Refuge

Let me tell you about something I love. That's what hearts in love want to do.

Sitting down on my cushion, I straighten my back. Just that moment of closing my eyes, resting my palms on my lap, finding that subtle, shifting energy of readiness and poise, it feels so good now that I often want to cry as I sit, and sometimes I do. It’s the moment of returning. Stopping. Opening. If I belong anywhere, if anywhere can truly be home, I think it might be here. It hasn’t fixed me, I’m not sure it ever will, and yet. And yet.

I spend a lot of time meditating these days, which sounds so worthy when I say it, so worthy that I tend to want to play it down fearing everyone might start to think of me as insufferable. The problem is, I love it. It gives me something that nothing else can. It makes me want to try and tell you why, even if you do think I am insufferable. It isn’t an attempt to try to persuade you to do it too, it’s simply me responding to that deeply human need, that human power, to love something and then to hunger to make that love more visible, even if you worry you’ll be judged for it. Love never wants to stay quiet.

The truth is that meditation has become how I move through the world now, through the ordinary every-days. I could no more not meditate than I could voluntarily stop breathing or remove my own head. After many long years of practice, it has established itself as one of the deepest, most natural habits of my animal body. It is just part of what my body does and what it wants to do more and more. My body sleeps. My body eats. My body meditates. There is nothing to boast about in that – how could there be. It’s just something I’ve found that my body and mind can do, like a baby discovering her toes. My body can sit. My mind can watch itself. Not something to brag about, just something to celebrate. Something to delight in.

Of course, not many people do do it, or not consistently at least, and a surge of misguided, under-trained mindfulness teachers who over-emphasise the rewards means that now many of the people who do meditate do so with a kind of hard, frustrated yearning, greedy for it to work and work fast. Many people who try to meditate are convinced that they’re doing it wrong or not really getting anywhere or do it in a way that is quite frankly exhausting, and so they do it less and less or talk about it with stronger and stronger opinions. And I get it, I do — it’s not an easy field to navigate — it just fills me with this strange kind of sadness. When someone tells me that meditation isn’t their thing or didn’t ‘work’ for them, I feel a little like they’ve told me that they don’t like the sea or the sky, my son or my partner. It feels personal, even if it’s got nothing to do with me.

That being said, there are lots of things our bodies do that not many of us explore particularly, and none of us can explore every part of ourselves. While I meditate, I likely neglect something else. Some people are interested in how much weight their human body can lift or how far it can run. I am interested in the human mind and so I meditate. I have a desire — an extraordinarily ever-restless desire — to understand more and more about what it really means to have a mind; how it alters our experience of being alive, and so I don’t get bored with the idea. I never do. Perhaps all of us, at the heart of us, have a question that we will never tire of trying to find the answer to and this is simply mine.

And yet, meditation has not, and likely will not, brought me to any kind of enlightenment. I haven’t got ‘better’ at it and although I’ve learned to enjoy it more and more, it’s not made me experience boundless happiness or even quietened my mind. It hasn’t cured me. The more I practise, the more I feel sure it’s not supposed to. What it has done is train me to notice what’s happening, to be interested in what I notice, and to trust that whatever does happen, I can handle it.

One of my teachers, Michael Stone, refers to the act of sitting in formal meditation as an opportunity to turn your body into a container, a container you can look into, to sift through what is present in this moment in time — within you and outside of you — to welcome it and see it clearly. And learning that, of course, becomes just the beginning. We get to be that open container every moment of our lives. Meditation is simply doing something or thinking something or feeling something, and knowing what you’re doing, thinking, feeling — really seeing it clearly, moment by moment, watching as things flow in and out of the container that is you. The heady freedom of meditation comes when you realise that you can learn to do that all the time. You can eat on the go and you can sit down to a deliberate, formal meal. You can sketch on your lap and you can paint with more focus in a special studio. Meditation is much the same. 

It’s helped me to learn that stillness isn’t and can never be empty. It’s given me a way to explore what does actually happen when we’re still. It’s helped me learn not to miss my life and to see and understand, sometimes painfully, exactly how it is I’m living.

Am I wiser for it? I think so, but it’s been a slow-growing sort of wisdom and not one that can give me much authority or acclaim. I am more compassionate and patient, certainly — it is very hard to examine your own flawed and confused human nature and not come out the other side without more understanding for everyone else’s. Conversely though, and perhaps surprisingly, it has made me less and less tolerant of bullshit, my own and other people’s. I find I have all the time in the world for people willing to be honest with themselves and each other, however flawed, but I have less and less time for people who deceive and manipulate in all the subtle, pernicious ways we often do. I find I particularly struggle now with those who hide behind passivity and excuses, even while I battle with those things in myself. It turns out that I don’t care how many times people mess up, but I do value integrity and courage more than just about anything else, perhaps because I have worked so hard to improve my own. My judgemental reactions still surprise and challenge me. I didn’t realise peacefulness could hold such hard edges. It is not like dozing somewhere comfortable, far from it, and I still have a lot to learn. There is still so much I push away that I should probably lean towards, if only to understand it better.

So yes, it is different from the image that was sold to me by some teachers in the beginning, and if I was to offer any tip or advice at all when it comes to meditation, it is this: give up trying to use meditation to make something happen. Give up all ideas of a specific reward or a cure. Just do it because it’s interesting. Just do it because it’s a good way to relax and spend time and a good way to get to know yourself and the world. Do it for its own sake and give up trying to make it fix you. Just do it to see what happens. This is, I think, good advice for most things.

I enjoy my meditating self more and more. It helps me to enjoy being myself, in all the complex ways I am and am not. I enjoy too how the sight of me sitting, eyes closed, back straight, has become such a normal, familiar thing and such a normal, familiar act in my household. Whenever I sit, my cat pushes his nose very gently to my fingers and passes on. My family move around me, unperturbed and unselfconscious, knowing I like the sounds they make, knowing I like letting those sounds become part of my practice and part of my joy.

I’d like to think it is an enduring image, me sitting, smiling a little. Perhaps when I’m dead, the people I love will remember me that way. I’d like that. I can see why people are drawn to statues of the Buddha. There is something about this act, this image, that can warm you like a campfire. It makes me happy to be a part of that, to keep becoming that. 

There: that was my heart’s truth.

Do you get it now, at least a little?

I promise that the next time you want to tell me about something you love, I will listen.

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*It wasn’t my purpose today to get you to do anything, but I know some of you will ask! — if you would like to try meditation, again or for the first time, my best recommendation is the Ten Percent app which has by far the best exercises and secular mediation teachers I’ve ever come across. You can get a full free month without entering any payment details via this link. They’re running a new beginners course starting on the 8th Jan, but any or all of their courses or single sessions will be of benefit.

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