7
“If I Get Too Happy, I’ll Lose My Edge”
The first time I was in the back of a police car I was fourteen years old and the 5-0 had nabbed me and my fellow Brain Trust wastrels for (allegedly) vandalizing a train station.
I vastly preferred the ride Jeff and I took late on day nine of our road trip, when we hopped (voluntarily) into the back of a police SUV piloted by Sergeant Raj Johnson, a supervising officer on the midnight patrol in Tempe, Arizona.
Tempe is just outside of Phoenix, with a population of about 165,000 that soars to 265,000 when the local college, Arizona State University, is in session.
Raj, as he insisted we call him, is a sturdy former college football player with a shaven head and meticulously courteous manner. I had a hard time imagining him in his former life working undercover in narcotics, with dreadlocks down to his shoulders.
As we sped down the freeway, Raj regaled us with stories from his SWAT days and spoke openly about the strains of the job. “It can be very stressful to come out here and know that you can go to a call and you could get injured. Or you might have to use force that could injure somebody or take their life.” He talked of seeing horrific car crashes, acts of domestic violence, and suicides. He mentioned the rising antagonism toward the police, and a troubling uptick in ambush attacks on officers. And he told us how he’d recently come close to discharging his weapon for the first time when confronted by a man, high on meth, who kept reaching for his waistband as if he had a weapon, all the while shouting, “Shoot me!”
“I thought my job was stressful,” I said.
“Yeah, but the other side of that coin is…man, I love this job. Do you know what I mean? It’s awesome to go to work with people who think like you and believe in the same mission. Where you truly do want to protect, you want to serve.”
As if to accentuate the perilous nature of his work, a call came over the radio indicating a pursuit in progress. “Sounds like there is a unit trying to stop a car—or a car is fleeing from them,” said Raj as he pulled a U-turn and started heading quickly in that direction.
I could feel a little surge of adrenaline, an echo of what I used to experience when things got hot while I was on patrol in war zones. I was curious to know whether Raj felt it, too. “I wonder, is a part of you also a little excited?” I asked.
“Oh, absolutely.” This is what they train for, he said. “It’s exciting to go get some bad guys.”
When we arrived, it seemed like every police vehicle in Tempe was there, lights blazing. The cops on the scene reported that a DUI suspect had initially refused to stop. When he finally pulled over, he fought with the responding officers, who proceeded to tase him.
Back in his SUV, Raj told us that when it came to handling the psychological ramifications of their work, police officers traditionally didn’t have many options. He listed the most popular coping mechanisms: “Drinks, stuffing it down, or talking to your buddy about it.”
I asked, “Do you think, on the force, meditation is considered socially acceptable? Or would people make fun of you a little bit?”
“Um,” he said.
“You can be honest.”
“You know,” he said, looking at me and Jeff a little sheepishly in the rearview mirror, “I think people are going to make fun of you just a little bit.”
As he made clear, however, the concern went well beyond the “people might think I’m weird” obstacle. For police officers, the more pressing fear was that meditation might be downright dangerous.
Raj came right out and said it: he worried meditation would make him soft. “You have to be on your game every day,” he said. Faced with the demands of a high-stakes job that required tough, split-second decisions, what he needed most was speed and strength, both mental and physical. His question about meditation was: “Will it slow me down?”
The “lose my edge” fear is one with which I have struggled mightily. Before I started meditating, I assumed the practice would hinder my ability to compete in the sometimes cutthroat world of TV news, and also that I might be required to wear my wife’s yoga pants to the office.
I have come to firmly believe that, applied correctly, mindfulness enhances rather than erodes your edge. Increased focus helps me get more work done in less time. Decreased emotional reactivity sometimes allows me to stay calm during heated meetings. Having compassion for colleagues can lead to more allies, which in an intensely collaborative atmosphere like ABC News is incalculably valuable. (Of course, having positive relationships with your coworkers happens to feel good for its own sake.) Full disclosure: if you ask anybody who knows me, they will tell you I retain the propensity to be a multitasking, Twitter-checking, temper-losing dummy. Not for the last time, I will remind you that this is a game of gradual improvement.
