When the election results for that FUBAR state of affairs known as Florida started coming in and it was clear no landslide of the American people doing what was right was in sight, I walked out of the room leaving Andy to fend off his mood and the increasingly disappointing news. I’d never had much faith in this country doing the right thing on a mass level. We are too racist, too selfish, too entitled, too hate-filled, and too deceitful to be anything better than a divided country right now. America has revealed itself, and it’s not beautiful. At such times, and especially during this disastrous year, my method of withdrawing and retreating from a world too dark to contemplate involved a meditation session and a mindfulness practice.
Turning off the classical music station that was playing in the living room, I took my habitual seat on the floor in the lotus position and lit the end of a Palo Santo stick, blowing out the glowing flame after a minute and letting the smoke surround me. An egg-shaped piece of rose quartz nestled in my hand. Cool and smooth at first, it would eventually take in my warmth. That was something I noticed more in this session: the warmth.
The chilly day that began with an early hour’s wait in line to vote ended with this chilly night, and I’d pulled a fluffy lavender robe around my shoulders before I sat down to begin. As my meditation went on and my breathing deepened, I blocked out the world and the worry until only good intentions and healing thoughts were present in my mind. My body shook off the chill, gradually gaining in warmth until the rose quartz in my hand seemed to emit its own heat, and I had to pull the robe from my shoulders. Despite the calm and deepness of my breath, my body had warmed itself beyond the need for extra layers. I’d noticed this warming phenomenon slightly before, in the way that I would occasionally wonder whether my sock-clad feet would be cold as I sat on the floor on fall and winter nights, only to feel perfectly comfortable, if not a little heated, by the end of a meditation.
When the twenty-six minutes were up, my mind was surprisingly calm. The way the election was going in Florida wasn’t surprising to me. When you spend all of your formative years and the bulk of your adult years being implicitly told you are less-than because of your sexual orientation or the bi-racial make-up of your ethnicity, and when you were only legally allowed to marry the man you’ve loved ten years after you met him, you tend to not have much faith in humanity. You realize early on you can’t trust that people will be fair and do the right thing, even if it has no bearing on their lives.
We saw that again in the numbers this week. It didn’t surprise me in the least. It saddened and disappointed me greatly, and my heart aches for what our country and our world has become, but it was not surprising. And so I did my meditation, in my favorite room of the house, breathing slowly and calmly, in and out, and when it was over I didn’t return to watching the results, but rather walked mindfully into the bathroom. I lit a candle and took a hot shower, extending the mindfulness, extending the calm, and leaning into the deliberate slowing of the day to recognize the simple sensations of life.
Then I tried something that I’d always thought foolish to do, a practice that some teachers of mindfulness encourage, whereby you initiate a thought or emotion by manifesting the physical results first – in this case a smile. The idea is that if you execute the physical manifestation of happiness and joy, it will in fact elicit such an emotion – a sort of reversal of how we expect things to work. And so I smiled. And then I laughed at the ridiculousness of it. And there, in the glow of a candle on an otherwise-dim night, came a spark of joy.
And a little bit of hope…
