Still Life: The Myths and Magic of Mindful Living

Part I

Where to Begin: Start in the Present

1

Meditation

What It Is and Why We Need It

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

—ALAN WATTS

What I want to tell you about meditation is this: it never hurts. It always helps. It costs nothing, and it can change everything. There are some exceptions; they are rare. We can quibble with words like always and never. But the essence of these audacious claims has been explored, discovered, and shared over centuries, across spiritual traditions, and around the world. Recently, a growing body of scientific evidence supports them. Teachers and gurus, past and present, offer similar versions of the same ideas. Then again, none of the teachers, data, or glowing praise for something as simple as sitting still will matter until it works for you, in your life, as it is right now. This is where we begin. The present is the best place to start.

The problem is never what meditation is capable of. No one misunderstands the mechanics: you sit and watch the breath. It’s quite simple. Few people are unaware of the benefits or mystified by the positive impact it might have on our lives, from less stress and anxiety, to better sleep, improved memory, decreased depression, more happiness and compassion, and less feeling like your head is about to explode. That list is wildly incomplete. The miscomprehension, the thing that keeps people from doing something so simple yet powerful, is myths (implicit or explicit) about how the actual experience should look or feel, how it functions in our lives. The myths make things harder, and they get in the way of the magic.

Our stories about things can subvert reality. We think meditation should look and feel a certain way, and when it doesn’t, we presume we did something wrong or that it doesn’t work. These are two of the more pervasive myths. All of them similarly undermine the magic of mindful living. Even with caveats for semantics—It (almost) always helps. It (rarely) hurts. It (can) cost nothing, and it might change everything—there are so few things on earth of which this can be said.

Meditation generally makes people feel calmer and more grounded. We are less agitated, mentally cluttered, and emotionally stretched-thin. With regular practice, we create space for creativity and clear decision-making. The head quiets. The heart expands. The heart expands. We discover an internal reserve of goodness, which existed all along. Rarely does meditation make people feel worse, though it doesn’t eliminate bad days altogether. That’s magical thinking. But, beyond the occasional pins and needles in one’s foot, beyond feeling bored or fidgety, people typically report feeling some degree better in the short and long terms. We may experience uncomfortable emotions or dark thoughts while meditating, particularly if we’ve experienced trauma or are going through a difficult time. If meditation makes this worse, we should stop. More often, we grow to befriend the part of ourselves that is hurting. We learn to sit with her/him/them in loving awareness, listening nonjudgmentally, and eventually—this is the breakthrough—eventually, we recognize that the dark thought, like all thought, is fleeting. It’s here. It’s gone. But it’s not actually what’s happening in the moment. Nor is it who we really are.

Meditation is not what you think. (I love nerdy meditation humor, nerdy humor generally.) All emotions arise and dissipate. We begin to realize that we are not our thoughts. Cultivating mindfulness helps regulate emotions. Consider, psychological studies estimate that the lifespan of any emotion is roughly ninety seconds. What lingers much longer are the stories we tell ourselves about the experience. The way we interrupt this relentless impulse with mindfulness practice is by choosing where to place our attention from moment to moment. In formal meditation, it might be the breath. In yoga, it might be the physical sensations of the body in a pose. While taking a nature walk, it might be the sounds of twigs snapping beneath our feet or the smell of the air before it snows. Our attention is the strongest determinant of how we experience our thoughts and emotions and, by extension, life itself. The interior life is a real life, James Baldwin wrote. The intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. Said more plainly, thoughts influence feelings; our feelings lead us to act. Our actions create reality.

You can pay for mindfulness products and services. Perhaps you bought this book. Thank you! But you can also spend just about nothing on paying careful attention to what is happening. Observe how periods of careful and nonjudgmental awareness change your experiences. The practices—whether formal meditation or everyday mindfulness activities (e.g., writing in a journal, drinking a cup of tea without distraction, or walking the dog)—are humble. Exquisitely so. Which can feel reassuring in contrast to aspects of the wellness world, and the world writ large, that are often exclusive. This exclusivity occurs both by design, through the most arduous barrier of high costs or whether a community authentically prioritizes inclusivity, or by default, with health and well-being unjustly and inextricably linked to income, race, location, and other factors historically dictated by biased power structures. Meanwhile, here is a no-frills form of mental, physical, and emotional support that’s widely available and often free.

