Until a few years ago, I correlated spirituality with the Catholicism I was born into. I received Communion, got on my knees, leaned my forearms on the back of the pew in front of me, hands folded, eyes closed, head bowed. I asked God to help the people in my life. I asked God to help me feel more comfortable. I asked God for a new videogame. When my brother, my sister, and I stayed over at my grandparents’ house, my grandmother would come upstairs after we were in bed and listen to us recite the “Hail Mary” and “Our Father” before we drifted off to sleep. My mother called my maternal grandfather The Pope because he had missed mass only a handful of times.
That quasi-spiritual life changed one evening during CCD class when I was 12 years old. The teacher lectured from her chair about how Noah’s Ark had been found on a mountaintop in Turkey. With the room quiet, she passed around a magazine that included photos of the apparent discovery. Discussion typically focused on stories from the Bible. That all seemed reasonable enough. But I had quite a few questions about how this Ark unexpectedly appeared on a mountaintop.
I liked stories and, if anything, Bible stories were my connection to the church. But when I examined the grainy photos of a ship on the pages of that magazine, I questioned Catholicism and whatever faith I had. And when I was 16 years old, my maternal grandmother died. I launched into a search for truth in other places. I was angry and confused. I armed myself with books about atheism and existentialism and secularism.
It would be two decades until I grasped the notion that spirituality was different from those wooden pews of my childhood. At 33 years old, I started on a practice of mindfulness, meditation, and qigong. Qigong, according to the National Qigong Association, “can be described as a mind-body-spirit practice that improves one’s mental and physical health by integrating posture, movement, breathing technique, self-massage, sound, and focused intent.” Think of it as tai chi meets yoga meets meditation. I found a teacher. Although it was uncomfortable at first, I saw that it worked for him. And it began working for me. I was becoming more relaxed, focused, present.
In his book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, Sam Harris—neuroscientist, philosopher, podcaster, and author—traces his decades long journey to embrace “a certain form of spirituality,” which he believes “is integral to understanding the nature of our minds.” In the first chapter, Harris writes that “Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.” From adolescence to early adulthood, I couldn’t understand why happiness seemed so elusive. It drove me to chase various forms of instant gratification: professional achievement, work, money, sex, power, authority, knowledge.
After months of elementary practice of mindfulness, meditation, and qigong, I began to internalize the notion that, as Harris writes, “every moment of the day—indeed, every moment throughout one’s life—offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.” I had a choice in how I responded to life. This concept first exploded into my consciousness when I discovered David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, This is Water. Wallace states that “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” It took practice to rearrange my default setting of extreme self-centeredness—of just reacting impulsively to life.
For example, I had the choice to view traffic as either an opportunity to sit back and call my brother or to get angry and punch the steering wheel. I had the choice in the grocery store checkout line while waiting behind a mother and her three children with 300 dollars of groceries, to begrudge having chosen the wrong line, or to consider the mother’s plight of raising these children—the cost and time and dedication. I had the choice of how to think. Harris writes, “our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head.” To ground myself—to be more comfortable in my own skin and get closer to living in the present—I need to be as aware of my own thinking as life unfolds around me: “…if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.”
My default mode of thinking leads me to the past or the future. I’m not alone. “One study found,” Harris writes, “that when asked whether their mind was wandering—that is, whether they were thinking about something unrelated to their current experience—subjects reported being lost in thought 46.9 percent of the time…this study found that people are consistently less happy when their minds are wandering, even when the contents of their thoughts are pleasant.” I had spent so much of my energy trying to discover happiness; meanwhile, it was there right in front of me.
But how does one stay present? Wallace says, “it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. This is where meditation comes in.” Harris writes that “Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.” The struggle is never fully mastered, but we search for progress, not perfection.
For me to have spiritual growth, I must practice some form of meditation. The more I practice, the more I reap the benefits in day-to-day life. Encountering moments when I am “able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one’s spiritual journey.” The process begins with baby steps. Dan Millman, in his book Everyday Enlightenment, suggests that a one-minute meditation, several times per day, can create “profound results.” Millman writes: “At any point in your day, especially when things get frantic or stressed, stop whatever you are doing, take a deep break, and practice one minute of deeply felt meditation or prayer.” Prayer doesn’t have to be anything more than “an ardent request for guidance or simply a heartfelt remembrance of the Spirit.”
When prayer seems too abstract to me, I just take a few deliberate deep breaths. “This is a moment,” Millman writes, “of remembering, of perspective, of pure feeling, that washes through the mind the way a fresh breeze sweeps leaves off the sidewalk. You will feel an almost immediate change of state.” This quick pause during the day not only offers relief from anxiety (suffering); it also stops the further compounding of discomfort that so easily happens during day-to-day life. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes in the opening of his book Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, “Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don’t have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy.”
Harris writes that “when we breathe in and out, we stop thinking, because saying ‘In’ and ‘Out’ is not thinking—‘In’ and ‘Out’ are only words to help us concentrate on our breathing.” This simple technique opens the door to the beginning practices of a more formal meditation.
Meditation goes against my default setting of waking up in the morning with my mind grinding through responsibilities and regrets and distractions. But by taking some small actions, the racing slows, and I find some relief. I don’t have to live in my head in a time that no longer exists or hasn’t arrived yet—in some existential wilderness of suffering.
As Harris writes at the end of his book, “Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our moral schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound.” Meaning is here. Now. And if I can’t enjoy the here and now, then I’m not even living.
—
This post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: Shutterstock