I first experienced meditation when I was about 18 years old. It was in the 1970’s and Transcendental Meditation was just getting off the ground in the US. My sweetheart had been introduced to the idea and he was excited to share this concept with me. Frankly, I think at the time I was skeptical and probably a little uncomfortable with the notion. I had been raised in a strict Catholic home and had yet to fully extract myself from that web of beliefs. But I was interested enough to pull together $75 (which my sweetheart might have actually pulled together for me) and participate in an Initiation for Transcendental Meditation.
I remember that this initiation involved an element of secrecy which likely contributed to my skepticism and discomfort. We went to a residence in a nearby community and were ushered into a darkened room where some of the principles were explained. There was an altar and some candles burning. I think we maybe had to read something and possibly chant something. The idea was that we were each going to be given a mantra, one that had somehow been selected just for us. It felt very solemn, very ceremonial, and almost religious. That didn’t bother me though. I was curious, I was with my sweetheart, and what could go wrong?
Nothing went wrong. I remember being a little apprehensive at the setup and wondering if we were being ripped off but I was still intrigued with the idea. I think I felt a little rebellious, a little independent, and very adult. I left there feeling initiated, for sure, into some exotic practice but one that felt more soothing than not. The deal was that you were supposed to practice TM for two twenty minute periods each day. The morning practice was fairly easy to insert into my morning. I just had to get up twenty minutes earlier. The second practice was more difficult because I was attending classes and working and it was not easy to carve out a second twenty minute slot sometime in the late afternoon or early evening. I gave it my best shot though.
I know I didn’t have much confidence in this whole experience. The twenty minute sessions were hard for me to pull off. I struggled with staying focused on the breath (who doesn’t but I didn’t know that) and was, at times, overwhelmed with frustration and annoyance. I felt like I HAD to carry on though because I had made the investment and I owed it to myself to see if TM could have a positive impact on my life. I wondered how I would know if it was “working” but I did what I was used to doing and just kept going.
Life got complicated and messy and I became less faithful to the practice. I wasn’t experiencing any value that I could feel and I didn’t really see the point in continuing . I think I practiced fairly conscientiously for about a year and a half, maybe two years, but gradually I let it go. I do remember thinking that I had been a regular meditator through a very rough patch of life and perhaps the meditation had helped smooth the path? How would I even know?
Then life got very unsettled for some years. I lost touch with the sweetheart and meditation dropped off the radar. A bunch of years went by. I graduated from college, traveled a lot, completed graduate school, worked, got married, had kids. I was a cog in the wheel of all of that busy-ness that comes with the productive years of life.
I don’t exactly know when but sometime in my mid forties, I found myself once more exploring meditation. I suspect I was reading more in the popular culture about the benefits of meditation and I started to be curious again. I read the Jon Kabat-Zinn book The Full Catastrophe and, knowing me, I probably read ten other books on meditation as well. I dipped my toe back in but this was from the self help angle. I wanted to reduce stress and mindfulness meditation is what the popular culture was suggesting. I did see it as similar to the long ago initiation into TM but, at that point, I liked what I thought of as the secular version of TM - no candles, no chants, no mantra. I wasn’t always a daily practice person. It seems to me now that I would go in spurts. I would meditate every morning for a few months and then drop it for awhile. Then I would start feeling stressed out again or someone would talk about meditation as a way of handling the frustrations of life, and I would pick it up again.
This casual, take it or leave it approach worked for a long time. It was really a useful attempt at stress reduction but I had the same question that I had years ago: how would I know if this was “working”? I didn’t have an answer. I was also becoming more aware that there was surely more of life behind me than ahead of me. I wondered more and more often what was the point of it all. What was the point of all this busy-ness in life? Why were we all running around frantically doing this and doing that and getting this and going there and fixing that? What? I started to question all the ways I had been living. I clung to the daily mindfulness meditation in the hope that it was somehow making a difference.
*Originally published on my Wordpress blog 10.26.2020
I ran into some serious confusion and stumbled along in despair for some time. Eventually, I realized that I needed help - more than mindfulness meditation - to sort out where I had been and where I was going. I dug down deeply and pulled out enough courage to begin working with a therapist. Very gradually some of the despair turned into a curiosity about the mysteries of life. Previously, I simply wanted all the answers. That’s all. Just the answers. Now I realized that there weren’t necessarily answers to the questions I was asking.
It took a long time for me to accept that there weren’t going to be answers, that all I could do, in the words of Rilke, was love the questions. I discovered that I was good at loving the questions. And concurrently, I continued with a twenty minute meditation period very early most mornings. I often found myself enjoying the time, even as I still wondered, “Is it working?”. I started to read more about meditation and began experimenting with some of the meditation practices I read about in my ever growing collection of books that featured Buddhist practices.
That’s where I am right now. I am intrigued with the Mystery that is life. I want to love the questions. I think that meditation holds some kind of key for me. I imagine that the Buddhist practices about which I have read and experimented with also, in some mystical, maybe magical way are revealing for me. I don’t really know. And isn’t that part of loving the questions? I don’t have to know. I just have to show up with an open mind, with kindness, and with good intent. I can do that. I want to do that. I want to do that not just with meditation but in every day life. It seems like the answers to the questions might eventually be experienced that way.
“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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