Even though meditation has taken off in all sorts of hard-charging, high-profile professions, from law enforcement to athletics to entertainment, I still encounter people who fear the practice will render them ineffective. Not long ago, I was invited to do an interview at the last place on earth I thought I’d ever talk meditation: Fox News. It was a radio segment with an amicable anchorman named Brian Kilmeade, who posed a question along the lines of, “If I get too happy, won’t I end up like Rocky from Rocky III?”
I hadn’t seen the movie since I was a kid, so I went back and watched it. The film opens with a montage of the boxer, fresh off winning the championship, signing autographs, shooting TV commercials, and gamboling around his mansion with his wife and son. These scenes are intercut with images of a vaguely psychopathic-looking Clubber Lang (played by Mr. T) training hard and drubbing his opponents. By the second round of their eventual encounter in the ring, Rocky is on the mat, bleeding and unconscious.
Message received: my new friend from Fox was worried that meditation would leave him vulnerable to leaner, hungrier opponents. But this conflates happiness with complacency. Just because you meditate does not mean you have to abandon stress and lazily rest on your laurels.
I still experience plenty of internal churn. Why doesn’t our app have more downloads? Why is Eckhart Tolle selling more books than me? Why is my son refusing to brush his teeth, and will he eventually look like he has meth mouth?
My meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein once gave me the single best piece of advice I’ve ever received when it comes to the management of worry. When for the eighty-seventh time you find yourself chewing over, say, an impending deadline or your rival’s promotion, maybe ask yourself one simple question: “Is this useful?”
I employed this mantra quite often on our road trip whenever I found myself carried away by anxious thoughts. Why isn’t Moby answering my emails? Is my next book going to be a classic case of the sophomore slump? Will it end up like that second, critically panned Strokes record? I actually liked that record. “Meet Me in the Bathroom” is my jam….
Whoa, whoa, dude. At some point, maybe after I had stress-eaten a bag of pretzels, the mindfulness would kick in. Is this worrying useful? Probably not. Then I’d go back to listening to whatever interesting thing Jeff happened to be saying at the moment.
The “Is this useful?” mantra has not only helped me waste less energy on internally generated distress but has also allowed me to clear up bandwidth for new and different kinds of thoughts. For example, I am in closer touch with my more positive professional motivations—such as wanting to work on incredible stories with cool collaborators—as well as my gratitude for what I already have. (There’s an expression I frequently call to mind: “These are the good old days.”) I used to spend the final moments before drifting off to sleep mulling over, for the umpteenth time, all of my current problems. Now I perform a somewhat corny ritual where I list everything I’m grateful for, including my wife, my son, and my job. The litany gets so long that sometimes I nod off before I come to the end.
Turning down the volume on my unproductive mental nattering has given me the space to reckon with an indisputable fact: I am not fully in control. None of us is. We inhabit a chaotic universe. I try to adhere to the concept of “non-attachment to results.” It’s great to work your tail off in service of a goal, but best to never forget that the end result is often dependent on much larger, often impersonal causes and conditions. If you keep that in mind when your grand plans are subject to force majeure, it can drastically increase your resilience.
In this way, meditation leads to edge without as much edginess. Mindfulness has helped me to see more clearly what really matters, which has made me much less focused on advancement for its own sake. Fair warning: it is possible that increased self-awareness may lead you to conclude that some career goals you’ve been rabidly pursuing may not actually provide true satisfaction, which may in turn lead you to pursue new and different goals. To me, however, that’s not losing your edge, it’s losing your delusions. Don’t worry, though; if being heedlessly acquisitive genuinely makes you happy, meditation probably won’t stand in the way.
Nor, for that matter, do I think it will stand in the way of your creativity. People whose livelihoods depend upon being creative often tell me they fear increased happiness could come at a cost. There is a widely held belief, fed by tales of such miserable masters as Beethoven and Van Gogh, that you need to suffer for your art. I’m struck by the paradox that people come to meditation with two irretrievably irreconcilable fears. On the one hand, there’s the fear of opening up a Pandora’s box of enfeebling emotions; on the other, the fear that meditation will lead to some sort of bovine neutrality or blissed-out blankness. In my experience, though, it works like this: meditation simultaneously puts you in closer touch with your emotions while making you less of their marionette. Believe me, I’d love it if the practice miraculously erased all of my neuroses. Instead, I think it allows for greater intimacy with the pain and poignancy of life while providing the wherewithal not to drown in it.
