6
Pandora’s Box
It is simultaneously one of the most hilarious and appalling scientific studies I have ever seen. Researchers from the University of Virginia Department of Psychology asked subjects to sit in a lab room for fifteen minutes with only their thoughts. There were no phones allowed, and no other people around. However, the room was equipped with a button that the subjects could push and give themselves an electric shock if they wanted. The results were astonishing: many of the people, including two-thirds of the men, were so uncomfortable sitting quietly alone that they opted to zap themselves.
The study authors weren’t quite sure what to make of this. There are many theories. You could draw the conclusion that we live in such a hyperstimulated age that we get bored very quickly. You could also surmise, as the lead author does, that part of what is going on here is that humans evolved to scan for threats and opportunities, which can make idling excruciating. Both of those theories have merit. But I suspect—based on zero evidence beyond my layman’s gut—that there could be an additional process at play. In my view, this study speaks to one of the deep and often subconscious reasons some people avoid meditation. They are afraid to be alone with how they feel. They worry that if they look inside, they will open up a Pandora’s box of potentially paralytic emotions.
This is a fear Jeff and I heard in a powerful way when we visited Aprendamos Intervention Team (AIT), a company in Las Cruces, New Mexico, that serves mostly low-income children with developmental disabilities and delays. The management had been trying, with mixed results, to introduce mindfulness as a form of self-care that could help the staff better handle job-related stress.
Jeff and I sat down with roughly two dozen employees.
“Opening yourself up to vulnerability is hard. It’s scary,” one staff member said.
Said another, “Some days I just don’t really care for being in my own head.”
A physical therapist named Zoe Gutierrez said, “I get people all the time asking me, ‘How do you do what you do? You work with kids that’ve been abused, and they have brain damage because of child abuse. How do you go into that home and deal with that parent, knowing it was the dad that did it?’ ” Zoe said she loved her work, but that when it came to handling the psychological issues the job produces, her main priority was simply to move past it all. “I think the hard part is coming home and shutting off that side, and then focusing on your family and what you have to take care of, and getting back to life.”
We also heard from Lidia Mendez, a boisterous and likable woman who works with autistic children. At first she told us her mind was simply too busy to meditate—a classic “I can’t do this” sentiment. Upon further probing, though, she admitted that, despite her ebullient exterior, she suffered from anxiety and had deep reservations about sitting with herself. “I’m scared of what I will find if I actually let everything out.” She laughed a bit nervously, perhaps surprised by the weight of her own admission.
It is true that meditating can bring up our deep fears. However, anxieties tend to surface sooner or later anyway. Meditation gives us a way to work proactively with our emotions, enabling us to see them clearly rather than having them sally forth from their dank mental redoubts at a time of their choosing.
There is an important caveat here. If you have trauma in your personal history, if you suffer from mental illness, or if you experience any psychological difficulties upon starting a meditation practice, it is prudent to consult a mental health professional before going any further. This does not mean that meditation isn’t the right move for you, but when it comes to addressing our mental health it’s rarely one-stop shopping.
That said, both Jeff and I have suffered from mild bouts of depression and/or anxiety, and we have found meditation to be enormously useful, often in conjunction with traditional psychotherapy. In my own experience, when the fog of gloom descends, meditation helps me step off the hamster wheel of obsessive thought, so that I don’t get so caught up in the stories barfed up by the voice in my head. In fact, research appears to back this up, suggesting that meditation can be beneficial for depression and anxiety. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study led by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine that found daily mindfulness-based meditation was roughly as effective as antidepressants in providing relief from some symptoms.
No one is suggesting that the process of confronting your emotions through meditation is easy. In our exchange with Lidia, Jeff spoke candidly about encountering some of his own issues, in particular those created by his ADD. “It was scary when I realized I had to start facing some of these things,” he said. His first few years of meditating were mostly peaceful and interesting. “Then, maybe five years in, all this aggression and shame and hurt started to bubble up out of nowhere. It would last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Even once it calmed down, I’d feel it simmering under the surface in my day-to-day life. I realized it had been there a long time, I just had never seen it clearly. Eventually it worked itself out.”