Does this mean that the mindfulness community can rest easy because we’ve solved the accessibility problem? Definitely not. Taking a nature walk to restore our mind-body may not cost anything—until you consider that living in proximity to parks and forests can. To be truly mindful means we acknowledge and work to change such inequities. Still, I believe that meditation and mindfulness—which require few resources or tools and offer potentially vast benefits—provide a promising path toward healing and well-being for many people.

Meditation contains few discernible drawbacks and delivers seemingly infinite benefits. You sit. You breathe. You watch the emotions come. You watch the emotions go. Where you once may have been in a tiny boat at sea rocked by a storm, taking on water, you are now an onshore observer. Maybe the storm still rages, but you are not in danger of sinking. You observe how you speak to yourself inside your mind. Is that even your voice speaking? It’s highly possible it’s not. Whose voice is it? You notice small details of ordinary moments. You discover a new voice. How you relate to the world begins to change. Your quality of attention becomes both more expansive and more granular. Bigger and smaller, both. It contains more empathy. It sorts distractions. Buried beneath layers of fear or anger or boredom or grief rests wisdom, intuition, and steadiness.

Some of the most practical advice I ever received came from Buddhist chaplain and yoga teacher Cyndi Lee on a retreat in the days immediately following the 2016 election. You do not have to be happy, she said. But you do have to be steady. This struck me as deeply honest and compassionate guidance in a time of inner or outer turmoil. With practice, we make our minds hospitable places to live. Indeed, we are quarantined within our heads 24/7. You practice and practice and practice, and many days not a whole lot happens. Until a time when hope lights a match in the dark and asks if it can sit vigil with you. Courage shows up with some provisions. Sandwiches on good bread. Coffee, maybe. Anyway, it’s not something I can tell you. You have to experience it. Your magic, like your life, is a customizable experience.

THE TERM MINDFULNESS means different things to different people. It’s defined and redefined all the time. Sometimes it’s exploited, made glossy, marketed questionably, or wrapped in too many too-lofty ego-tickling promises. Mindfulness will help you achieve financial success. Find the perfect partner. Lose weight. Forget for a moment that these things may happen anyway. (More on that later.) First, we must understand that mindfulness is not self-improvement. That voice—the one imploring you to weigh less, make more money, or seek someone or something outside yourself as the path to happiness—is not the voice of living mindfully. It’s a combination, sometimes a cacophony, of insidious voices of social pressure and systemic constructs like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. You are not good enough: do this. Buy this. Download this app. Eat this not that. Drink this not that. What’s radical and magical about paying attention is that it teaches us to politely ask that voice to quiet down. Mindfulness says, You are already enough as you are, right now.

You have to marvel at how personal meditation is while revealing how similar the voices in all our heads are. It’s almost as if they are not our own. Guess what? They are not our own! They are deeply conditioned thoughts and beliefs we’ve picked up through past, lived experience. Meanwhile, meditation and mindfulness, a two-pronged approach of formal practice and how we move through life, teach us to pay attention to the present.

The awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose in the present moment, nonjudgmentally is how Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness meditation. Kabat-Zinn is often referred to as the father of the modern mindfulness movement, and I should add that he is also the actual father of one of my dearest friends. As the author of fourteen books and founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic and Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dr. Kabat-Zinn pioneered the way people meditate in the West and is most responsible for shepherding the word mindfulness and practice of meditation into mainstream consciousness. Beginning with his days as a scientist at MIT, Kabat-Zinn’s approach focused on the efficacy of mindfulness by researching its mental, physical, and psychological benefits. This approach to managing chronic pain, specifically, was groundbreaking at the time of its inception in the 1970s and now exists in more than seven hundred hospitals worldwide. Upon defining mindfulness in countless talks and interviews, he always goes on to clarify that this does not mean you won’t have judgments, especially when you try to become still. You will have many judgments. Banal. Insightful. Petty. Profound. Self-loathing. Self-congratulatory. Benign. Benevolent. Incessant. There will be no shortage. This feels good. This is boring. How long do I have to sit here? I’m hungry. I’m not good at this. This isn’t working. You will experience these judgments and countless others, in the span of seconds and on loop some days. But with practice, they’ll untangle and soften. You’ll learn to observe the judgments and criticisms, likes and dislikes, without reacting. It will be a welcome break from frittering your attention into simultaneous multidirectional oblivion all day long. The grip of your judgments will loosen, after a lifetime of conditioning. You will notice a deeper, kinder, and truer presence beneath all the conditioning. This is your awareness. Say hello. Acquaint yourself. She comes in peace.