When we interviewed the singer Josh Groban back on day one of the road trip, he asked about the interaction between meditation and creativity. Jeff’s response: “If you’re just crowding your head with the violence of your own anxious and neurotic preoccupations, how are you ever going to mine a deeply fertile experience? You’re blocking it.”
Josh seemed to resonate with this concept of accessing the muse. “Honestly,” he said, “some of the times when you feel like you’ve written the best thing, you say, ‘Well, I didn’t write it; I was quiet, and it came.’ ”
Or, as one of my favorite rappers, Schoolboy Q, once rhymed:
Metapho’
How I come up with it, I don’t fuckin’ know.
While I do not consider myself an artist—my rapping and beat-box skills haven’t advanced much since seventh grade—I have found that being less tied up in knots of fruitless worry gives me better access to good ideas, wherever it is they come from.
It has helped me immeasurably with extemporizing in live situations, a big part of my job as a morning news anchor and traveling speech-giver. The most vivid example of this may be my aforementioned visit to The Colbert Report. I was more nervous about this appearance than any I’d ever done in my TV career. The idea of discussing my personal failings and my belief in the power of meditation with a fictional cable news bloviator was unsettling, to say the least. Colbert is one of the most quick-witted and fearsomely intelligent comics of our age, and his whole job in this role (before he went to CBS, where he appears as himself) was to mercilessly play his guests for laughs.
Before the show, the producers would take the guests aside and advise them not to try to be funny. Just play the straight man, they would say. Colbert himself would pop into the green room and deliver a rapid-fire, rote speech about how his character is a buffoon who will mock everything you hold dear. When he delivered the speech to me, I could feel the blood drain from my face.
Moments later, I found myself in the surreal situation of being seated across from one of my pop culture heroes on the set of a show I had so often enjoyed from the comfort of my couch. My strategy was simple: fall back on my meditation training. Drop all of my plans. Deliver no canned lines. Just be in the moment and respond to whatever happens.
A few minutes into the interview, we got to the issue of drugs. “Were you, like, a club kid on the ecstasy? What were you doing? Did you have a pacifier in your mouth and glow sticks?” he said, waving his hands like a raver. This was exactly the moment I had feared. I could hear the rising roar of the laughing crowd. I felt like I was in the Roman Colosseum, and I was the gladiator about to get nixed. I have no memory of saying the following, but, seemingly out of nowhere, I replied, “You’re making me realize I did it wrong.”
Colbert paused, leaned back in his chair, and said, “Okay, that was good.”
Thank you, meditation, for enabling what was one of the most validating moments of my public life. I really am sure the conversation would have gone down very differently had I not been able to let go, listen, and trust the moment. This is a whole different kind of edge, one that is available to anyone, whether or not you have built a career as a talking head. And it applies well past the workplace, enabling more spontaneous, authentic interactions in all aspects of your life.
If you’re a cop in Tempe, Arizona, however, your needs are significantly more urgent than the ability to ad-lib on camera, write a catchy song, or navigate office politics. When I make a mistake on air, it’s embarrassing; when Raj or his colleagues lose their edge, people could get hurt or die.
The day after our ride-along with Raj, Jeff and I went to visit his boss, the city’s new police chief, Sylvia Moir, who has made it her mission to introduce meditation to her officers. Latterly of El Cerrito, California, she’d been in Tempe for about a year. She combined NoCal earthiness with the crisp, authoritative demeanor of someone who had spent decades in criminal justice. Sitting in her large, light-filled, impeccably neat office, decorated with both law enforcement memorabilia and tasteful throw pillows, she said her job required a tricky balance. “Dan,” she told me, “try being a woman in police work. There’s a lot of risk of not looking hard-core.”
Chief Moir had initially written off meditation as a “crunchy granola thing,” but the science convinced her mindfulness could help her cops be more effective on the street and more resilient in the face of a torrent of stressors. Indeed, despite Raj’s fear that meditation might slow him down, studies of people with dangerous jobs, including soldiers, firefighters, and police officers, have shown that meditation produces such benefits as improved working memory, reduced release of the stress hormone cortisol, and quicker recovery times after high-pressure incidents.