Jeff also pointed out that sometimes what you’re avoiding is not as bad as you might fear. “Often I’ve had this experience: ‘Oh God, I don’t want to go in there.’ And then you open the door a crack, and it’s a little mouse. There’s no monster in there.”
For many of us, the natural inclination is to run from our difficult emotions. (As Stephen Colbert joked when I appeared on The Colbert Report to promote my book, “I used to not be happy all the time and then I just grew a pair and manned up. I do what men do: we stuff it down!”) Meditation offers an alternative, although, as Jeff points out, it’s important to pace yourself; it can be delicate work.
There is a popular acronym that many people, myself included, have found useful as a guide for leaning into emotions, RAIN: recognize, accept, investigate, non-identification.
RAIN is a way to explore any sensation, thought, or emotion—even the hard ones. It’s a very useful tool to have in your meditator’s tool belt. Other meditations in this book that can help with difficult emotions are Taking Back Lazy (Chapter 5), Smart Compassion (Chapter 5), and Walking Meditation (Chapter 8).
The practice helps in a couple of ways. First, it boosts your emotional literacy. Instead of being lost in an emotional reaction, you stop and get curious about what’s happening inside you. Although we can obviously have emotionally loaded thoughts, our bodies are the real epicenter of our emotions. Massage therapists like to say, “Our issues are in our tissues.” It’s true. And not just any tissues—your tissues. You may experience anger in your jaw, or in your forearms, or in your ears, as they throb and shoot cartoon flames. We’re all uniquely configured, but there’s overlap too. With RAIN, we get curious about our own idiosyncratic “tells,” the many subtle tics and quirks and contractions that are our particular body’s way of saying: I’m feeling over here! Feeling is happening! In this way, we can learn to catch our emotional reactions early, and not, in teacher Sharon Salzberg’s excellent words, “fifteen consequential actions later.”
And there’s a second way it helps. The fruit of meditation isn’t just less emotional reactivity. It’s also having fewer negative emotions in the first place. The more we practice observing our emotional habits, the less potent they become. Over time, they can begin to heal. This can happen with even our oldest and most private emotions. The process is slow. But it’s effective.
How does this happen? What does it feel like to be inside this undertaking? That’s what RAIN is about. It’s the gift inside Pandora’s box.
RAIN
5 to 15 minutes
Start by taking a few breaths. When we work with emotions—which can get very strong—there’s an important preliminary step of identifying some subtly comfortable or settling sensation or simply seeing if you can tune in to an underlying stillness. Like a home base you can come back to. It might be the breath, or a peaceful feeling in the body, or a sound, or an image—even an external picture you can look at. Take a couple of minutes to find this place and to meditate on it, noticing its qualities, getting familiar with it. This is a place we’ll come back to over the course of the meditation; you can visit it anytime you need a break. Note it, if you like: call it home or rest.
The first step of RAIN—the “R”—is recognize. Can you recognize any emotions happening in your experience right now? Sadness, happiness, anger, frustration, curiosity, boredom, impatience, anxiety—any emotion. If so, note it: sadness, boredom, whatever.
A feeling may not be obvious. Sometimes when we look we realize that, actually, we’ve been carrying around a kind of background emotion with us all day. Maybe it’s a hollow hurt feeling in the throat, a shaky excitement in the chest, or a band of tension in the neck and shoulders. There are many permutations of these, often expressed through some trackable body sensation in the face, throat, neck, chest, or belly. If you think there’s some emotion happening but you don’t know exactly what it is (or even where it is), just note it as feel.
If you happen to be emotionally neutral at the moment, you can try to deliberately evoke an emotion. You can bring to mind some idiotic YouTube video of a guy farting in a freezer bag and notice any feelings of hilarity or weary disappointment in humanity. Or you can think of a situation or person that angers you, or saddens you, or fills you with well-being. Whatever is here, the first thing is to see it clearly.
Our next step is “A”—accept.
That means, whatever the emotional sensation, you let it be there. Instead of trying to ignore or suppress it—which we often do—you open to the whole complicated feeling of it, with great tenderness and care. You are cultivating a feeling of self-compassion as you do this, which hopefully means you will also naturally pace yourself and take it easy. This attitude provides a new way to experience these sensations, so the emotions behind them can start to get expressed and even metabolized. The neuroscience of this is intriguing: we are essentially integrating our emotions with our cognition, marrying what we feel with what we know.
