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.
我的生活在不停打转，滑行在一张光滑的否定书上——我无法留住工作，作为一个丈夫和朋友，我的行为很不正常，我那些似乎是愤怒引起的随机断片让我没有任何希望或稳定。在经历了一个精神错乱的夜晚后，我在凌晨4点看到了这封邮件，然后对自己说，"我可以利用一场胜利。"
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).
在那些令人遗憾的日子里，我经常穿着内衣醒来，平躺在地板上，在 "哦不，我做了什么？"的紧张情绪冲进来之前的那几秒钟，我感到重生，无忧无虑，只注意进入我意识的感官压力，迷失在天花板的图案和地板的冷哼中。
一个重要精神旅程的开始
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.
陷阱和路障
从图书馆魔掌中把这本书解脱出来后不久，我的妻子离开了，COVID盛行，进一步把我推向了自己，远离他人，仍然没有工作，摇摇欲坠，虽然最终得到了恰当的诊断和药物治疗。
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?).
冥想的目的就是从根本上改变人与意识的关系。
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.
正如拉姆•达斯（Ram Dass）在一次关于自我的演讲中所说，"[它]建立在对无法生存的恐惧上，如果那就是你认为的自己，那么你就会一直恐惧。因为你害怕，你就会过度补偿，做出进一步将你与他人和自己分离的决定。
在我进行正念练习的三年里，我可以把我的许多失败和错误归结为那种不受控制的，害怕被抛弃、被尴尬、被遗忘、被瓦解的恐惧。当我的朋友对我的心理健康以及在他的婚礼上可能出现的情况表示担忧时，我抓住了被指责的感觉，而不是在他爱的关怀空间里放松下来。
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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图1 Shrikesh Kumar 来自 Pixabay 2 图片由 Al Seeger 来自 Pixabay 3 图片由 Dariusz Sankowski 来自 Pixabay 4 图片由 Reinhardi 来自 Pixabay
