I'm learning to mediate. It's awesome, and you should try it.

Come, join me on this cushion. Close your eyes. Breathe.

Mar 06, 2023

So, among the projects I randomly decided to undertake for 2023 is a commitment to daily meditation practice. I’m still not entirely sure what inspired this. I think I just saw a few people on Twitter who I like and respect make oblique references to their meditation routine and I thought, “well what the hell — I’ll try it.” My meditation origin story doesn’t have a good hook; there was no crisis in my life that led me to think I needed to do this — I was just curious. It’s been two months now, and while it’s still early, I think I’ve learned enough to write an initial post. And I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s been great, and I’m excited to see where this goes.

What Meditation Isn’t

To start, I should say that as a rule, I’m not the sort of person who meditates. Or more precisely, I’m definitely not the sort of person who feels at home with the aesthetic of meditation. I don’t do flow-y robes and candles. I don’t like sitting on the floor. I think incense is usually gross. I would feel ridiculous doing anything with chants or crystals or birkenstocks. I just .. don’t have an appetite for spiritual woo-woo.

And even more to the point — I don’t have an appetite for religious practice generally. I was raised culturally Catholic — we were an Irish Catholic family by history, but we never went to church and had no particular sense of reverence for Catholic hierarchy and iconography. My friends growing up were all Southern Baptists and nondenominational evangelicals, and I accompanied them to lots of revivals and Sunday services and whatnot, so I had a fairly good sense of what “Christian” meant in the 90s and 2000s. But like.. actual prayer/religious practice to me was always SO pointless. I didn’t get it.

Now as an adult, I’m here to say that I think prayer is really bad! I mean.. it’s fine for you if you like it, I guess. But for me, as an adolescent or 20-something, it did nothing but up my anxiety. First, I couldn’t get past how irrational it felt — silently listing off my hopes/fears/wants/sins to some distant higher power who (a) I wasn’t sure existed; and (b) if He did exist, I certainly didn’t believe He was listening to me and taking note of anything I said. But even more than all that — the voice in my head I would use to pray was just a mess. I couldn’t formulate words that meant anything, much less express coherent paragraphs of thought. Every few seconds my prayer was interrupted by a random idea, a song lyric, another rabbit hole of memory I didn’t actually care about .. whatever. The whole thing just convinced me that my own internal monologue is a noisy, uncontrollable disaster, and that any attempt to converse with that inner voice in a methodical way was pointless.

All of which is to say.. I have since learned that meditation is not at all like that. I am slowly undoing the damage caused by a couple decades of being tortured by the internal monologue of my own thoughts. It’s nice to engage in a practice that doesn’t expect the impossible. I don’t walk around with a sense of Profound Mental Clarity, and meditation doesn’t start from the premise that I should. Prayer left me feeling constantly judged and like I was failing in the task. Meditation is completely different.

Meditation is also — i should stress — not about “clearing your head.” I think this is the other big misconception that gets people hung up on the idea of meditation. “Clearing your head” sucks for the same reason prayer sucks! It’s impossible. It’s like forcing yourself to play The Game over and over.1 You have a working brain (if you’re lucky). It comes with thoughts. It just does. Quit trying to be “free” of them. Meditation helps channel thoughts, sure, but like.. it’s not some blissed out serenity vibe where the mind just goes empty. That doesn’t exist. Or at least, it doesn’t exist without drugs, and I’m not willing to go there.

What (i think) Meditation Is

I should caveat all this of course by saying that I’ve barely been working on meditation for two months. I haven’t done the deep reading. I don’t know anything about Buddhist tradition or philosophy. I haven’t been on any week-long meditation retreats. I’m just getting acquainted. And so far, the thing I find most valuable about meditation is that it gives me the tools to stay deeply, meaningfully in the present.

The thing is.. the guy inside my head who runs my internal monologue is a huge asshole, and his attention is all over the place. He never stays focused on one thing for very long, but he is constantly either re-playing something from the past, or looking ahead to something in the future. And whatever he’s focused on is usually mean or negative or both. I think one reason I’ve never found prayer useful is that prayer involves just letting this guy in my head talk about whatever’s on his mind. And inevitably, he dwells on something I screwed up (either like, yesterday, or a week ago, or 20 years ago), something petty or stupid that made me mad (same timeframe), or some future event I can’t control. This isn’t *all* the time of course, but more often than not, the guy in my head is anxious, aggrieved, self-defeating, or just generally miserable. Or he’s daydreaming about something pointless — imagining conversations that could/should have taken place with people, or imagining a ridiculous scenario that will never happen. But regardless, he’s constantly fixated on stuff that isn’t happening *now* and thus it’s stuff I can’t do anything about.