There’s a higher stakes, more poetic, less formal definition that Kabat-Zinn also gives. In this version, he doesn’t hold back. Living your life as if it really mattered, he says.

Consider a typical day: it whooshes past, often in a blur. Life is what happens when we are busy making other plans people jest. A day is littered with throwaway moments, beleaguered by tasks to be gotten through, endured. Waiting at a stoplight, standing in line at the grocery store, doing the dishes, vacuuming the rug, putting away the toys (again), waiting for the WiFi to connect . . . we presume these seconds and minutes don’t matter. Why pay attention? We’d rather bend the moment to our will. Have you ever eaten a meal so quickly and mindlessly that you looked down at your empty plate and genuinely wondered where the food went? It becomes not even remarkable. That’s maybe a typical day.

Most of us, most of the time, engage in a pervasive, individual, and collective daily dodging of the present moment. We inhabit a self-imposed virtual reality. We can live whole life chapters pining for a different moment other than the one we’re in. We can half-live our whole lives if we’re not careful. This business of becoming conscious, writes Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, . . . is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be? She was speaking about the consciousness of becoming a writer, but meditation is the same, all a question of awareness. How alive are we willing to be?

The trance of what’s next and what’s next and what’s next is compelling. Surely the next thing will be more interesting, important, or pleasurable than the current thing. We do this in mundane moments (understandably), but we do it when the moment is safe, pleasurable, or delicious, too. We are eating a beautiful meal but already focused on dessert. At graduation, we are obsessed with getting the job. It’s unsettling and often anxiety provoking not to know what the future holds, so we construct our own mental artifices of knowing things we cannot know. The guessing (or worrying) provides little solace, but that doesn’t stop us from doing it anyway. To worry, as a bone or piece of wood, the word derives from the act of gnawing or turning something over and over without progress.

Our avoidance of the present manifests not only as fast-forwarding into the future, but also as a constant reliving of the past. You’ve probably had at least one conversation with yourself today about something that happened years ago. We want to know what happened, and why. How we felt about it and who was to blame, how great it was and how to re-create it, or how terrible it was and what we can do to avoid it happening again. These are deeply human, adaptive responses. We all experience them because they are hardwired into our operating systems from a time when we wandered into the wrong cave and unintentionally roused a bear. It would behoove us not to do that again. One prominent benefit of mindfulness is that it strengthens the parts of our brain that have the capacity to reason beyond this fear-based fight-or-flight response. If we didn’t feel stressed by past conditioning or future speculation and panic, we wouldn’t need a way to step out of the frantic and artificial pace of what happened in the past or might happen in the future. We wouldn’t need a way to help us think more logically in the present moment.

It comes down to this: mindfulness allows us to recognize what is real and what is not real. The present moment is the only one that is real. It’s all we really have. It’s not distorted by memory or guesswork. It’s characterized by power and choice—by agency. It carries clarity and nurtures compassion. It is sacred, even when forgettable, still sacred. Potential lives in the present moment. Love lives here. It’s the moment that matters. Paying attention to what matters in the moment, compounded over our days and years on earth, is the basis for a meaningful and mindful life. We accept the offhand commentary that time flies because it does, but it’s a myth that we must resign ourselves to look upon it in a daze. When we live in a state of autopilot, we lose touch with our humanness. It is possible to look back and think I was there. I didn’t miss it.

Technology, which has radically changed the way we live, work, connect, and think, exacerbates this reality. We feel an urgent need to go somewhere else while also feeling like we never arrive. Well, we were urgently going places, until a global pandemic struck and exposed how unsustainable that pace of life was, how chronically overcommitted we were to un-reality, and how distorted our perceptions of what mattered most were.