But the PR problem remained real. The chief described the usual pushback from fellow officers: “They’re like, ‘What are you talking about? This is going to make you lose your edge. You’re going to be soft. What about the tactical necessity of the job? You have to make split-second decisions and be tactically sound.’ ” She argued the opposite is true. “I offer that it makes us more tactically sound.”
The chief’s argument appeared to be having an impact. When Jeff and I sat down separately with a group of eight of her officers, many of them were either open to the idea of meditation or were already practicing.
We were situated around an empty square of tables in a conference room at police headquarters. Sergeant Rich Monteton, a former marine, was the first to speak up. With his close-cropped blond hair, black golf shirt, and tattooed biceps, he had what the writer Emily Nussbaum once called “vinegar charisma.” Sergeant Monteton had been on the force for eighteen years. In his current role as the officer in charge of skills training for the department, it was his job to execute the new chief’s meditation agenda. He acknowledged the stigma around meditation, but argued that members of the force were already practicing a form of it nearly every day—breathing exercises that officers would perform while en route to potentially dangerous calls or in the middle of tense confrontations. Deep breathing can mitigate the impact of adrenaline on fine motor skills and information processing. In fact, this is what Raj had told us he had done when confronted with that suspect who was high on drugs and demanding to be shot. The department called this exercise “combat breathing.” Sergeant Monteton noted drily, “Now you’re on board, because I called it combat, right? I painted it black. It’s tactical. You’ll buy it.”
What emerged from the group discussion was that officers were craving the ability to build on combat breathing. Specifically, what they were seeking was the ability to “reset” both during and after stressful events. One of the biggest challenges of police work is not to take the anxiety and anger from your previous call into the next one. The men and women in the room with us saw this ability to reset as a way to sharpen their edge while out on the street.
This notion was nicely summed up by Officer Jake Schmidt, a newbie on the SWAT team who looked so young that everyone called him “K-Through-8.” He said, “You go to a call, there’s shots fired. And you leave that call, and the next one usually, you’re going to someone with a barking dog. The citizen’s really upset, and you’re kind of like, ‘Really? You’re upset? I just went to someone who just got shot.’ You just kind of gotta hit that reset button.”
Equally as important, he said, was to not carry the disquiet of the day back into your personal life. Jake had a newborn and a toddler at home. “I want to be a good father to them and also be a good husband to my wife. So I think doing this kind of puts me in the present, and not so caught up in replaying the day or worrying about tomorrow.”
Jeff was nodding vigorously. “You start to see how you’re always bringing stuff into these situations. You’re bringing your aggression, you’re bringing your fear.” But the smart move, Jeff explained, is to mindfully let it all be there, without fighting it. “Instead of white-knuckling it through your experience, you’re actually opening to the experience, and that’s what allows you to reset.”
There were several questions in the room about how best to apply this skill in real time. Jeff had at the ready another simple but game-changing acronym, SURF: stop, understand, relax, freedom. Actually, he got it from me; I came up with it. I think of it as a free-range version of RAIN. You can use this as a way to bring mindfulness into moments when you’re fighting the urge to lose your temper, send an impolitic email, or eat a fistful of french fries.
Psychologists use a version of this meditation to help people through their addictions, including our technology addictions. The idea should be a familiar one by now: the faster we are at noticing our urges, the less likely we’ll be to helplessly act on them, and the more quickly they will pass—thus allowing us to reset. It is extremely hard to reset fully. As with everything about mind, body, and behavior, we are talking about a continuum. You can get better and better at disembedding from your urges and not acting on them, but we’re still going to miss some of them, and catch others late. And even with the ones we do catch, the feeling of wanting to act on them can linger for a long while, sometimes causing us to act out all over again as soon as we lose mindfulness.
All of which is fine. Forty percent better, 20 percent better, even 10 percent better—that’s still better. As someone with lifelong impulse control issues, I can definitely say that meditation has reduced my ratio of high-risk behaviors, to say nothing of the blurting-out-stupid-shit-at-dinner-parties ratio.
