Meditating through Lockdown

Right now I am typing as a Melbourne winter is closing in. Raindrops hang from the leaves outside my window. I cannot imagine a moment when the sun will shine again. The sound of the 7 am bus roars past outside - the whoosh of tires on a wet road. I am happy within this moment of tranquillity.

One of the [top five regrets of the dying](theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying)(number five to be exact) is I wish I let myself be happier. Baked within it is the proposition that people on their deathbed realise it is not something outside blocking personal happiness - but something within. You have control over what is within and, so, happiness is an act of personal grace away. You must let yourself become that way. Of course, it’s not as easy as all that.

I can feel this when I am meditating or afterwards. I am naturally a very anxious and socially difficult person. I find friends quickly turned enemies - their secret agenda revealed, the gripe ferments into a grudge. It once took a lot of emotional rehab to get to a state where I’m ok again. Yet with meditation I can locate the hard packed emotional space, the locus of tension. I focus on it and bit-by-bit it begins to loosen then dissolve. Perhaps it is the same as the limescale that builds up on pipes - or calcification on bones - the pressures and stresses of one’s life live inside somewhere. They make their presence known. I feel this area swept clean after a two hour meditation session. I feel lighter. A space has opened up.

History #

I have been meditating for years but the COVID outbreak has given me the ability to connect with the practice as never before. Recently I became a project manager at a software startup in the international health space. From that moment my life became more stressful. I can be found today trying to coordinate multiple projects, figuring out which developers have made the transition to remote work successfully, hire, fire - all within the context of concertinaing deliverables.

Yet beyond this I’m doing well under COVID. There is a new sense of freedom: I can dress how I want, I can work with my dog sleeping by my side, I can slow cook. However, none of this (with the exception of the dog) is what has brought me a state of inner relaxation while things bubble and boil outside. It’s a steady meditation routine combined with a stoic philosophy has meant that I am far more relaxed than most others cooped up.

On Stoicism #

A stoic philosophy is very powerful and has recently seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to the writings of philosopher William B. Irvine. Perhaps the most useful tool of the kit is when things are becoming very stressful - you can take a step back and look at the world like a piece of absurdist theatre. Another option offered by stoicism is to consider high points of stress in your life as a test. Not only does this throw your ego into the mix - a clever tactic of pitting one enemy (ego) against another (never-ending frustrations of everyday life) - but it grants an external perspective for a moment. For that moment there is a psychic shift from being totally embroiled inside the drama - to considering it coolly from the outside - an audience member to your own life.

Unfortunately it’s not very zen. The long game of overcoming the ego is swapped for the win-right-now of feeding it but then again you gotta take your victories when you can find them.

But meditation… #

While stoicism offers a range of techniques you can apply to situations from the moment you use them, meditation is a bit longer term. As of today I have meditated for 63 days. How do I feel? Relatively normal. I can still feel the swirling of anxieties within my gut, the tension of what I expect from myself on this day (this right here is part of a 1000 word a day routine). Yet again there is space after meditation where there was none before.

More history #

Before meditating, for a long while I was benign. An inauthentic persona. I had a big group of friends with whom I would crack jokes and drink. Life in my twenties was very social. I was wary of saying anything controversial lest I upset someone. Yet inside was a pressure-cooker of emotion. I was able to keep those feelings at bay for a good decade throughout my twenties with willpower during the day and booze at night. I was an unstable system kept in check with this drink and inoffensiveness. This stood in stark contrast to my genuine personal nature - ambitious, dedicated, militantly individualist and demanding to be heard. Those harder edges were sanded back at great a cost to my satisfaction with life. Jesus Christ if you’re gonna live life you may as well be yourself.

It took a major breakup for it all come undone. When it happened, I was surrounded by people I realised never really knew me. What’s more, I did not have the vocabulary to describe how I was feeling. I drank more which made things worse. I could not reach out because I had never been vulnerable - I had no practice and did not know how to do it. I grew resentful of them for not being responsive when I was hurting. But they never really knew who I was.

I also had a collective sense regarding my group of friends - an implicit contract. I know now that this was lazy thinking. The deal in my head was I would be there and present, conform to all social obligations on the condition that if I needed them they would be there for me. This seems reasonable enough but if you consider the personal cost of social obligation for me as an introvert and as an individual - pretending to be someone else, moderating myself to be more palatable - it was a rough deal for me. Especially when the payoff never really arrived - the breakup happened, I was sad but except a few, my friends never really gathered around me - my pain was my own - their lives went on.

The transformation #

Something strange has happened. The sense of a group with it’s collective expectations and obligations has dissolved and I struggle to believe that it ever really existed. I was left standing alone with nothing. On top of a breakup I was left alone, my social world that seemed rock solid had dissolved in front of my eyes. My girlfriend quickly hooked up with someone else in the group and nobody really talked about it. It did not fit the narrative

Going Authentic #

I began reading Nietzsche long before that breakup. I realise now that that was an inner me looking for help outside the yearning to break free. I was living in a party house in inner city Sydney. It was a converted optometrist. My bedroom was once an office so the door had a window that looked right onto the living room.

As with any party house it was dominated by an atmosphere of extreme and aggressive permissiveness. The idea that someone would stop doing something for the general wellbeing was anathema. I’m trying not to be bitter here. Judging by how regularly “this is not a party house” comes up in advertisements for housemates many people out there have been through the same experience. What’s supposed to be freedom is oppression of a different kind.