I know I’m not unique here by any means, but I have conversations with myself a lot. What meditation has made me see is not that those monologues are pointless, necessarily, but more that — I don’t have to be held captive by them. I can direct my attention toward other things that are more useful, or more fulfilling, and I feel better when I’m able to do that. It’s frustrating to write about this, because inevitably what I say is going to sound like Deepak Chopra nonsense. But like — meditation gives me a single frame of awareness with which to experience the world. The sense of my own breathing — the physical sensations in the body — the immediate environment where I find myself — and my own internal thoughts — it’s all one big set of experiences that happen within awareness. Within consciousness. And when you think about it — the present moment is truly the only thing that matters, as an experience. The “past” is just thoughts in your head. So too with the “future.” You have to keep your mind in the present if you want to actually experience your life. Otherwise, you’re just lost in thought ruminating about stuff.

Anyway. Going down this line of thinking gets pretty philosophical pretty quickly, and I won’t pretend that I’ve got it all figured out here. What I can say is that when I meditate, I manage to bring my thoughts directly to bear on my immediate experience, I get to really focus on the idea of what it means to pay attention and to really think about my own thinking, and the asshole in my head finally, mercifully shuts the fuck up for a few minutes. It’s amazing. It feels fantastic. I can’t recommend it enough.

Where to Start

So .. just a couple of links and stuff if you’re at all interested in trying any of this. My gateway into meditation has been the Waking Up app by Sam Harris.2 I have a link to a free 30-day trial period if you want it, so just email me.

Waking Up starts with an introductory course of 28 guided meditations. You do one per day, and each one is about eight or ten minutes. Sam Harris narrates each session, and at the end of it you have a basic idea of how mindfulness meditation is supposed to work.3 There’s also a daily lecture you can listen to that’s about five or six minutes, and it helps give some background as well. But I skipped about half the lectures and just focused on the meditations themselves.

Once you finish the introductory course, you can explore the whole app and listen to lots of different guided meditations from different teachers, mediations that focus on better sleep, or meditation while walking, or meditation for dealing with grief, or whatever else. There’s also a default guided daily meditation of 10 or 20 minutes led by Sam Harris. Basically, the app has way more meditative juju than you could ever want, but there’s a lot to explore and you can just find what works best for you.

The other resource I’ve leaned on has been a short book called 10% Happier by Dan Harris (This is needlessly confusing, but Dan Harris is no relation to Sam Harris). Dan Harris is a former reporter at ABC News who had something of a meltdown on live television in 2006. He was serving as the news reader guy for Good Morning America and the the next minute he just lost it. There wasn’t any huge freakout or lunatic ranting or anything, but as career developments go, it wasn’t great. Eventually, Harris discovered meditation as a way to help be less stressed and miserable all the time, and he wrote a book about it. I liked this book both because it had some good background on meditation practice, and it’s also a pretty good memoir for a guy who used to work in national TV news. Being a national TV reporter sounds miserable — both because the job is incredibly stressful, AND you can’t help but feel like you’re never good enough (you always want the job of the person above you), AND there’s always people below you trying to take the job you do have away from you. It’s toxically competitive in a way that I don’t think I could ever do. Dan Harris eventually left the business entirely, so I guess on some level he couldn’t deal with it either. But it’s a good read.

There’s also a 10% Happier app, that I assume more or less works like the Waking Up app, but I haven’t tried the 10% Happier one. It’s on my list to check out.