The coronavirus pandemic, which is ongoing as I write, immediately revealed two things: that we needed to slow down and we are profoundly interconnected. The first was painfully obvious. We had been hurtling at an untenable pace for a long time. One small example that has large ramifications: today we are confronted with more information in a single week than someone one hundred years ago processed in his/her/their lifetime. Meanwhile, the human brain—let’s revisit the analogy of an operating system—has not been upgraded in that time. It’s an organ after all and reserves the right to maintain a low-tech existence because, um, it keeps us alive! We are not robots. Praise be, we are not robots. Furthermore, life all around sped up and boxed out anything resembling spare or leisure time. This has been doubly true for women who earn less than men, work longer hours, and shoulder a disproportionate amount of work at home. Of course, this worsened catastrophically in the pandemic, especially for women of color, the results of which will be felt for years if not generations to come.

One positive way that some people coped during this time was through meditation. After years of convincing my students to meditate, I suddenly didn’t need to convince anyone. For one, many people had more time. They were stuck at home. Stuck with themselves in the most obvious and inescapable of ways. A Buddhist friend of mine joked that we were all suddenly on a meditation retreat that nobody signed up for. Of course, we were always stuck with ourselves, but now, we had fewer distractions at our disposal.

Loneliness had been declared a public health crisis before the pandemic entered our collective consciousness, and it would likely worsen and splinter into myriad other forms of mental health crises as the pandemic wore on. And yet, on the other side of that loneliness, an understanding emerged that while we were longing for each other and life as we knew it, we were also more inextricably connected than most of us previously acknowledged. One daily example of this realization I noticed was that we seemed to abandon small talk. Are you OK? we asked and needed to know the honest answer. Professional correspondence relinquished its veneer of compartmentalization, and our breakneck devotion to the trance of productivity finally collapsed. I needed you to be OK because we share a stairwell and doorknobs, and you being well impacts whether I might remain well. I need you to be OK because you are a human being like I am a human being, and it’s precarious to pretend that things are more complex than that. It became customary to see infographics depicting one person’s level of exposure to the virus with circles and pods that overlapped and expanded so that one infection rapidly became dozens more and soon hundreds or thousands. I kept thinking about the fundamental lesson in Buddhism of interconnectedness.

We have no control over the past. We have some agency over the future. That agency depends, first, on seeing the present clearly. So, the question becomes not only how alive are we willing to be, but also how willing are we to let go of our personal and collective commitments to unreality? I have no interest in hyping meditation to anyone who doesn’t want or need it. I am only here to say that meditation works. It can heal or, at least, process past wounds. It can help us recompose ourselves. We can envision new and better selves, communities, and societies. In this way, the future begins now. The future is now.

WHILE THE EMERGENCE of mindfulness in the West is fairly recent, its origins, of course, are ancient, dating back to the Buddha, who lived in the sixth century BCE in present-day Nepal. Yoga’s earliest mentions date back earlier, to Hindu tradition. And ancient wisdom traditions of all kinds share contemplative practices for paying attention and coping with life. Suffice to say, life today is radically different from the sixth century. It’s radically different from a year ago, and we face new and different challenges. Nevertheless, human beings have endured, and we’ve sought and created ways of making that endurance less fraught. Meditation, prayer, silence, walking, and chanting—all forms of mindfulness—have soothed and strengthened us along the way.

Today mindfulness feels like a necessity for survival. You know those small, internal pockets in winter coats? They’re typically for smartphones and barely keep pace with changing technology. One winter your phone fits, the next it feels wildly outdated. Our inner environments reflect a similar struggle. As the gulf widens between real and digital life, between what we see of the world when carefully curated and shared for our consumption versus how things are, we need help anchoring ourselves in reality. We tell the stories of our lives with increasingly innovative imagery, but we still feel the vicissitudes of those lives in ways that remain unfiltered, analog, complex, and human.

What I mean to say is that the mind is not a device and our bodies cannot be hacked. The mind needs quiet. A spirit revitalizes in stillness. The heart craves ease and gentleness. Peace cannot be artificially induced. At different times and for different people, the gifts of mindfulness bear a striking resemblance to those of spiritual practice or yoga practice or taking a walk on a crisp fall day when the air is a companion. Strip away the mechanics of where you do it and what it’s called, and the same essence remains.