Meditation for many is hard. I tried for over 10 years, trying every flavor and teacher I could find—zen monks, Christian retreats, new-age gong ceremonies, and hiring teachers. I was a very, very slow learner, and it was so difficult to stay still, but I knew I needed to get some level of, if not control, at least awareness of the endlessly distracting chatter in my mind. Eventually, I used an app and a habit formed. For the last 15 years, pretty much every day, I start my day with 12 minutes of meditation. It has been life-changing, probably the single most impactful thing I have ever learned to do.
This habit allows me some amount of space between me receiving a stimulus and me reacting; for example, a man bumps me on the subway, and instead of some sort of reactive response, there is nothing. That said, I am still highly reactive and far from mellow, but it is better now. There is more peace in my brain than there was before. Because I have some level of control over my thoughts, I can also imagine and visualize more clearly. Up until recently, I was a competitive ski racer (yes, I recognize this does not exactly align with health span and longevity, but that is another story). In competitive sports, one will lose. Even world champions don’t run the table; they will miss a shot, strike out, crash in a race, and all these things have an emotional impact. If one is stuck ruminating over one’s shortcomings, it is game over—you can not perform when locked in a self-esteem hell hole. Meditation helps us learn to break out of the rut of ruminating and move forward. It gives us a needed break from ourselves.
Some people have the mistaken idea that meditation is for the weak. I studied martial arts for five years and held some rank. The most accomplished people there, the ones you really did not want to spare with, were the hardcore meditators. We beginners had no idea that what seemed to us like the magical ability to slow down time and move with jungle-cat speed was to a large extent their ability to be totally in the moment. The elite warfighters I have spoken to also tend to be meditators. These are Seal Team people, not exactly weak or unmotivated. This idea—that mediation is a waste of time—is held, for some reason, more often by men than women. And it is not true. Meditating is indeed a form of giving up, but it is giving up the handicap of the useless looping obsessions in our minds, and moving to becoming better at being the person you could be. Pro tip: The endless, noisy chatter in our minds, that we may feel is our entirety, may not actually be true. There is more there that we can’t sense unless we turn down the volume on the other mental static.
Onward and upward,
David
