The first time I moseyed towards meditation was for a contest (face palm emoji). My friend, MP, and her husband hosted a New Year’s fitness challenge through their gym where participants kept track of time spent exercising, water intake and (gulp) sessions of meditation. Winner got a prize.
My life was spiralling and I was coasting through it on a slick sheet of denial—I couldn’t keep a job, I was behaving erratically as a husband and friend, and my seemingly random, rage-induced blackouts were road-blocking me from any hope or stability. “I could use a win,” I thought to myself, reading the email at 4 a.m. after a psychosis-fueled night.
I was active already, what with all my free time and manic energy (hehe), disc golfing four or five times a week and walking the dog daily. My water consumption was great, thanks to the year-round heat of Texas and a new addiction to off-brand La Croix. But this meditation thing, I did not know much about.
Aswirl in mood swings, delusions and hallucinations, heightened by what later would be revealed as a negative side-effect of my anti-depressant, the only moments I had much peace were the first instances following a manic rage attack, when I would blink awake after blacking out (yeah, I know, it’s strange and scary and a little sus).
On those regretful days, I often woke in my underwear, flat on my back on the floor, and in those few beats before the “Oh, no, what did I do?” jitters rushed in, I felt reborn, free of care and attentive only to the sensorial pressures entering my consciousness, lost in the pattern of the ceiling, the cool hum of the floor.
The start of an important spiritual journey
So, that is what I did for the challenge. Each day I would strip to my underwear, lie on the hardwood floor and just remain—no bell, no guide, no intention, no timer. I did not win, but the universe had clearly opened me to the possibility of being situated differently upstairs (exploding brain emoji).
The openness I felt in those early moments of meditation was not wholly unfamiliar to me. As a poet, I was a frequent frolicker in the playground of consciousness; the subconscious, the unconscious, the associative and the dissociative were popular mental spaces of mine. A hick from rural Indiana, I was raised among quiet activities—waiting in a tree stand, sitting in a boat, poking at a campfire after everyone went off to bed (gif of sparkling embers).
I was still amuck in mental health woes, but I now realize I was at the start of an important spiritual journey, a new approach to “coming to terms with things as they are,” as Jon Kabat-Zinn defines healing.
After six years in the big city of Austin, I moved back to my hometown of Elwood, and shortly upon arrival, I visited the humble local library, hoping to find something good to read until I unpacked my books. Much to my delight, I came across Sam Harris’s Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, his neuroscience-based, part-memoir look at finding spirituality without religion, in particular through meditation.
Harris’s earlier work was vital to my development as a person, first in my “young angry academic atheist” phase in college, and later via his work on ethics through his Making Sense podcast, as I was figuring out how to be “good without god,” as humanist Greg Epstein calls it (still am, btw!).
This particular book, Waking Up (and for the last two years, the meditation app of the same name), has been transformative in adjusting my relationship with my mind, teaching me how to zoom out beyond my troubling and intrusive thoughts, in order to not be attached to—and thus ruled by—those cognitive activities.
Pitfalls and roadblocks
Not long after freeing that book from the clutches of the library, my wife left and COVID hit, pushing me much further into myself and away from others, still jobless and flailing, though finally properly diagnosed and medicated.
Evermore curious about this meditation thing, I reached out to Harris’s team and was no-questions-asked given a free year’s subscription (ty!). Their generosity rolled me onto the path towards completely rebalancing the power structure of my mind and my self (wtf is that?).
Meditation’s purpose is to radically alter one’s relationship to consciousness.
Harris says in multiple places on the app that the purpose of meditation, in general, is not to help one sleep better or to reduce anger, though those are positive by-products; instead, he declares, meditation’s purpose is to radically alter one’s relationship to consciousness. Flat on the floor in my underwear, hoping to get lost again in the ceiling, in that free feeling of relief, I thought, “Yes, that sounds quite nice.”