Acceptance may seem unassuming, but it is the most important move a human being can make. It has dozens of near synonyms, described in different ways in every culture and tradition: forgiveness, love, equanimity, maturity, being present. It is a radical act of coming into the world by letting go of what’s in the way and welcoming exactly what’s emerging. There can be a bracing existential quality to this act: it’s as though when we accept every part of this moment, we synchronize with it.
Acceptance isn’t easy when we’re inside a challenging emotion like anger or fear or sadness. But the alternative is either grabbing on, which can make the emotion more painful when it leaves, or pushing away, which may work in the short term but ultimately amplifies and drags the emotion out. The expression is “What you resist persists.” It’s like trying to win a wrestling match with a giant blob of melted toffee. The harder you press, the more entangled you get. Sometimes you don’t even realize you are subtly fighting with a feeling or sensation. Your body might be tense, like you’re braced in some way against a thought or a feeling or a sound. It’s a kind of friction that we can sometimes detect if we look. If you realize that you actually don’t want to accept a particular emotion, then the kung fu move is to pan back the camera and accept your aversion. It’s always the same move; only the scale changes.
Which brings us to the “I” of RAIN: investigation. Investigation is expanding and deepening the volume of what we are accepting. It’s getting interested in whatever we are feeling, and exploring it at a pace that works for us.
There is a learning curve here around how to do this skillfully. We want to be curious and aware of our emotions without feeding them. This is so important. Some of our chains of emotional reactions are on a hair trigger: guilt leads to critical thoughts, which lead to sadness and negative images of yourself and sudden catastrophizing about the future, and before you know it you’re curled into a ball in the basement under an old tarp, inconsolable and covered in petrified mouse droppings. We can go from zero to TILT! very quickly. When this happens, we’re no longer mindful—we’ve almost always lost our ability to keep track of what’s going on.
We’re working with emotional feedback loops that want to complete their circuits. It’s like the energy in them can’t quite discharge, so the pattern keeps playing out again and again. And every time it plays out it gets more entrenched. How to work with it, then?
With a light touch. The key is to observe our emotions in the most relaxed possible way, friendly but also objective. It’s more important here to be relaxed in our attitude than to see every part of an emotion clearly. We let the sensation come to us; we let it show itself. We are never in a hurry. The clarity will emerge from the equanimity, less so the other way around. This kind of openness is the ideal medium in which to absorb an emotion’s momentum.
It is exactly in this moment that change can happen. When you see and open yourself to a feeling—particularly one that comes around again and again—then it’s less likely to escalate or chain forward. The mindfulness somehow takes the wind out of its sails. If you do this enough times, you create a new and healthier habit. The entire emotional-behavioral response can be rerouted. It is a way of slowly and patiently taking responsibility for ourselves.
What’s the move if we’re doing this meditation and a strong emotion spikes up and gets super intense, and we find ourselves en route to that tarp with the petrified mouse droppings?
There are a few options. One, you can deliberately zoom in on one small part of the emotional sensation—the very center of it, maybe, or one of its edges. You breathe out and keep the body relaxed as you lightly track this one small part, noticing how the sensations—the throbbing, or tingling, or aching, or tension—either move and change or stay the same. When we isolate one part of the emotional sensation it becomes more manageable, and by staying clear and mindful we can prevent the emotion from amplifying into what can become an overwhelming chain reaction. So it may surge, but if we stay with it in a mindful way, the wave can also quickly recede, leaving us feeling lighter and calmer.
Another strategy is to swing back to the home base sensation we identified at the start. Everyone should do this anyway, as a matter of course, throughout the meditation; it is part of working smart. Every few minutes, practice shifting your attention to the comparative comfort of this other place: your breath, an image or sound, or some peaceful grounding quality in the body. Meditate here for a while. Or do a compassion practice—that is also a good option. This is how we pace ourselves—we swing into a feeling, lightly observe it for a while, swing back to home base, relax there, then return to survey the activation for a little longer. That’s the process, moving at a rhythm that works for us, a bit deeper with each swing of the pendulum.