Obviously there is good automaticity and bad automaticity. You want to be able to trust your body’s training and knowing. It’s important to make a distinction between the urges we want to immediately act on and the ones we don’t. Like if we are about to get run over by a bus, we want to act on the urge to move and not be in some kind of death-inducing deliberation about it.
But in the more nuanced world of health and society, where context and thoughtfulness are important, there are definitely urges and impulses that are better left unrealized.
SURF THE URGE
1 to 5 minutes (meant to be done on the fly; once you get the hang of it, can be done in a few moments)
Step one: stop. When you feel the first stirrings of an urge, try to use that feeling as an early warning, a reminder to pause and breathe for a moment. In, out. Breathing out the go-fast tension and urgency. You can still act on the urge—you are just trying to insert the tiniest space between stimulus and response. This battle, by the way, is practically the whole battle, so I’m not saying it’s easy. But it doesn’t need to be perfect. You can stop even once you’ve already given in to the urge a little bit, or even a lot. There is still damage control. It’s not like stop and go are your only two options.
Another thing that’s helped me deal with urges—especially the urge to share some half-baked opinion—is something I learned from the Zen teacher Bernie Glassman. When you go into any situation, he said, “think: don’t know.” As in, don’t pretend you know what’s up or what’s really going on. Chill for a bit in the situation, watching, learning. There’s a humility here that is really helpful. It’s kind of a natural “stop” that you can learn to bring with you into all of your life.
Next is understand. This just means: “Oh yeah, I got this urge that’s about to pop off. I know what urges are about. They’re those things that make me act like a dysregulated idiot and lead me into long chains of self-flagellation and regret.” That’s the minimum “understand” move: being conscious enough to know an urge when you feel it.
The more in-depth move is to get curious about where you feel the urge in your body, what the sensation feels like, how it moves. Is it in your face? Your hands? Your chest? Is it prickly or smooth, concentrated or spread out? This is so important. Knowledge is power. If you have an urge that you struggle with a lot in your life—to smoke, to punch, to binge, to blurt—get to know where in your body this drama plays out.
You can also start to understand the life cycle of your urges. Generally our impulses have a bell-shaped curve, which means they come up fast and get real intense but then taper off. Once you’ve learned to find the epicenter of the urge, the next step is riding it, riding the wave.
Relax. “Relax” could also be called “ride.” Except for me it feels like I am riding the urge backward. It’s like you notice the surge that wants to propel you up and forward into doing or saying, but instead you do the opposite: you breathe out, and deliberately relax down and back. Take a moment to actually feel this scenario in your imagination. Someone says or does something, and instead of spasming forward like a puppet on a string with your knee-jerk objection or action, instead you pause, breathe out…ahhh…and settle back through whatever urge has come up. Like you and the urge are two ships passing in the night.
The “action” is this settling back into yourself. From the outside you don’t move a millimeter, but from the inside it’s like you’ve just sat back into a fat armchair. As you do, watch the original urge pass through you like a ghost.
Last one: freedom. This is about noticing the feeling of the urge passing and you not acting—and taking satisfaction in this. Once again, we are back in equanimity, inside this quality of things moving through you and you not fighting with them, the feeling of the energy draining from an urge or an emotion, so you can move toward a reset.
The accessible end of this is just noticing you didn’t act and taking satisfaction in that. Notice your mindfulness, the mindfulness capable of seeing all this. When you notice and appreciate the mindfulness you reinforce it. This is what it feels like to be centered, to have autonomy, to be free—or at least more free. Noticing that freedom. Now, whatever’s going on out there, it’s from this place that you want to respond, with the full measure of your intelligence and care.
And that’s it. I went through it slowly, but once you get the hang of it we’re really talking about a single motion: noticing, pausing, and then settling back into yourself as you breathe out and the intensity of the urge passes. Pretty soon you’re settling back automatically, metabolizing life’s temptations and provocations on the fly. Over time it’s like you live in that settled place more and more, better able to choose what bit of conditioning you want to follow along with.
CHEAT SHEET
1. Stop. When an urge comes up, notice it, and pause instead of hurtling along unheeding. Catching the urge is the hardest part.