Two of my housemates were in a successful band which meant bands from interstate stayed with us. They would drink all day and night and leave the house in a shambles. Nobody would clean it. I would drink to deal with a homelife that was gross and not conducive to the thinking i wanted to do. I had nobody to blame but myself but I became full of resentment.

On becoming #

I went on an exchange in San Francisco. I studied Nietzsche. It inspired me deeply because it explained everything that I had been struggling to articulate. Nietzsche was romantic and subversive - the herd animals unable to truly feel, the individual must overcome their situation and become his heroic self. All that repression that lived inside me now had a credo.

I was probably a pretty difficult person to be around once I had returned to Sydney equipped with my photocopied ideas. I have been told as much. I raged with contempt, still drunken, slurring my scorn at the whole rancid collection of fake friends with their pathetic bands. I had gone international. My world was bigger than this Shitburg. People around me were shocked. In retrospect I could have handled things better. My friends probably were owed an explanation. I could have made a slow and quiet exit. But thanks to the bombast of Nietzsche - I now had permission to be a jerk - of course I took things too far.

I look back now and I realise the real motive was to destroy what I could not control - that I was dissatisfied with my whole sham life. That I had been inoffensive for long enough and now it was time to be offensive. By pushing people away I could see who returned. It was misguided and arrogant. It was nobody’s fault but mine. That life goes on for everybody else during a personal crisis is a shocking revelation - it shows our true diminutive shape in the face of the chaos.

Starting to meditate #

I moved out with mates a little distance away from the centre of things. I began to do things on my own terms. A mate and I made an extravagantly planned motorcycle trip to Eastern Europe and Iran. I also did a meditation class.

It was actually before this - while I was in the party house - that I had first tried meditation. I got out Paul Wilson’s The Quiet from the library. I can still remember coming to the the park to give meditation a shot (the party house could not be trusted to offer 10 uninterrupted minutes). I sat cross legged and shut my eyes to expect tranquillity - darkness silence. In the vacuum appeared was a raging tumultuous mind. Inside my head was not the promised quiet but Central station at peak hour, a thousand youtube videos playing at once. It was a glance inside the chaotic, swirling maelstrom. Did I look like a weirdo? What if someone I knew walked past? What if a ball hit me in the head as I sat there unguarded? What I saw inside frightened me. The idea that this could somewhat be tamed was simply impossible.

That was enough to shut that door and live in a further state of unquestioning passivity until the crisis of the breakup. It was then I tried a 10 week meditation course at the Newtown Buddhist Center. My approach to this course like any other I had leading up to this point - through gritted teeth I was determined to be the best. I can remember coming in having a herbal tea looking around the room at those sitting cross-legged - all searchers and very much in a state of inner disquiet. We went round the room to introduce ourselves. One poor girl burst in tears because she had just gone through a breakup and things were still so raw. One guy, a deejay, smoked too much weed and could not get to sleep at night because the “music would not stop”. The instructor - a kindly man - listened patiently. I thought how his expression seemed a little confected.

I looked at the rest of the group in contempt. These people were a mess. I could pitch some intelligent sounding questions “Was meditation the means or the end?” and would be established as the smart guy.

After a brief introduction we gathered in a circle to start our first guided meditation. Things began gently enough. The meditation room itself was what you would expect - polished wood floor incense and candles. Yet it backed onto an alley in inner-city Sydney. Halfway through the first guided mediation someone started ranting in the alley. The instructor patiently said “this will happen from time to time”.

The first meditation was somewhat of an epiphany. Finally this room provided the protection I needed to focus on what was happening inside. There was quiet to be found here. It came from the instructor guiding us through the meditation. Inside my mind was not the rabid chaos I had experienced in the park. The tugging in different directions was gone - I was here to do one thing and I was doing it. This was a safe place and I was not exposed. There was a time limit. I did not have to make any decisions so worries about the making the wrong decision was not in my mind. This is the power of guided meditation.

After the class I tried to foster a regular meditation practice. I managed something regular but there was the constant backdrop of frustration. I realise now that the problem was I had defined put so much cache in willpower that I had tried to defeat my problems with meditating by trying harder. This is a regular issue of those in the west that we are so goal oriented that we’re looking for inner peace as an end rather than a means. If I had actually listened to that instructor’s answer rather when I had asked him, rather than tried to just sound smart, I would have learned something.

Another epiphany was that I needed help. Guided meditation was always very different from doing it on my own because there was nothing competing for my attention. At home my mind was always on the next task, or, if I was doing it just before bed, I would be too tired.

Eventually I tried Sam Harris’ meditation app and the rest of it is history. It was the easiest way to recreate guided meditation at home. Someone else is in control. It takes as long as it takes.

Meditation and Lockdown #

The purpose of writing all this out in such detail is to explain my journey in meditation and how it has built my mental resilience from brittle to hardy. It’s not a silver bullet and it takes time. Using it in conjunction with something like a regular exercise routine and the Stoic philosophy works wonders. The most empowering aspect is a growing confidence that I can handle upsets to my plans without melting down. This is a deep shift that means that I can begin to be bold and take risks without the fear of internal collapse, resentment, rage that used to haunt decisions I had made.

It’s confidence is newfound and tentative. I’m sure that it will be buffeted by life’s trials but it is beginning to be self-perpetuating. By that I mean confidence means you take risks and survive them meaning more confidence. It feeds back.

All this has mean that a challenge to many people’s mental health like prolonged lockdown I have actually managed relatively easily - yet getting to this state took years and searching. Finally, though, now I feel like I have ownership of my life, how I think and how I feel. Time to work on those neurosis.