Of course, it’s also important to say that at any time you can just stop meditating and go for a walk or talk it out with a friend. There are many ways to work with our emotions.
The fourth and final step of RAIN, the “N,” is non-identification. Non-identification is less an action than an attitude, the attitude of not taking your emotions personally. However counterintuitive it may sound, it’s something to try, to explore. How does it change your experience to note anger is happening, the way you might note a thunderstorm is happening? Emotions are the atmospheric conditions of this human moment, part of the natural flow of things, a product of untold causes and conditions that roll out quite on their own. So give yourself a break. You don’t have to constantly judge yourself for feeling a particular way. It’s okay: we’re all part of this much bigger process. And guess what? When we stop compulsively claiming every passing emotion and thought as I-me-mine, then something beautiful may happen: we feel more connected to everything and everyone else. Very slowly, we start to get over ourselves.
Non-identification is actually implicit in RAIN’s previous two steps. It’s a deeper kind of allowing. If you want a “move,” try lightly noting each sensation as not me—or, even better, be free.
We’re liberating the butterfly conservatory over here. Free all the little sensations! Not me! Be free! Let all experiences come and go. What’s happening now will be different soon enough, and what a privilege it is to be here at all. Sub specie aeternitatis: the view from eternity.
And that’s the practice. Make sure to finish back at your home base, at the breath or some sound or sensation that feels comfortable for you. Before you open your eyes, take a few minutes to relax, maybe even lie down. Let the work integrate.
CHEAT SHEET
1. Close your eyes and first find home base: some sensation that feels comforting. Maybe it’s the breath, or a relaxed place in your body, or a picture in front of you.
2. Recognize. Now ask yourself: are there any emotions happening? If so, note them: anger, sadness, exuberance. If you can’t find the exact name for what you’re experiencing, note it as feel.
3. Accept. Open to the feeling and let the sensation of it do exactly what it wants to do. See if you can find a quality of caring and friendliness for this emotion that just wants to express itself.
4. Investigate. Now we get curious about our emotion, about where it’s happening and what it’s doing. Is it centered around a particular part of your body? Is the feeling staying the same, or is it changing? See if you can lightly follow the sensation, like you’re a field naturalist. If the emotion starts to get too intense, you have a couple of options. One is you can try to zoom in on one small part of it and notice just that, which makes things more manageable. Or you can swing your attention back to your comfortable place, noting home or rest.
5. Non-identification. Can you let the emotional feeling do its thing without taking it personally? Try to see your emotions like you see the weather: not as something to judge yourself for but, rather, as part of the natural atmospheric conditions of the moment. This is a deeper form of allowing. After you’ve let this happen for a while, go back to the breath or to your home or rest sensation for a bit. Before you open your eyes, take a few minutes to relax and do nothing.
Jeff, a few questions on RAIN. I want to home in on the “accept” piece because it seems to be so central, and yet also so subtle. How do you know if you’ve really accepted something?
Usually the emotion gets less intense, although not always—feelings have their own arc and lifespan. There can also be dramatic experiences, in which you get a noticeable release. It’s a bit like when you suddenly realize you’ve been holding your breath—or tensing some part of your body—and you let out this long exhale and everything relaxes and you’re like “Man, why didn’t I let go of that sooner?” Or you finally give someone a piece of your mind, and afterward you feel this big weight come off your shoulders. It’s cathartic—in fact, “catharsis” is another word for this dynamic.
The more we accept, the more the energy bound up in our previous gripping or aversion or fixation gets freed up. As a result, we often feel calmer and lighter and generally more sane. And of course, when we let go, we also make space for new things to come in. So each release is also an update.
I know you’re interested in the idea of “updating” the mind, like we do with a software program. Except the total disappearance of a pattern only rarely happens, right? How much can chronic feelings of anxiousness or sadness or anger really change? Isn’t meditation more about mitigating our suffering rather than resolving it altogether?
I think it’s both. One way to think about it is to ask what is the relationship between in-the-moment experiences of catharsis—which are pretty common—and long-term change and transformation? It’s the million-dollar question. There’s definitely a relationship. I’ve had meditators tell me about seeing and releasing some deep pattern in the moment and they say it’s gone for good, poof! Which is completely bonkers if it’s true, and has serious implications for how we think about learning and behavior change. I think it’s one of the most important things meditation has to share with neuroscience.