2. Understand. Be curious about where this urge lives in your body. Where exactly do you feel this clutch of urgency? In your face, your chest, your hands? Explore for a bit.
3. Relax. Settle back into the urge, breathing out, letting any associated sensations spike and then taper off. Try to let the urge pass through you without either fighting it or acting on it.
4. Freedom. Take a moment to feel satisfaction that you didn‘t act on the urge. Notice any sensations of the urge dissipating, and any other attendant feelings of freedom, openness, and sanity. This “noticing with satisfaction” will reinforce the SURF habit.
Not to nag, but it really is much easier to apply mindfulness in moments of acute stress if you have a foundation of formal practice.
Officer Lindsey Fernandez, a twenty-two-year-old rookie, illustrated the point perfectly. When she first started on the job, she had experienced considerable anxiety, especially because she had been assigned to patrol the neighborhood where she grew up, which at times entailed arresting people with whom she’d gone to high school. She had recently started meditating and claimed it had made a big difference. “I’m five foot two. I’m about 110 pounds. I’m a tiny officer. So when I show up to scenes, it’s essential that I’m calm, my mind is in the right place, and I’m able to talk to people.” She said meditation had made her less scattered and better able to de-escalate situations. “For me, it’s a big thing, especially when I’m first on the scene, being a female.”
For these officers, keeping a level head was especially important at a time when tensions between police and the community were running high all over America.
Officer Denison Dawson, a jacked but genial patrol cop, weighed in with a surprising take on this subject. “We see it on some of these videos of confrontations with police, how the officer’s interacting with the community. If he was calmer, if he was more caring, it goes a long way.” Meditation, said Dawson, could not only help officers reset but also provide them with more compassion. “If you can express that caring, and they can see that love coming from you, it’s totally a different experience.”
I was struck by the use of the word “love.” Playing devil’s advocate, I asked whether exhibiting love for people out on the street could “hinder your ability to be an effective police officer.”
“No, it actually increases,” he said. “I practice this daily in the community. There’s been times where people have cried with me. I’ve cried with them. I’ve been vulnerable. I’m able to be intimate and vulnerable with them, even though I have a uniform on.”
Amplifying the point, Jeff added that meditation helps us see that everyone is caught up in their own baggage. “There are no true enemies. They’re just people in screwed-up situations.”
For Officer Dawson, this wisdom was hard-earned. “My mom was a crack cocaine user. Never around. All my siblings have different fathers. My father raised me. He was very abusive.” As a younger man, Dawson had “a lot of anger management issues, a lot of pain.” But now, in part through meditation, he had learned how to harness the energy in constructive ways. “You can never completely wipe your past out, but I’ve learned how to control it and focus it and center it, to where it’s now my motivation and my drive, not a hindrance.”
“Wow,” said Jeff. “You should be teaching this meditation.”
Let’s not let Jeff off the hook. Here he is with a meditation that plays off a key cultural aspect of police work: skills training. Cops constantly run drills to maintain skills such as shooting and driving. Mental skills are no different. As Jeff explained to the officers, there are six mental muscle groups that we train in meditation. We’ve talked about these skills throughout this book, but here Jeff ties them all together.
My favorite description of the Buddha is “the unexcelled trainer of the animal in the human.” Meditation practices train the mind and they train the heart (sorry, Dan).
The core training—the one that sets the stage for all others—is mindfulness. Dan talks about mindfulness as the capacity to notice our stuff. I also like an older definition: “to remember.” Mindfulness is remembering that we can wake up and smell the coffee at any moment. We can snap out of our trances, and from that place of wider awareness we can choose both how we want to pay attention and what we want to pay attention to. In this sense, mindfulness isn’t neutral; we bring to it a preference for reinforcing healthy patterns and qualities. Our own ethic is built right into it.
Other trainings roll out from here. My teacher Shinzen Young emphasizes three: concentration, clarity, and equanimity. To these I would add: enjoyment and friendliness. Because we’re trying to help Dan thaw the imaginary block of ice in his rib cage.
The baseline levels of all of these qualities can increase over time; as they do, they spill out of our meditations and into our lives. I’ve already described mindfulness; here’s a quick recap of why each of the other five qualities is important, and what they feel or “taste” like when they’re present in our experience.
