The silence doesn’t hold for long. Within seconds my own mind corrupts the peaceful void of sound and replaces it with that familiar, persistent tremor. That electric vibration that only gets more prominent the more its ignored. I scrunch my brow, searching for the silence, aiming to rid myself of the anxious ripple that pulses through me.
Sometimes I find myself going through life distracted. Along for the ride but looking ahead with eyes glazed over. Not completely there, in it. Sometimes I can even recognise it, yet I still can’t pull myself out of it. This distraction manifests itself as an inner restlessness, feeding on the promise of the next rush, the next dose of dopamine, the abstract idea we call the future.
If I truly consider this state, this feeling, this passive way of experiencing life –– I find myself filled with fear. To have the blessing of life and distract yourself from living it seems to me the antithesis of virtue. Distract yourself for long enough and you will forget that which you are running from. But don’t kid yourself, your subconscious won’t. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ seems to forget that our body runs on its own clock. Unresolved fear or (the overused word) ‘trauma’ can appear within the body as a deep anxiety as it has done in me on more than one occasion.
Now I don’t like the term self help, and it isn’t my intention to fall within that bracket. If this is self help, it is mostly so in that I’m helping myself punch keyboard letters in to form half-baked sentences that ease my spirit. I write this in a somewhat fractured state – on the one hand confused in how I find myself in this situation, and on the other pragmatically looking for solutions. Fragmented mostly, even though these two are one in the same.
There was a time when I meditated every day for 20-30 minutes. The effects of this daily practice was astonishing and permeated many layers within my understanding of myself and the world.
If I could describe one key attribute that meditation provided me it would be space. In everyday moments, times I couldn’t predict or plan for, I discovered space between stimulus and response. As if in key moments where my reaction would be anticipated, time would slow down. I could consider and confidently respond. To equate it to a superpower, it would be like having a phobia of tight spaces and being able, at will, to push the walls away from you as far as you’d like them to go. The room you’d find yourself in would be the same, yet your relationship to its borders would have increased.
If you can’t imagine what this feels like, pay attention to the space that arrives when you relax your brow, your jaw, the muscles in your face and neck. The benefit of consistent and disciplined meditation is this feeling, yet through every part of your behaviour, mind and being.
Living with greater space is a conduit for discovering pockets of joy in your day. Like noticing the peculiar difference in responding to conversational questions a few beats later than expected. Try it the next time you find yourself in conversation. Reply a few seconds after you normally would and you’ll find people listening more attentively, find your own answers delivered with more grace.
There was a time, as I said, where meditation at the start of each day was non-negotiable. Rain or sunshine, happy or sad, busy or not, I would set 20-30 minutes aside and sit crosslegged on the mat, grass, sand or floor. I would focus on my breathe, I would let thoughts come and I would let them go. I would listen to all the sounds which appeared in the now and focus on them. I would scan my body from crown till toe and discover areas of tightness, I would relax them. I would bend forward and hug myself, I would reach up to the sky and see myself seated below. I would hear a bird fly passed and displace my awareness into its body, watch myself sitting there as I flew passed. I would sit distracted sometimes, until I surrendered, until the space returned.
The ability to create space is like giving a part of your brain time to relax. Instead of shutting off, its able to create connections between unobservable stimulus that are completely imperceivable when you’re living in a state of fight or flight. Whilst I couldn’t fortune tell, I did find myself less surprised at certain occurrences that arrived in reality. As if I could see them coming. Like thinking about a friend before they call your phone. Or watching a punch make its way towards your face and finishing your conversation before stepping out of the way.
There was even a time when, opening the gates of my own awareness with force, I was thrown off balance. Whereby I experienced a kind of depersonalisation, as if reality was breaking down. This was equally scary, and required a backing off from awareness practice and a rebalancing of energy centres. I’m saying all this not to make you believe everything I say, but rather to illustrate that you can also in fact, go too far with this stuff.
Synthesising my journey with meditation (so far) has been a good way for me to remember what it is I’m missing when I find myself trembling at the fringes, pulled one way and another, petrified in the headlights of life. One of the big things I love about writing these entries is that I do them for me as much as I do them for you. Perhaps I do them for me even more. Writing my thoughts down, making sense of the mess in my mind, seems to make me a better human, providing me with a firmer grasp over my beliefs, values and ruminations.
Meditation is like writing with invisible ink. You may notice what you write down when you write it, yet it disappears as soon as you look at it. To do what you wish to see on the page, is to live with a faith rooted in the present moment, in other words, to just be.
Till next time,
- IL
PS. A pensive track to ponder to…
Meditation daily can be powerful I used to do it too but got out of the habit. Thanks for the reminder - I must find time again. Thanks for sharing, I just subscribed.
"To do what you wish to see on the page, is to live with a faith rooted in the present moment, in other words, to just be". What a quote, it's going on my bedroom wall in big letters. Loved it!