But my sense is that these kinds of sudden transformations are pretty rare. And, actually, contemplatives say this too: it’s more about gradual change. Most practitioners I’ve spoken to say the patterns come back, just a little less insistently each time. This has been my personal experience. I see this stuff again and again, and the more I do, the less it owns me. Eventually I’ve had emotional patterns get so worked through that it’s like they become transparent—still there, but hardly influential. But then, other times, this thing I thought I had dealt with comes back and bites me in the ass ten years later. Especially if I’m stressed.
It is worth mentioning here that the permanent disappearance of all patterns of reactivity is one of the central claims of Buddhism. They say it can be done. Although most of the senior teachers I know say it’s more like you are always halving the distance to zero, but never quite getting there.
As our encounter with the folks from AIT was wrapping up, we took some group pictures in front of the bus, and then the 10% Happier team clambered aboard, did our count-off, and set off for our next destination. Amazingly, we were on schedule. It wasn’t luck or divine intervention; it was Ben, who was now officially running this road show. He had initially resisted the assignment, but now that he was actually in the role, he loved it. This didn’t surprise me at all—Ben really enjoys bossing people around. A more polite way of saying that would be: he’s a natural leader.
I was well acquainted with the benevolent dictatorship of Ben Rubin. Despite being nearly ten years my junior, he had essentially been running significant chunks of my life for quite a while as the CEO of our 10% Happier meditation enterprise.
As I do with everyone I like, I mock Ben mercilessly. He dresses in what might charitably be called geek chic. His hair reminds me of that scene from the movie Knocked Up, where Katherine Heigl asks Seth Rogen whether he uses product in his unruly mop of curls, and he replies, “No, that’s, ah—I use ‘Jew,’ it’s called.” Ben toggles back and forth between an all-business C-3PO-like chief executive and, when he is letting his figurative hair down, a florid goofball who insists on telling jokes that only he finds funny. In spite of his lack of comedic chops, Ben has become one of my closest and most trusted advisors. He’s like a younger version of me—except more disciplined, more thoughtful, and way better at math.
Among our shared interests: making good-natured fun of Jeff when he goes off on his mythopoetic jags, waving his arms wildly like he’s conducting the universe or Rolfing reality. Among our shared aversions: pretty much everything touchy-feely. In fact, Ben—even though he, too, is a dedicated meditator—has this particular allergy even worse than I do. So you can imagine how excited he was when Jeff, on board the bus, proposed a group discussion about our go-to emotional patterns and how meditation could help. It was a voluntary opening of Pandora’s box.
We were in our usual configuration. Jeff and I were seated at the small dining table in the front cabin, with Ben, Carlye, and several others arrayed on the bench across from us.
“So maybe I’ll just start,” said Jeff. “If indeed Ben has any emotions, they may even emerge.”
“Unlikely,” said Ben, smirking.
Jeff then walked us through an account of some of what he had excavated when he turned the meditative microscope on deeper and deeper levels of his own psyche. Early on in his practice, he noticed a “go-faster pattern” that was, he said, “the secret life of my ADD—a stream of images of places I’d rather be and things I’d rather be doing, along with a continuous agitated buzzing through the core of my body.” This chronic dissatisfaction caused him to push for ever more stimulation, which in turn activated him more (and satisfied him less) until eventually he’d crash, only to repeat the cycle again. Meditation helped him back off and observe this process without indulging it.
The practice also enabled him to see deeper emotional elements, including one of the sources of his sharpest pain. “I learned that as a consequence of feeling like I didn’t belong”—in life, in his family, anywhere—“I had a lot of judgments about that, which I internalized, about not being good enough. I could see—way down—this part of me that would just put the knife into myself.” That feeling of insufficiency, he said, had created mindless behavioral patterns. “There’s one that’s about being compulsively super-nice and wanting to help everybody all the time. It’s this acting out of my own insecurity that is just so ingrained. And another one is anger that I have this embarrassing insecurity in the first place.”