We all, of course, in our own ways, have pitfalls and roadblocks (often several tbh) in our relationship to consciousness. Too attached to ego, as the Buddhists would say, we worry endlessly and fruitlessly about possessions and status. Too bogged down by our erroneous default setting, that we are the center of the universe, as David Foster Wallace put it, we make everyday moments so much more difficult than they need to be, both for ourselves and others around us.
A mental illness or addiction, the result of our neurology being held captive by another force, literally keeps us from performing as our true essence. In my own journey with bipolar disorder—an illness where moods alternate between both ends of the spectrum, mania and depression—I have suffered from the either/or, all-or-nothing, win-or-lose mentality that plagues, I would come to learn, dualistic thinkers (basically all of us lol).
Reading Robin L. Flanigan’s article “Finding the Off Button” in the Winter 2022 issue of BP Hope, I was struck by Sally Winston’s pull quote, that “[r]umination seeks impossible guarantees of certainty and security and safety.” There it was, the source of a decade’s suffering. Whatever it was to which I was attached—my ego, my delusions, my irritability (my my my)—had become the source of so much dysfunction in my life, these expectations and these attachments feared unmet.
As Ram Dass said in a lecture on ego, “[It is] built on the fear of not surviving, and if that’s who you think you are, then you’re fearful all the time. And because you’re fearful, you overcompensate and make decisions that further separate you from others and yourself.”
Three years into my mindfulness practice, I can pinpoint so many of my failures and mistakes to that unchecked fear—of being abandoned, of being embarrassed, of being forgotten, of being disintegrated. When my friend expressed concern about my mental health and how it might play out at his wedding, I latched onto the feeling of being accused, instead of resting in the space of his loving concern.
When an ex-girlfriend published an online essay about my psychotic behavior, I latched onto the loss of my poetry career and the death of my public persona, instead of healing the source of that pain. When my wife said she could no longer maintain our relationship, I gave over to hallucinations and paranoia, pushing myself to the brink of offing myself, catastrophizing instead of compartmentalizing and reaching out for help.
Open to whatever comes
But now? Not so much (fingers crossed emoji). Yes, of course, I struggle with my symptoms, much milder now, anyhow, thanks to a better relationship with my support system (thanks, Mom!) and my medication (thanks, doc!). However, my mindfulness practice has become the most essential tool in managing my bipolar disorder and the grief that tagged along.
At the end of sessions on Waking Up, Harris reminds us that mindfulness is not just for sitting; it is an essential element to be enacted in our everyday moments to lift us out of the dualistic space of fear, that jet fuel for less-fruitful, less-love-filled action.
This ability, which took over three years to cultivate (gif of person lifting heavy weights), keeps me unattached to my ego, grounded and plugged into the universe; in terms of positive by-products, it has literally all-but-eliminated my anger outbursts, allowed me (me?!) to de-escalate contentious situations and relieved me of living “constantly on edge,” as my ex-wife described it.
In a playwriting studies course at the Michener Center for Writers years ago, Sherry Kramer explained how great turns in a story are “in retrospect, inevitable.” Though unpredictable and surprising, with hindsight, they are extraordinarily natural, even obvious. Finally, I can witness how each point in the path has gifted me the next, even through heartache and suffering, through triumph and resiliency.
When I can access that plane, I can lead with gratitude and wonder, curiosity and celebration, instead of fear and judgment. Ram Dass, perhaps, would call this loving awareness (vibrating heart emoji). I can hear this gentle reminder of his greatest hits, that this light is available to us anytime when “[w]e grow into love through familiar practices: be here now, learn to let go of attachments, cultivate compassion and loving-kindness, and die into loving awareness, over and over again.”
The crux of my healing, it turns out, was not found in the space of awareness, but was the awareness itself. These days, I am open to whatever comes, in this life and whatever is next; whatever will be, in retrospect, inevitable.
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image 1 Shrikesh Kumar from Pixabay 2 image by Al Seeger from Pixabay 3 image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay 4 image by Reinhardi from Pixabay
