Photo by Tim Walker for British Vogue. (And if you’re not immediately picking up on the cheetah reference, go read or better yet, listen to Glennon Doyle Melton’s new book, Untamed.)
I’ve been practicing meditation for about a year and a half now and I think I’m finally starting to get it.
Here’s my current understanding in my own words, in case it’s helpful for you.
Meditating is like taking a gentle, intentional time out from your mind.
In our culture and age, the message we tend to receive/believe is that we are what’s happening in our mind. That we can’t separate ourselves from our mind. In fact, we believe that if we did we’d be losing our minds—a psychotic break!—which is a terrifying thought and something we want to avoid at all costs.
But that’s just a story we believe.
Because actually, we are not our minds. Our minds are just one part of us.
Our minds are the part of us we tend to give the most attention to and tend to be the loudest. I wonder if that’s mostly because of the time and place we live in. It may be that squeaky wheel always getting the grease.
Imagine you’re at a big party in a house or...let’s say hypothetically, quarantined in a house with four kids. I’m the kind of person (introvert and a highly sensitive person so my nervous system needs a lot of alone, quiet time to operate well) who can love the party, love the four kids in the house AND want to step outside sometimes where it’s quiet and give myself an opportunity to metabolize all that I’ve taken in.
Meditation is the conscious time out from the party/quarantined house of your mind for a minute (or twenty).
When you step outside, you can focus on your breath as a starting point. You can try to calm and slow it down or you can just notice how you happen to be breathing at that moment (which usually calms it down because you start detaching from it as you notice it).
But then what?
When you go outside the party or hypothetically—let’s just say:
You are quarantined in a little apartment with four kids and it’s been raining for days. You’re getting to the edge of your sanity and you tell your kids, “Ok, I’m going to have a little time out in my room for a few minutes.” What do you think happens next? Do you find peace and bliss in your room? Not exactly. You still hear the chaos through the wall. You hear the Beyblades battling, the dog that wants to go out, your seven-year-old knocks on the door to say he’s hungry, and your eight-year-old comes to give you a hug.
When you step outside your mind, notice your breath, you’ll find that your thoughts are still very loud and some may even try to come out and try to pull you back into the fray. Here’s the trick though…you can learn to non-anxiously notice the thought or feeling long enough to be able to name it and then not worry about it anymore—just for those twenty minutes. The point is not to fix anything or even judge anything during those twenty minutes. You’re just kind of…taking a census or inventory as you’re taking a break. It’s like, “Ok, I see you anxiety. I see you grief. I see you love. I see you gratitude. Make yourself a banana sandwich, I’m taking a break right now.”
The magic of this is that when we can name the thoughts that ask for our attention, it starts to create enough distance that they’re beginning to not consume us. With enough practice, none of them are all that scary or demanding anymore. What may have once been a terrifying monster in the closet comes to be more like Mike and Sully from Monsters Inc.
And then some more magic happens. You discover YOU are not quarantined to your mind. You realize your mind is one source of information but you can also walk down the road to another house, your heart, and take stock of what it’s trying to tell you. Again, you don’t have to be consumed by the feelings you find there. Notice them, name them, find out what they need.
When you start all this, you might feel overwhelmed and disoriented. But just like brushing your seven-year-old boy’s shoulder-length hair for the first time in a week, take a deep breath, accept that it’s going to take more than 30 seconds, and start working out the tangles.
You’re going to be like Adam and Eve naming all the animals. It’s going to be chaos to you at first. Resist the urge to put all the animals in a zoo, in cages. Just observe them, name them, find out what they need in the wild. Learn from them, where they live (your mind, your heart, your body are some of the basic habitats).
Sometimes when you meditate, you will notice the elephants or the starfish are all worked up. Now, this can get dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing and who you’re working with. An upset starfish is different from an upset elephant (or tiger or alligator). And what kind of worked up are they? Are they hurt, hungry, happy? My suggestion is to observe at a safe distance until you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on and how to truly care for the situation.
You can also use it as a time out to practice the thoughts, feelings, and actions you want to cultivate. So you could say, “Anxiety, you’re not welcome here right now, I’m practicing Peace right now.” Some anxiety is good and important to caution us to potential threats. But when Anxiety overtakes the garden...not so helpful. You may need to spend some more intentional time cultivating Peace (I subconsciously typed “peach” instead of peace there, that kind of works :) ) for a while to get your garden back into a healthier state.
Overall, I love the approach of Jungian/Depth psychology that asks us to observe what arises (rather than trying to force changes in our behavior) and ask:
What is it there for?
What is it trying to tell us?
What is it asking of us?
Ok, I realize there are so many mixed metaphors here but apparently this is how my brain works. If some of it helps some of you, it’s worth sharing. :)