As moved as I was by Jeff’s honesty, when it was my turn to speak I felt a surge of discomfort. Hearing my friend hold forth in such a raw manner reminded me that I had thus far been spared so much of the difficulty that other people have had to endure. The truth is, I was born on third base, the recipient of an incalculable amount of unearned privilege.
“I had a kind of idyllic childhood,” I said. “I have two really loving parents who never got divorced, and I was totally supported. They were hippies, and there was a lot of lovey-dovey stuff. So I think the result was a spoiled kid.”
Yes, I had endured the trifecta of panic, anxiety, and depression, but my struggles were rarely rooted in personal trauma (and, in fact, were sometimes self-manufactured). And yes, through my years of meditation, I had faced some difficult interior phenomena, including anger, impatience, boredom, and fear. But, truthfully, none of it felt that heavy. Maybe this meant I was a terrible meditator. Or maybe there simply wasn’t a lot of Mahler music playing in the backdrop of my psyche.
I found it embarrassing that so much of my internal bandwidth was occupied by material that was, relatively speaking, petty and selfish. Even as we sat there on the bus, most of my thoughts were swirling around whether all the greasy road food we were eating was going to require me to wear Spanx, and whether my ongoing email negotiations with the musician Moby, who was supposed to lead a sound meditation at our culminating event in L.A., would prove successful.
This discussion tapped right into my ongoing story line about having some sort of internal frigidity. “I definitely have stuff I don’t want to face,” I offered to the group, adding that I suspected it was “around capacity for compassion and stuff like that, which I think is a source of shame for me.” Intellectually, I knew I wasn’t a sociopath, and yet I still struggled with this story about myself.
I was not alone. Ben weighed in, explaining that, like me, he struggled with feelings of selfishness. “I feel like I get locked. Instead of feeling compassion for all of these people who need help, I just squish it down and put it in a box because if I feel the compassion for them, then I might have to help, and that would hurt me.” It would hurt him, he said, because the voice in his head was saying, “I can’t help. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the energy. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the…whatever.”
Sitting there, I felt empathy and compassion for Ben’s perceived lack of empathy and compassion. I knew from prolonged personal exposure to him that he was actually extremely helpful, and also that he viewed leadership as a source of service. His words also helped me realize that I had actually made real progress since I was his age. Despite the sometimes selfish nature of my inner dialogue, having a child had opened up heretofore unseen reservoirs of feeling. Moreover, through meditation, I had actually come to enjoy helping others, because mindfulness had revealed how good it can feel to be nice. As a tiny example of this, bring to mind how pleasant it can feel when you do something as simple as holding open a door for someone. Meditation had shown me how scalable this behavior is. I call it “the self-interested case for not being a dick.”
When we catch ourselves thinking or acting in unkind or ungenerous ways, it can produce a running dialogue of second-arrow self-reproach. Such was the case for Ben. “There’s the layer of shame on top of that that’s like, ‘Oh you’re a shitty person. What a shitty person. You can’t be bothered to help, or even feel compassion when you can’t help. You’re kind of a broken human.’ ”
“When you’re in a pattern it feels like fate,” said Jeff. He had seen it play out in his own life. He said he would occasionally get into “a mood where my life is completely fucked and everything is screwed up, I don’t know what I’m doing.” But that’s when his years of meditation practice would kick in. “Anytime I go into that space now, which I still do, I always have a little bit of perspective around it. I can always say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been here before.’ ” That is the kind of invaluable perspective we are training in this practice, using RAIN and other meditations to boost our inner radar. We can learn to track our emotional storms before they make landfall.
As the bus drove west from New Mexico into Arizona, passing fantastic rock formations that looked like gigantic, Martian versions of the Play-Doh sculptures my son makes, I recalled something Jeff had said during our visit to AIT. When confronted with difficult emotions or distractions, he said, “the first move” is to say, “All right, welcome to the party.”
Welcome to the party: it seemed like the perfect way to introduce equanimity when confronted with emotions we don’t want to face. Moreover, it struck me as something that might help me in my own practice. Perhaps “welcome to the party” was the antidote to my seemingly intractable habit of beating myself up every time I got distracted. “What if,” I asked Jeff, “at that moment when you wake up and you’re having judgment about everything, you just use that as a mantra right there?”
