Meditation, Week 1

Last Saturday, I attended an introductory meditation course. This was something I'd been wanting to do for a while, and circumstances just came together and I finally committed to it and went. I'm so glad I did.

Since then, I've added 15 minutes of meditation to my morning routine, and managed to fit it in every day this week except Friday.  I've also been reading Real Happiness, by Sharon Salzberg, before I sit, which I highly recommend.  It's difficult to try to articulate (much less understand) everything that has already begun to blossom from this apparently simple practice, but here are my initial observations.

Through meditation, I've started to realize how many of my thoughts are repetitive and unproductive - they don't serve to further anything except my anxiety and tendency toward escapism. That leaves me unfocused and feeling less alive, as if I move through my days with half my mind absorbed in thoughts that don't ultimately serve me or anyone else. For example, if I've done the best I can at work, endless thoughts about what awaits me tomorrow or a week or a month from now do absolutely nothing except increase my level of stress and distract me from the present. Of course, we all know this intellectually, but I'm finding that meditation somehow attunes me to this more viscerally, in a way that allows me to start to truly become less attached to those unproductive thoughts, rather than just acknowledging that they aren't productive but not knowing what to do about it.

At first, I was resistant to the idea that when meditating, we should try to recognize and move away from long strings of discursive thought. As I rode my bike home from the introductory class, I thought, isn't discursive thought where ideas and insights come from? And I think that's true when we are focused and creative. But what I've started to notice through meditation is that my automatic thought patterns are extremely predictable. They consistently turn to the latest anxiety about the future or obsession about the past, rehashing the same thought pattern again and again. Just recognizing this, observing it, and then breaking the pattern by re-focusing on the breath has been tremendously empowering.

But here's the thing: I'm also realizing that I'm incredibly attached to those thought patterns. The idea that someday we will "escape" to a little mountain town where we'll be immersed in nature and I'll write brilliantly every day is one of the abiding fantasies to which I turn during the challenging parts of my day, especially during a sleepless night when I feel insecure and inadequate to the tasks at hand. And there is a part of me that thinks if I let go of that fantasy, I'll lose it forever - I'll forget that I'm supposed to escape to a small mountain town and write brilliantly, maybe because I'll be so fully absorbed and engaged in life as it is instead of life as it should be. The part of that fantasy I need to let go of is the idea that I'll somehow be a different person in that world than I am in the here and now. Which of course isn't true - and if I don't wake up and recognize, and then work to break, this particular thought pattern, then a new fantasy world will just replace that one once it has been achieved.

Finally, what I've found is that meditation is really hard. Sometimes it takes every ounce of discipline and concentration I have just to sit and focus on breathing for fifteen minutes, reigning in my thoughts as I go. But given everything I've only begun to learn in the past week, I sense that this practice will stay with me for a long time to come.

On Yoga & Commitment-Phobia

I went to a new yoga studio yesterday, and found the class I took there quite refreshing. It wasn't so much that the teacher was super amazing - she really wasn't - as that the class she taught was so calm and therapeutic. Of course, there were some challenging poses; any yoga pose is challenging when you bring your full physical and mental attention to it. But there was also meditation to start and end class, and a feeling of calm and sensitivity in the room that made its way into my mind and body. I was able to be present in a way that I have not been in a yoga class (or anywhere else) in quite some time.

The studio I normally go to holds one-hour classes that are incredibly intense from a physical perspective. They are crowded - mats are laid down edge to edge like the patches of a room-sized quilt - and it's hard not to feel as if you're at some kind of yoga revival. I don't mean to be overly critical or dismissive of this approach: it draws a huge crowd and is definitely an intense workout. I'm just not sure that an intense workout is what I'm really looking for from yoga anymore.

What am I looking for, and am I going to find it in yoga? I'm not sure, although I have been consistently drawn to yoga for ten years now, though it's never really found a comfortable niche in my life. I have always been drawn to its spiritual and philosophical aspects, but never enough so to really dedicate myself to their exploration beyond reading a popular book or two. I suppose I'm a yoga commitment-phobe: I want the benefits of a cursory relationship with yoga - strength, flexibility, a toned body - without all the intellectual and spiritual work of delving into its literary and meditative teachings.

Maybe this speaks to a larger issue I struggle with: a hesitancy to believe thoroughly in anything. I try to avoid dogma in its many forms, even when disguised by things I believe in, like nature and science. Does this hesitancy keep me from fully investing myself in a course of study and spiritual development? Or am I simply, as I sometimes think, just lazy? Am I just satisfied enough with the way things stand that I don't feel any need to dedicate a lot of time to profoundly changing my life - a life, I must say, that I'm very happy with?