• Concentration. If you’ve ever felt focused and in the zone, then you know what it’s like to be temporarily concentrated. Concentration is the ability to choose and then to hold a direction, to get absorbed in some activity and to see it through. Not only are we more effective when we are concentrated, but there is good science showing that a concentrated mind is a happy mind. Concentration feels like you are merging with the action. It can be very pleasurable, with a feeling of internal stillness and quiet. There can also be a slight—or strong—sense of buffering from the external world.
• Clarity. This is the ability to discern and tease apart the details of our actual experience. It balances the dullness that can sometimes happen with concentration, and has other benefits as well, from boosting the vividness of life to giving us better information about our thoughts, our emotions, and our particular patterns of bias and activation. Clarity is clean and bracing, with an aha moment’s subtle electric snap. It’s the satisfaction of seeing an old thing in a new way, or of finding the right focus with your camera so the image is suddenly bright and crisp. It is recognizing what is true in our experience, and for this reason clarity tastes like sanity.
• Equanimity. The learned capacity to be smooth with our experience, to not push and pull on sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts, and sensations. Equanimity feels like letting go, like openness, like the world is falling through you. It is the weird and paradoxical skill of getting out of your own way. If you’ve ever had the experience of being braced against some uncomfortable feeling or sensation, and then suddenly accepting or relaxing into your discomfort, then you’ve been temporarily equanimous. Usually when this happens our discomfort diminishes, and some or all of the energy bound up in our resistance gets liberated, to be reapplied in whatever direction we choose (service, creativity, medieval jousting). Equanimity is a peerless life skill that has the potential to turn us all into frictionless ninjas.
If our first three skills help cultivate a steady and balanced mind, then our next two deliberately skew to the positive. Friendliness and enjoyment are part of the attitude we bring to meditation.
• Friendliness. The compassionate part of us that decides to treat all visitors—all thoughts, feelings, sounds, and sensations—with care and good-naturedness. Friendliness is primarily an intention. It doesn’t require some big emotion, and in fact the feel of it will be a bit different for everyone. For myself, it feels like affectionate amusement, like smiling on the inside. Friendliness acts as an insurance policy against subtle inner antagonisms.
• Enjoyment. Another intention, this time to be open to the hedonic dimension of experience. If friendliness is smiling, then enjoyment is deliberately enjoying the feeling of smiling. Although optional, it does make meditation more pleasurable. The key skill here is balancing enjoyment with equanimity, finding pleasure in experience without subtle gripping or dependency.
In this meditation, we’ll let the mindfulness be implicit and make these five other skills explicit. I’ll try to point out each of their “tastes” in situ, as it were. I can’t say enough how important this is. The single greatest accelerator in a meditation practice is noticing the “reward flavor” of each of the attentional qualities you are training. So noticing the vaguely enjoyable feeling of being concentrated allows you to get even more concentrated, which in turn increases that enjoyment, and so on. Ditto with clarity and equanimity and friendliness. All of these qualities mutually support and reinforce one another, and all of them feel like something when they are present.
TRAINING THE MIND
10 to 20 minutes
We start with our familiar breath meditation here, the one we’ve used as the standard through this book. If not the breath, then choose something else you find relatively easy to concentrate on—maybe some part of the body, or sounds. Don’t worry if you suck at concentrating. Sometimes I do too. You’re simply exploring what it might be like to suck marginally less. It’s a training exercise. So take a few minutes to get as focused as you can get on your chosen sensation, in a light and good-natured way. We’re looking for a balance of concentration and easygoingness. The first skill of concentration is the directedness, the ability to choose what you want to pay attention to. Explore what this is like: to center your attention on a chosen object, and then to re-center it every time your mind wanders. Explore this.
Sustained concentration builds quickly in some people, and more slowly in others. At a certain point, the mind settles and you get into the zone, or at least more of a zone. It’s this feeling of being more in the zone—of being “into it”—that I want you to try to notice. Sometimes it just feels like the external world has faded a bit and the breath or other sensation is more vivid and present and full. Other times it feels like there is more quiet inside, more stillness, that it is a tiny bit easier for your attention to stay where you want it. Try to stay relaxed as you proceed. You aren’t trying to drill into the sensation, you’re just trying to hold your mind lightly in a particular direction. How into it can you get? Can you find something enjoyable in the object of your focus?