Jeff was jazzed. There are few things MacGyver loves more than minting new meditations. “Why don’t we do a ‘welcome to the party’ meditation?” he exclaimed.
WELCOME TO THE PARTY
5 to 15 minutes
Start in the usual way: a couple of deep breaths, relaxing on the exhale. Make a decision here at the start not to get uptight about anything. That’s the whole principle of this meditation: no secret biases or preferences, everything that rises is welcomed, including your most neurotic judgments and unholy feelings and seething resentments. All perfect. “So happy to see you, welcome to the party of my direct experience. Would you care for an aperitif?” Like that.
If you’re a breath person, start there to get settled, zeroing in on the soft feeling of it. Or choose another body sensation: heart, belly, bum, hands. Note, if you like, feel—or, if you are working with the breath, in and out. Enjoying the full feeling, committed to this direction in our experience. Mind wanders, bring it back.
And…here’s the fun part. There’s one more note: Welcome to the party. Really say this in your head. Whenever you’re getting pulled into a thought, or you get distracted by something and you notice it, say, Welcome to the party. Make it your mantra. Welcome the insistent thought, welcome the annoying sensation, welcome the distracting sound. Then return to noticing the breath.
There are no enemies in this meditation, there are no problems, only new things to notice and welcome. And, as usual, it’s okay to fake it. Welcome your fakery. Welcome your suspicion. Welcome the smell of fried chicken floating in from the neighborhood. Explore how this attitude affects the tone of your meditation. Try this for a while. If your mind wanders, welcome the fact that your mind wandered and go back to the breath. There is no traction here for feeling bad.
After you’ve done this for a while, if you like, try experimenting with a wider expanse of mindfulness. To do this, let go of your focal attention on the breath or body, and send your awareness out to include any sounds coming and going, and also the wider sense of space in the room, the volume of air above and behind and around you. Note sounds if you like; note space. Let your mind get big and soft. Welcome your big soft mind to the party.
If you find this open focus challenging to maintain, you can return to the breath at any time. But the idea is to explore what happens when you expand the stance of your welcoming. Now there really is no such thing as a distraction. All sounds and sensations are welcome, all of it rising and falling within the broad space of your awareness. Welcome to the party, you say to anything you happen to notice, and then you kick back, aware of sounds, aware of space, maybe aware of the body and the breath and whatever else. Aware of it all. No limits.
When you’re ready, come back the body, to the breath and the feeling of contact with the ground. Enjoying the body—its solidity and presence. Re-combobulating. Rest here for a minute or two, then slowly open your eyes.
CHEAT SHEET
1. Choose an anchor for your attention—breath, belly, bum, hands—something you already know works for you. Use a note if it helps: in, out, feel.
2. Whenever you get distracted, notice this has happened, and then good-naturedly note welcome to the party. Notice it with welcoming amusement, and then return to your anchor, letting the distraction fade or stay in the background or do whatever it wants. You are a generous party host.
3. After five or ten minutes, experiment with a wider field of mindfulness. Let go of focal attention on the breath and expand to include the sense of sounds and space around you. Note sounds, note space, note welcome to the party for all of it. If you don’t like this broader stance, you can always return to your original focus.
4. At the end, bring your full attention back into the body, and then let yourself rest and do nothing for a couple of minutes before opening your eyes.
“That was a great meditation,” I said as Jeff wrapped up.
To be clear, it wasn’t magic. Big Eddie (that’s what we called our driver, to distinguish him from regular Eddie, our director) was blasting the radio up front, and it was continually annoying me. I would try to greet both the noise and my reaction to it with a hearty “Welcome to the party!” It didn’t work every time, but it was comforting to hear Jeff say that it didn’t have to; this was a training. As Jeff often said, “Fake it until you make it.” In those tiny little moments where the mantra did work, where I was being less uptight about my less-than-perfect concentration, I got a glimpse of how powerful this practice could be—how it could make my meditation less fraught and perhaps even transform my relationship with my own emotions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn’t all this getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings stuff, not to mention the maudlin, Girl, Interrupted–style group therapy, just going to turn you into a navel-gazing softie? Maybe Colbert was right about the utility of stuffing it all down?
At our next stop, we were about to see if meditation could survive in one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs imaginable.