A Couple Observations

It’s early days, still, and I honestly feel like I should wait six months or a year before really trying to articulate how meditation has benefited me. But even though I’m just starting, I can still enthusiastically say I like it. It makes me calmer and less anxious. Even just the few situations I’ve been in recently where I would ordinarily get really stressed or restless — miserable car traffic in the suburbs, a chaotic and crowded shopping experience, an interminable hours-long customs line at the airport — I’ve reacted to these way, way better than is typical for me. And, I don’t talk to myself quite as much. Or when I do, I notice that I’m doing so, and it’s a lot easier to steer myself out of the mental skid. When I ride the CTA each morning, I’m ok to just *sit there*. I listen to my Spotify or whatever, but I’m not miserable (even though the actual environment can be pretty bad!), and I’m not looking for distraction in my phone. It’s ok to just be. It’s a very small thing, but it helps.

And look. I should still acknowledge that meditation is like any other form of exercise. There are days it’s just not there, and it really feels like I’m doing it all wrong. Like.. if I’m overly tired, or my mind really wants to be somewhere else, meditation doesn’t just automatically fix that. Sometimes I still get distracted, and the vibe is all off, or I’ve bitten off more than I can chew — trying to meditate for 30 minutes, when I really should have just held steady at 10 or 15. But meditation is a forgiving practice. The whole point is that your mind is going to wander a bit, and you’re going to lose focus. That’s ok. You just start again.

I guess if I had to pick one piece of the practice that I still *really* don’t get though — I should note that there’s this big focus on deconstructing the ego. And I mean, that’s certainly a good thing, as far as it goes. It’s nice to focus attention on the idea that my thoughts — my own internal sense of who I am and what I’m about — don’t control me. But mindfulness meditation takes that a step further and argues that the “self” doesn’t really exist at all. It’s simply another thought banging around in your head, along with “I’m hungry” and “it’s kinda chilly in here.” “I have a ‘self’ and my identity is distinct from mere observations in consciousness.” — just another thought! It seems like kind of a big leap to yadda-yadda away the notion of the self.4 The guided meditations I listen to tell me to observe something in space and then “look for the one who is looking,” but like — I’m right here. Me. I’m the one looking. But somehow I’m supposed to realize that “I” don’t exist in that sense, and the mere thought of my existence is just that. This is apparently a next-level achievement in meditation that can take years or a lifetime to attain, so I’m not sure why my little meditation app tries to bring it out in the introductory course. It’s all of a piece with the idea of nirvana and achieving enlightenment, which — I dunno. Does sound pretty cool. But I’m not going to push myself too hard in that direction.5

AI generated art, like the ego, doesn’t really exist. It’s simply an impression that arises from the constellation of thoughts your head. Or something like that.

Anyway. I’m not sure this post achieved anything, but I did want to take a stab at describing this whole meditation kick I’m on, because it is turning out better than I expected. “10% happier” is a good name for it. It doesn’t fix everything. But it helps me not persecute myself quite so much. There are still hard things in life, and things that bother or upset me. But I feel like meditation helps me not make it worse with my own self-destructive thoughts. And that’s something.

Am I ready to run off to this six-day men’s mindfulness meditation retreat in the South of France later this year? Probably not. But I’m not ruling it out for 2024.

The Game is an Internet meme thing that .. oh it’s too dumb for words. Here’s the gist of it from the Wikipedia article:

If you followed The Discourse in the mid-2000s, you may have heard of Sam Harris. He has a reputation of being a strident atheist, kind of like Richard Dawkins. People got offended by a lot of what he said post-9/11 when he aggressively argued that religion is bad and religion leads people to do bad things like fly planes into buildings. He’s since moved off a lot of the anti-religion writing, and now focuses more on meditation. He’s also recently gotten into/written about psychedelics.

Mindfulness meditation is distinct from other forms, like transcendental meditation. Mindfulness, as I understand it, is about focusing on your immediate sense of awareness and learning to direct (or not direct) your attention. Transcendental meditation involves a bunch of mantras and attempts to achieve some higher consciousness. It’s a lot more woo-woo.

The other big metaphysical realization you’re supposed to have in mindfulness meditation is that, in addition to the “self” not existing, free will doesn’t exist, either. This idea doesn’t bother me nearly as much, and I can pretty much get behind it, partly because science says it’s the truth.

I will admit, there have been like, one or two instances where, just for the briefest moment, I achieved *something* that might be a window into how this is supposed to work. I’m not at all sure I understood it. But it did feel like I was able to truly separate the sense of “myself” from my awareness. As drug-free experiences go, it was pretty far out there. But like I said.. we’re talking about a second or two. I’ll keep working on it.