Although sustained concentration is helpful, concentration also happens in little pulses—pulses of paying attention to something deeply for a moment or two. You can notice that if more sustained concentration is less available. The instruction is to meditate and be curious about both the experience of directing your attention and any feelings of absorption or into-it-ness that may emerge. No rush, nowhere to get to other than easily being with your chosen sensation.
Sometimes the stabilization of attention leads to dullness or a loss of vividness. There is less novelty, so we may find ourselves moving toward sleep. We need to actively train ourselves to stay clear once attention settles, thus clarity is our next skill. Clarity is the ability to discern the details of our experience. Curiosity is king here. If you’re working with the breath, see if you can get very still and steady and notice the subtlest part of it. Can you feel the breath move through your body, through your nose and chest and into the soft rise of the belly? Same goes for sounds—for anything. How fine-grained can you make your sensing?
Any kind of noticing is clarity. A couple of things can help. One: stillness. The stiller you are, the clearer the signal. Two: an interest in how sensations move and change from moment to moment. Can you notice things with that level of detail? As usual, if you become aware of other stuff—distractions, thoughts, tensions—see if you can let all that recede into the background.
This is part of our next skill: equanimity. Equanimity is lack of interference and uptightness. It’s the delicate art of letting everything be what it is, even as you express a light preference via the direction of your focus. Let go of judgments. Let go of any bracing or rigidity. Let go of all the ways you may be subtly trying to control the experience. Let the sensations and sounds come to you, expressing themselves and moving on. What does it feel like to be receptive in this way? Some people say it feels like lightness, like openness, like maturity. What does equanimity feel like for you? The more you notice the taste of equanimity, the deeper it becomes—in practice, and in life. Equanimity is the profound art of accepting the moment.
Our last skills are friendliness and enjoyment. Sometimes our meditations can have a stern or serious quality. Notice if that is there and see if you can lighten up a bit. Can you have a slight sense of humor about the experience of breathing or feeling or listening? Where do you feel this subtle friendliness? A trace of a smile at the lips can help. And what about enjoyment—can you explore this possibility? Noticing the softest part of a sensation, letting it caress you. Finding something enjoyable in the way you sit.
Nothing else to do. Just breathing, just listening. Enjoying your own company.
Moment by moment, recommit to the breath. Feel it as fully as you can. You are building up your mental muscles in an atmosphere of simplicity and easygoingness. Training how you want to exist.
When you’re almost done, keep your eyes closed and take a few minutes to coast and do nothing. Rest. Then open your eyes.
CHEAT SHEET
1. Choose an anchor for your attention—breath, belly, bum, hands—something on which you already know you can get concentrated. Let yourself get settled and focused. This will be your main meditation object throughout the sit.
2. After a few minutes, notice any subtle feelings of absorption, of being “into” the breath or sounds. How into it can you get? This into it feeling is the taste of concentration. If your sustained concentration is weak, you can still notice momentary pulses of being more focused.
3. Get curious about the details of what you’re concentrating on. Get as still and stable as you can, and try to notice the edges, the center, the individual pixels of the sensation and the way it changes. This pop-out discernment is the taste of clarity.
4. Try to be easygoing about distractions, letting them play out in the background. How open can you be? Smooth, no friction, letting all sensations be there without resistance. This is the taste of equanimity.
5. Finally, see if you can find something enjoyable and even slightly amusing about this whole exercise, smile tugging at your lips. Good-natured about everything, including the breath. These are the tastes of friendliness and enjoyment.
6. When you’re ready, let all that go and take a minute or two to just drift. Then open your eyes.
By the time we wrapped up our shoot with the officers in Tempe, all of them seemed to be on board with meditation—even Raj. He said presenting the practice as a training made sense, because “cops are very good at taking information and retaining information, and putting it in a tool bag.” We had watched him go from worrying that meditation might dangerously shave down his edge to vowing that he was going to give it a shot.