The evolving story of my meditation practice begins, more or less, with a story about yoga.
Late in 2013, I began a daily hatha yoga practice to control stress and to increase personal stamina and flexibility.
I started each day on a flimsy salmon-colored yoga mat on my bare living-room floor. A typical routine consisted of a downward-facing dog, a plank pose, a seated forward bend or two, various standing poses, and sivasana, "the corpse pose," where you lie motionless on your back and follow your breath with your awareness. It all took less than fifteen minutes. I also started taking a few classes a month at a local yoga studio.
I was in choppy personal waters. In my 40s, I had chronic health woes, which I feared would worsen. After some false starts, I'd carefully chosen a career a few years back and gone back to school to train for it. But in the depths of the Great Recession, when I'd graduated, there were no jobs in my chosen area. I was high-and-dry, with money worries, health worries, working almost full-time at something I largely resented, and volunteering a lot.
I was tightly scheduled. But daily "yoga time" wasn't a corner I was ever willing to
cut. I found "yoga effort" transferable to the rest of my life: "This hurts. Do I gently push into it, or do I back off? Back off for now." An old ankle injury was receding noticeably because of the seated forward bends. Yoga was slowing me, not molasses-slow, but fully-savoring-my-stew-of-a-life slow. I was calmer.
Long before starting yoga in 2013, I'd had formal mindfulness training in my twenties, through exposure to Zen Buddhist meditation. Several of my housemates at the time were involved in a zendo nearby. I wanted to find out what they were doing, and I tagged along. At the zendo, I was instructed in how to "sit Zen," straight-backed and motionless, breathing mindfully, on firm, stacked cushions, facing the immense, gold-leaf Buddha, the curling incense, and the fresh-cut flowers.
I was attending regular "sittings" at the zendo. I was trying to "sit" at home. But I wasn't good at "sitting." I heard confusing, upsetting "spiritual" rhetoric in those days, about how we meditated, supposedly, to vanquish the "wily ego"—the source of suffering—with "awareness." It was a battle. I sat on the cushion and tried to focus my mind on my breath but that mind went where it wanted. I had no idea how much time I lost, daydreaming, completely out-of-touch with my objective. I concluded after many months of this that my "ego" was "winning" this "war," or at any rate, seated meditation wasn't the practice for me. That was the last of formal efforts at "mindfulness" for a good while.
By spring of 2014, however, a few months into my regular home yoga practice, I was noticing something remarkable. Lying on my back during sivasana, relaxing, aware of my breath, my heart was pounding as if I'd just drunk strong coffee. This makes no sense. It was excitement.
Practicing hatha yoga, at long last, I'd "gotten the hang" of meditation, a skill that had eluded me since my Zen days. My body completely relaxed during sivasana, my gremlin-mind bobbed and weaved in my awareness, but my breath was always right there. I could choose to return to it at any time, regardless of where my mind was. My awareness was separate from my thoughts.
My daily "sivasanas" were getting longer. From ten minutes in the early spring, by solstice, I'd bumped them up to twenty minutes. They lengthened again, to 40 minutes, in July. Obviously, by then, it was unwieldy to combine them with yoga. They weren't "sivasanas" anymore, really, as much as "meditation." I persisted, rising earlier if I needed, to make time for them. By then, I was relying heavily on Jon Kabat-Zinn's 1990 science-based meditation how-to, "Full Catastrophe Living." In the book, Kabat-Zinn, a psychologist, details his signature "body scan" meditation, a full forty-five minutes of lying on the back, focusing relaxed attention on each part of the body in turn.
I've practiced that ever since, for many months; I regard it as daily self-care, like bathing, like sleeping. On days when I don't do the body scan, I sit upright in a comfortable chair and follow my breath for forty minutes. I watch daylight seep into the room, sometimes with a candle flickering. Scanning my body lying down, or following my breath sitting up, my hands are open and my palms face upward. I meditate to cultivate an attitude of acceptance.
I still practice hatha yoga a few times a week. It's boosted my functioning in distinct ways. But my "flagship" personal practice these days is meditation, not because I've chosen that consciously, but merely because I follow where my intuition leads.
How could I rebound from that nadir of discouragement with meditation in my twenties, to my committed engagement today? Was hatha yoga some kind of "gateway" practice for me? Was it something as simple as having my back supported during meditation that so improved the quality of my effort?
I think it is that I've realized something basic: My mind churns nonstop when I'm awake, because that's what minds do. Despite it, I can observe my breath with infinite, matter-of-fact patience. On no account is worthwhile meditation "war;" it is kind, undivided attention.
From that definition, all else flows. I noticed after I had been meditating a few months that the taste of food was back. It had been largely absent for years and years, though I hadn't missed it. Now, peanut-butter-and-jelly is delectable again, on the tongue, sliding down the throat. Colors are back, random, improbable gifts, and they are stunning. I am hiding less, speaking up more. I have the prerogative, every moment, of starting over. My life is easier, more privileged than a good many, more restricted, I suppose, than others. There is room for everything in it, even lightness, even joy.