and they want out. They want to be released. It may never have felt safe to let them go. Holding on, even to the negative things, may have saved us once. It may have protected us. It may be harming us now. It shows up as tightness in the hips, the lower back, the neck, adrenaline and cortisol living in the body like old weather.
If we keep practicing, and we find that stillness, the first thing that may happen is we cry. We might not know why. Don't judge it. Don't talk it to death. Just let it happen, then keep breathing. Keep moving. The session ends. In time we build a tolerance. We let it run longer. We learn to create a flow inside the crying that modern life would otherwise stifle. We're either too stoic or too depressed. We cry too much or not at all.
In meditation we soften all resistance to pain, and at the same time we breathe to build the strength to carry it without being overloaded. This is one of the great shifts: moving through a range of enormous emotions in a single sitting without reacting to any of them.
When I practice yoga and really drop into the zone, I'm smiling from gratitude in one posture and feeling tears well up in the next. Sometimes I can't tell if it's sorrow or happiness, happiness just to be breathing, to be present for my own consciousness. Then I get excited, because I sense that if I just keep the breath going I'll go deeper. I'm not afraid anymore. I'm not afraid of whatever truth lies below the surface.
My main goal is mental relaxation. I don't worry about turning my anxiety systems back on. I've lived in them my whole life. I have no fear of losing my alertness, my sharpness, my ability to survive. When I reach these tender spots, the opposite happens. I become more alert. Senses that were shut down switch back on, empathy, compassion, capacities I can't yet name. I'm just diving deeper and deeper into what compassion actually means.
Writing this has made me humble. The more I write about it, the more I see I'm nothing special. You and I are the same thing. I'm just working through it the way it comes to me, and it heals me, and the message is to share it without getting caught up in the teaching, the fame, or the power.