When I first started meditating a month or so ago, I found it quite a challenge. Even the brief ten-minute window I allowed myself seemed interminably long and despairingly bleak. It was also the first time I allowed my darkest thoughts and emotions to have their time in the spotlight of my mind, and all their ugliness and awfulness was on gross if necessary display. I wasn’t proud of all the things that came rushing to the surface: the anger, resentment, bitterness, jealousy, fear, sorrow, anguish, cruelty, and rage. Each reared its head, but instead of pretending them away, instead of faking that everything was good and I was not bothered by it, I sat beside them, taking in their grotesque nature, acknowledging and honoring the place they had taken up in my mind, respecting that they had been a part of me for all this time. One by one, I allowed them their say, their existence. No longer was I trying to snuff them out, for they each had their purpose. They each had a reason for existing. I sat with them, and then I let them go. Every meditation gave them a chance to be heard and acknowledged. As the days and nights passed, the thoughts and emotions that came up gradually changed and shifted. The heaviness and darkness that seemed relentless slowly lifted. Other thoughts took their place – healing, resignation, acceptance, forgiveness, and even hope.
Still at the start of my meditative experiment, I’m not sure which way it will take me, but I’m feeling much better, so I hope it continues. Enraptured by this trajectory, I’ve taken to expounding upon and promoting meditation for my friends, explaining to Suzie and Kira how I go about it, subtly suggesting ways they might make a practice of it. Suzie asked if I ever cried at the emotions dredged up during a session, and I had to admit that I had in the very beginning. Not so much for what I was feeling at that specific moment, but for the fact that, while I’d made my life all about me for over four decades, I’d never really taken care of myself. There was something very sorrowful about that distinction. It clues me into a profound realization that in all these years of putting forth a self-centered image in the hopes of making some sense of self-worth stick, I’d failed at simply taking care of myself. And in the last few months, when I understood in heartbreaking fashion that no one – not my husband, not my parents, not my family, not my friends – could ever help if I didn’t help myself, the simple act of focusing on my own breath, my own life, became the most tender, kind and compassionate thing I could do.
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