Whatever the case, the cursory relationship I've had so far with yoga no longer seems to be enough, and in some way, I desire to go deeper. This may mean facing some of my own assumptions head-on: after all, I realize there is plenty of room for critical thought when one is engaged in studying philosophy or in developing a spiritual practice.  It's just a matter of owning up to the rigorous work that represents, instead of brushing the whole thing off as dogma and therefore not worthy of my time and serious contemplation.  It's just a matter of deciding to invest - an always risky, often rewarding, proposition.  

Helicopters

Several years ago, I was backpacking off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon when my party came across another group. It was one of the hottest among many hot days I have spent in that canyon, and the heat radiated off the ancient, black Vishnu Schist with what seemed to be a special ferocity. Sweat dripped like water as we made our way along the beach, bodies hunched beneath our backpacks, next to the booming Colorado.

We met the other party shortly after we had left the river and started up a side canyon. They told us they had separated from the rest of their group, that one of the others was struggling and moving very slowly. This first party was heading to the river for water. We wished them luck, said we'd keep an eye out for their friends, and moved on.

We never did come across the struggling hikers that day. We made our camp up the side canyon, next to the creek, beneath the cottonwood trees. The North Rim is famously remote - far fewer people visit or hike there than the more populated South Rim. We had driven an hour on a dirt road off a basically deserted highway to get to the trailhead. And so we speculated: perhaps they'd turned around to attempt to hike out? Maybe they were camped somewhere above us? But there was nothing, really, for us to do about it.

We sat in the shade and played cards into the afternoon, the encounter largely forgotten. But toward sunset, suddenly, we heard it: the unmistakable rhythm of a helicopter, the sound reverberating off the canyon walls. We stopped what we were doing, looked at each other. This part of the Grand Canyon is one of those treasured places our constant human ruckus has not reached, and for days we had heard nothing but birdsong, rushing water, and our own voices. But now this, all too familiar: the sound of trouble. It was distant and low and distinctly human. And to us, with no way of communicating with the outside world and the acute knowledge of our own isolation, it was foreboding. To the man being rescued (we found out later he was evacuated from the canyon, severely dehydrated, but fine), that sound was no doubt a symbol of safety and rescue. But to us it had the tenor of human affairs gone deeply awry - of rescue, yes, but also of combat, of emergency, of something being ushered away.

For five days now, helicopters have gathered over my hometown. They are amassing at the site of a great rift - a lurch, it seems, in the quiet way of things. They hover above the hospital where the victims of Saturday's shooting lie recovering, where the rows of news trucks, satellites aimed at some distant orbit, broadcast Tucson's tragedy across the world, and where the shrine to the victims every day grows larger, the entire scene more surreal. They wasp above the University of Arizona, where, as I write this, people are gathering by the thousands, twisting in lines across the campus, to hear the President of the United States speak some comfort to a shocked community.

The world has cleaved open a bit, and the helicopters are here, not so much to tend, as to record, the wound. Perhaps we long for them to carry us away, to bear rescue and hope rather than sorrow. But really, though it will take time, I think what we long for is silence, for a clear, blue Arizona sky, punctuated every so often with something both mundane and magical, something to remind us that the world is, once again, as it should be. Something clear and ordinary, like birdsong.

Coming Home

The only time I miss real winter weather is when I snowshoe or cross-country ski. The snow-laced trees, the frozen world, the blue, blue sky that holds a sun amplified again and again over ridges of white. My breath heavy and released in visible puffs, the stinging of my hot cheeks as I move through the sharp, freezing air. Traipsing uphill with that ridiculous, splayed-ski waddle.

We started out the new year on cross-country skis, and it made me long for something different. For an adventure, a new life in a new place where I could cross-country ski every day. Surely my life would never become routine or boring if only I had snow over which to cross-country ski.

This slump of longing (which was only a few steps short of a full-on pity party, and which I knew all along to be founded upon false premises) lasted for a few days after I got home to Tucson. And then, of course, I remembered how much I love this city, the desert, and my life here. I remembered the water harvesting projects I've planned around the house, the garden I'll grow, the creative life I'll make. Having plans and ambitions for the future inspires me, invests me in this place as my home. But being fully aware of the present, with all its quirks and blessings -the cats on my lap, the fridge full of food, a Gila woodpecker outside the window - that will sustain me wherever I go.

So cheers to the new year (arbitrary though it may be), to the desert, and to coming home; but most of all, cheers to this moment, the one that none of us will ever quite experience again.