Clayton's Notes

On Meditation

I am writing this as a checkpoint, a snapshot in time of my experience meditating over the last 8 years, and how that has changed and evolved over those years. I’m writing this mostly for myself, because I know I will forget large portions of this 10, 20, 30 years from now, and will want to have it written down somewhere so I can go back and re-remember, re-live, these feelings and memories. Too, meditation has been foundational to a certain kind of personal change or awakening that I feel I am going through, in a very positive way, and so I’m posting these thoughts publically so that perhaps they will be of use or inspiration or perhaps just plain interest to others.

It is the 26th of June as I compose this, and according to my meditation tracker, I have meditated something like 75 out of the last 78 days. This is the longest consistent practice I’ve had by a large margin, and I can feel it: I’ve had a lot of personal turmoil the last year of my life, and any other past version of me that I can imagine would be far more anxious and torn-up about things than I am today. That’s not to say I don’t feel those things. I feel sadness, grief, loss, confusion, general & specific anxiety, frustration, raging anger, jealousy, envy, and the whole other host of “negative” emotions that go along with being human. I put negative in quotations on purpose: we say those emotions are negative because they aren’t pleasant. We run from them, do not want to experience them, but I’ve come to believe they aren’t actually inherently bad, only messengers of information to be acknowledged and felt just as we find it so easy to do with our “good” emotions. The point is that as a direct result of my meditation practice, I can feel these things, let myself experience them, and not be overwhelmed and dragged under for days or weeks on end. I can hold the negative with the positive, and let them both be.

At this point I must clarify something: It might seem like I am saying I have achieved some kind of enlightenment, that I now spend my days floating on a Zen cloud of equanimity.

I haven’t, I don’t.

I’m in a near-constant state of strongly changing emotions, with very little consistency. I don’t have anything figured out, and many major pieces of my life are in shambles. A girl who I was desperately in love with broke up with me in January, a short time after I moved across the world to be with her. That hurt and continues to hurt, nearly 6 months later. My job evaporated shortly after the breakup, and after 17 months of traveling, living abroad, learning another language, meeting a plethora of new and different people, having a ton of new and exciting experiences and moments, I find myself back in my hometown, driving the same streets I’ve been on for the majority of my 31 years, entwined in the same family dramas and dysfunctions, lost without a plan, face to face again with every shortcoming or problem I’ve ever had. Not all is lost: I have an array of friends so consistent and good that I often wonder how I got so lucky, and my siblings and other family I get along with are something I too feel unbelievably lucky to have. I still have money to live on for a while yet before I must resort to a cardboard home under a juniper. But many big things feel disjointed, broken, out of place, hidden.

In short, no Zen plane of existence has been discovered or attained. If anything, I am more in the mud than ever before.

So what is it then that I’ve found, that I experience with this meditative practice? It is something else, not a cloud to float on high above the muck, but perhaps rather a solid set of boots, or a good walking stick: a something that stays with me no matter how rough the ground, a tool to help me traverse the territory. A good pair of boots does not levitate you along the trail, but it does keep your feet warm and dry, and helps you not slip and fall. With all the traction in the world, they aren’t foolproof. You can still slip, fall, hurt yourself, but you’ll have them with you when you pick yourself back up and begin walking the path once more.

So: I’ve found something good. But the journey to that discovery took years.

I first began experimenting with meditation in 2017, because I wanted to be able to focus better. My conception of meditation then was sitting and focusing on my breath, and any moments that I wasn’t focused on my breath, I thought I was failing to meditate. This resulted in me spending most of my 10 minute sitting sessions feeling angry and frustrated that I couldn’t do the thing that I was supposed to be doing, because as any experienced meditator will tell you, the distractions and sidetracks are infinite. It is hilarious for me to look back on that viewpoint now knowing how completely I had missed the point. Meditation isn’t the act of focusing on your breath, it is the sitting down and trying over and over again, and being graceful with yourself when you catch yourself inevitably slipping into distraction. It is the learning to return to that point of focus through those distractions, and being kind to your mind when you find yourself 17 jumps of thought away without any idea of how you got there. With my impatience and frustration and anger, I could not have been going at it more backwards.

Still, even going at it backwards, it did something for me. If I meditated for a few days in a row, I would sometimes wake up the following day and feel a sense of peace, tranquility, that might last several hours. I very rarely, if ever, felt something similar otherwise.

I fell out of my half-assed inconsistent practice a month or two later.

