Stillness

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Invention. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

“If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.” ― Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation

There are two daily habits that I believe would help anyone. The first is writing three pages longhand of whatever’s hanging out in your brain right when you wake up. The second is looking yourself in the eye, in the mirror, and saying out loud: Hi. How ya doin’? I love you. (You might at first find this to be uncomfortable. Get over it.)

But a third habit I value highly for myself—meditation, a cultivated and intentional stillness—is tricky. It’s tricky because people who are into meditation tend to be quite committed to whatever version of it they’re into. (These people include the hypergenerative artists David Lynch, whose evangelism spurred me to learn Transcendental Meditation, or TM, and Nick Cave, who writes about it gorgeously.) lt’s tricky because you may already have meditative practices—prayer, yoga, soaking in the sunrise, running, watching the screensaver on your Apple TV—that feel sufficient. It’s tricky because it works against all the reflexes of mind that arise from and then compel pervasive screen use. It’s tricky, most of all, because taking the measure of it, finding the mode of meditating that you’ll love enough to keep doing, requires time and curiosity.

So, I’m not going to tell you how to meditate, or that you should. I’m just going to make some observations about my experience—things I wish I had known sooner.

I like to meditate by a river.

The first thing is that the form of meditation you often encounter in America these days—mindfulness, in which you concentrate on your breath and observe the activity of your brain and the condition of your body for a period of time—isn’t the only way to go. One aspect of the diversity of our minds is in how they allocate attention, in what doses and strengths and for what periods of time and in what rhythms. My attention is highly rotational: short, intense bursts of noticing and processing that are almost never sustained beyond a few minutes. I have found that metta meditation—in which you systematically intend the wellness of all beings—and various visualization exercises can be powerful grist for a mind especially churning. For my own daily practice, closing my eyes and softly reciting a silent mantra has been transformative.

The second thing is that meditation has no goal; doing it is not for the satisfaction of any criteria. I despise—truly despise—the use of the word “benefits” to describe what happens when you meditate. There are no fucking benefits. The meditation is the benefit. The reason the meditation is the benefit is that it puts you in an intimate and gentle proximity with yourself. (If it doesn’t, try another kind.) There, you may start to see your experience more clearly and by sheer nature of that exposure come to regard your life and its occupants, starting with you, through a lens of compassion and delight. (More of a lensless clarity, really, a de-lensing.) If you attach an expectation of benefits to meditation, you will find that it yields them inconsistently. The pursuit of benefits will rob you of lightness. The pursuit of benefits will place you into a compulsion of “doing it right” to ensure the benefits show up. If you’re going to meditate, please do it to meditate. In TM they say, We meditate and we don’t mind what happens. You close your eyes and you’re off the hook.

The third thing is a contradiction of the second thing, and I can do that because this is my newsletter: Meditation practiced consistently opens everything up and makes the world a richer place, not-so-secretly teeming with ease and delight, in which imagination and creativity and laughter and possibly even love are not only boundless but gushing, torrential. Are conflict and burnout and balls-to-the-wall threats to civilization swarming us like spotted lantern flies? Absolutely. This in no way depletes the truth of what is available when we befriend ourselves in silence. It can only be an incentive.

If you decide to find a way to meditate that allows you to do so contentedly for a pretty good stretch—long enough to pass out of the state of mind in which you began—then I suspect that over time you too will discover a coherence about yourself so surprising that you might be inclined to think the meditation produced it. But meditation just builds the room, a room where you go to have the lightest and most effortless encounter with someone you could ever possibly have, because that person is you. She comes with no expectations and no demands. She finds you a joy to be around. The only thing she ever wants to know, the only certainty she seeks, is that you’re here.

Coming Tuesday, from Utah: The desert.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.