Let's talk about meditation
I am not an expert on meditation nor do I have some kind of monk-like meditation practice. I’ve been meditating off and on for over 10 years and daily for the last several, usually for 10 minutes at a time. I sometimes meditate longer but rarely shorter than that. There are a lot of really great ways to “learn” meditation and I’ve done some of them and they are very helpful (I will talk about that later in this post). I’m not qualified to teach you how to meditate or meditate “better” but I can share some of my experience.
Meditating for me is like taking a cat into the shower (maybe your cats like showers, but mine never have). It’s a mess of water and cat hair and probably my blood and a lot of screaming. OK, it’s not as graphic as all that and it looks a lot quieter, but it’s messy in my head.
Meditation became part of my sobriety practice because someone told me to do it every day and I did anything that I thought could help me get sober. Luckily I already had a mediocre practice in that at least I could actually sit for a long time without saying “fuck it, I’m outta here.” I have found that meditation helps me understand myself a lot better through understanding how my mind works. Anything that helps me understand myself better is good for my sobriety.
What I found most helpful to know about meditation is that it is not remotely about emptying your mind or finding some kind of consistent calm. It doesn’t have an endpoint. You never unlock a “bliss” level that you enter into like some kind of cartoon guru. As humans we are always thinking, and when we meditate we are always thinking. We can’t really stop that. And that’s totally fine.
What it is about is seeing your thoughts as arising in consciousness. When you use your senses, when you see or hear things, they arise in your consciousness. Thoughts are the same. So when I meditate and I feel my nose itch, I can say “that itch is in my consciousness.” When I think of the email I’m supposed to reply to, I can say “there’s a thought.” And by pinning it as a thought I let it evaporate for a moment. It, or another thought, will certainly come back. But I have identified it as something arising in consciousness. There is actually another level to this which involves trying to figure out where that consciousness is, but that’s a subject for another time and can be a little bewildering.
Here’s Kosho Uchiyama talking about meditation. He calls it “zazen,” which is a form of seated meditation that is central to Soto Zen Buddhism.
“When you realize you’re thinking and return to just sitting, the thoughts that appear before you like images on a TV suddenly disappear, as if you had switched the television off. Only the wall is left in front of you - for an instant, that’s it. Then thoughts arise. You return to zazen, and they vanish. We simply repeat this. Awareness of reality is called kakusoku. This is zazen. The most important point is to keep repeating this kakusoku billions of times. This is how we should practice.”
- Kosho Uchiyama, The Zen Teachings of Homeless Kodo
If this Zen priest, who sat for long periods of meditation every single day for over 50 years, says that he had to turn off his thoughts TV billions of times, and you are constantly pushing away thoughts that arise when you’re trying to meditate… well, you’re in good company. Also note that he calls it "practice" - it's something we keep working on. We never stop and say "nailed it!"
I like meditation because the shift in thinking that it brought to me helps me be less reactive. I can intercept my hackles going up because someone’s pissed me off. I can choose compassion or understanding over giving someone the finger. I spent most of my drinking decades pretty angry, so this shift in thinking (which only happened after I quit drinking despite meditating as an active drinker) has been huge for me. Meditation has almost been as important to me for maintaining my sobriety as finding a safe community where I can be vulnerable with my peers.
There are lots of styles of meditation and I’m confident you can find one that fits you. My style is just sitting for 10-30 minutes (usually waaaay closer to 10) at a time. I usually do it first thing in the morning.
If you are interested in starting or getting back to a meditation practice, I heartily recommend a meditation course by Sam Harris. Conveniently, the course is thirty days and you can get a free thirty days of his app, “Waking Up” here - https://wakingup.com/ (click “Free Trial”).
I’ll also leave you with two books that have been really important to my meditation practice. They are both explicitly about Soto Zen Buddhism, but sitting meditation - aka zazen - is central to that practice, so they’re totally about meditation.
The first, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, was my introduction to Zen Buddhism, and there’s a chapter in it called “Mind Weeds” that is all about those thoughts coming up.
The second, The Zen Teachings of Homeless Kodo, is a far-ranging book that is very accessible discusses meditation at great length. It’s where I got the quote from Uchiyama above.
(The links are Bookshop.org affiliate links - a pretty cool place to buy books online if you don’t want to shop at Amazon. You can also choose to support a bookstore in your area at Bookshop.org or just write these down and bring them into an actual bookstore, some of which thankfully still exist.)
I love you,
David