5 years later, a friend was fighting cancer. She was meditating a lot, twice a day for 30 or 40 minutes at least, she told me. She said that she did not think she would be able to keep herself in a sane and stable place without that practice, watching her body turn against her and consume itself. I saw her keep that inside peace up to the last time I saw her. She died, and a month later, I took up my inconsistent practice again for a month or two, in search of whatever inner centeredness and calm she had found, before slipping out of it again, never having really felt like I had set a habit.

I moved across the world, and a couple months later, friends came to visit. One of them had brought a book that I picked up one day and started leafing through, and she left it with me when they departed. When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, a book that I’d describe as a Buddhist-oriented manual for what to do when it feels like everything is going wrong in your life, flying to pieces. Chodron shared something incredibly simple that changed everything for me: when you found yourself lost in thought, distracted, you would say “thinking” in your mind, kindly acknowledging it as the default thing that your mind would do, without attaching negativity to it. No impatience or frustration, simply a kind acknowledgement of what was of course taking place, since what else would take place, since that is always what the mind will do as that is its function, and then a gentle return to the breath.

I still didn’t take up a regular practice. I practiced for a couple weeks and realized how impactful this different way to approach meditation was, then had to move twice in a few weeks and got busy with other stuff and fell out of it again. But more seeds were laid.

9 months later, I was visiting a new city, and ended up going to a comedy show that a hostel-mate was performing at. I sat behind a piano with some random guy in the back, and after the show, we ended up talking intensely for an hour or so. He told me he’d taken up meditation a few years ago, and that it had totally changed him. He used an app called Insight Timer, and he showed me his streak. I can’t remember the exact number, but it was north of 900 days. He hadn’t missed a day in close to 3 years. I can’t remember his name, and we didn’t exchange any contact info, just conversed for an hour and then went our separate ways, but this dude had an outsized impact on me. He had a peace and solidity to him. I wanted that.

A few weeks later, and the ground for my practice finally was made ready: I had just gone to Mexico for several months, I was totally alone, and was in the midst of a weird long-distance pseudo-relationship with a girl who I was deeply in love with, though I didn’t know myself well enough to know that then. The relationship began to fall apart, and it was the only thing I had at that time. It felt like my one tether keeping me held onto anything was being cut, and I had the most intensely anxious and miserable two months of my life. I was so stressed that I stopped eating regularly, and could only sleep a few hours a night. A week or two into it, and I remembered the dude from the comedy show, and I downloaded the app and began to practice in earnest. I’d always thought using an app to track meditation was corny, against the whole idea of it, but I was desperate.

The app worked. I did a lot of guided meditations the first month, finding that the guided sessions could keep me focused in a way I couldn’t do on my own, in silence. Then, after 20 or 30 guided sessions, I returned to my normal silent meditation and found I could do them again. Going to the gym, yoga, dancing, and opening up to friends on calls with how miserable I was went a long way towards getting me through that time, but meditation was core. I would have had a complete breakdown without it, instead of the partial breakdown that I had.

The two months of isolation ended when the girl came to visit for a week, the relationship temporarily patched up. Other friends came to visit shortly after, and things got busy and chaotic. I stopped meditating again.

Two months passed and I flew across the world again, this time to live in the same city as the girl, have a real relationship. There were many cracks showing in the relationship, and my feelings and gut knew it. I was stressed out of my mind, having difficulty eating and sleeping again, but I still didn’t know enough to pay those feelings heed. I knew things were off, but I wasn’t honest enough with myself to take it seriously. I was stressed enough to know that I needed meditation again, and I started up again my first night in her city. This was a very good thing, because she broke up with me 10 days after I moved there. I packed up my things (again) and went to stay for a month with friends who lived nearby in Switzerland, try to piece back together my world. I kept meditating, then it all fell apart when I moved back home and lost my job a few days later, my employer imploding under rising interest rates, unfavorable exchange rates, and good old tariffs.

I started meditating again a month later, and I’ve been consistent since. Reading through all this, it sounds very start and stop, as if even this current practice could come to an end on a whim or change of circumstances, but I don’t think it will. I feel inner peace much of the time, even though things around me are turbulent, and I’ve had a number of revolutionary-to-me insights while sitting on my cushion over the last couple months that have changed how I experience life in a very positive way (talking about any of them would take its own post). It doesn’t feel like something I will fall out of now. I go to my cushion every morning after tea and stretching, and it anchors my day.

That’s all.

If any of this resonated with you, give it a shot :) You might find it changes a lot for you, too. This is the app I use, which I’m very happy with: https://insighttimer.com