How To Establish A Meditation Practice?

We continue to reflect on the audiobook, Coming Closer to Ourselves: Making everything the path of awakening” by Ani Pema Chodron. If you missed the first post, you can catch up here.

❤️‍🩹 Content Warning: This article contains mentions of suicide and depression. If these topics are triggering to you, I recommend you stop reading here and choose something else to read.

Since I was 13 years old, I’ve had multiple suicide attempts. In 2016, I made my last attempt.

It was a monsoon evening when night fell earlier than usual.  I lived behind a bustling main road in the south of Bangalore.  From my house, I could hear the throng of people on the road, milling about at various street side food stalls savouring tasty vada pavs, bajjis, chaat, pav bhaji and other delicacies. that were best eaten only on the roadside and not in the comfort of ones houses.

I had been feeling low for the past few weeks. It was hard to get through every moment, leave alone a day navigating work and life. It was a planet-sized task to go to work every weekday.  After sleeping fitfully for more than 12 hours, it took me a couple of hours to drag myself out of bed. Another hour to take a bath and get dressed and it would be early noon by the time I was getting to work. I was acutely aware of what millions of people in the world do effortlessly, get up, brush their teeth, take a bath, go to work (besides handling life tasks, family responsibilities, healthy habit routines and what not). And I could not muster enough energy to get out of bed.

At work, I would stare at an email for hours together while trying to figure out how was I going to get through my workday when it was beyond my capacity to respond to a single email not to menton the 3 projects that I had taken on(why, but why!) with deadlines looming and tasks undone. My appetite had vanished, I wasn’t able to eat and the very sight of food was repulsive. My sleep routine (or the lack fo it) had also shaken up. I would sleep for 14 hours and still wouldn’t feel refreshed on waking up. I was low, tired and numb all the time. I was living under a heavy dark fog and the outside world was a veil of shadows.

This wasn’t an unusual state for me, as I had spent better part of my life since I was a teenager living under this fog. On this particular evening, the weight of all those years of feeling numb and dead came crushing on me. I lost my bearings and I have no memory of what happened next. Everything seemed too much to handle, and these low periods were coming on frequently and were staying on longer. I could no longer go on, could not longer take a breath. The night, the sounds, the air was oppressive and suffocating me, and I decided to take the way out that seemed always readily available to me. One that I had fantasized for a million times since I was 13.

When I came to my senses, I opened my eyes and found myself at the kitchen sink with a knife in  my right hand poised at my left wrist right at the point where I had the symbol Om tattoed. The sight of Om, brought me back to my present moment and I was horrified at how I got there. I had no awareness of what had transpired between feeling low and standing at the kitchen sink. This loss of awareness shocked me and I set aside the knife on the counter and walked back to my bedroom. There on one side of the bed lay around 10 books and the one on the top was a book called “The Art of Communicating” by Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Zen Monk.

I picked the book and turned the pages but was unable to focus and could not read a word or make sense of what was written. But the book reminded me of meditation and my first Vipassana retreat I had attended a year before. During the silent retreat, over 100 hours, I had practiced just sitting with myself even if a storm was raging inside of me and outside in the retreat center. I could barely bring my attention to breath or do a full Vipassana meditation, but I trained in just showing up for the sessions despite the protests of my body and a full blown revolt of my mind.

I set the book aside and sat cross legged on my bed and took the meditation posture - straight back and an open heart (as Pema likes to call it), and drew my attention to my breath. I could not find my breath and what I found instead was an onslaught of  thoughts, feelings and sensations that were alternating with feeling numb and zoning out. I felt like a drifting logwood caught up in the ocean in a mighty cyclone and being thrown up and down with no mercy.  I sat and watched the storm inside, I watched how challenging it was for me inside and how lost I was in the storm. I sat with all this for some time, when a tiny voice in my head was whispering, “You can’t even keep your attention on your breath, you better open your eyes and get up. This will not work for you.” I stayed because I did not know who would be there for me if I did not cultivate the courage to stay with myself right then.

When I finally opened my eyes, I noticed that the physical urge to kill myself was gone. I was feeling a lot more calmer and clearer on what I needed to do. I came to the realisation that I needed emergency help, in the present moment and not in the distant future when I could pull myself together enough to go consult a psychiatrist or find a therapist. I took a deep breath, opened Google and searched for “24 hours suicide helpline in India.”

This is why I meditate. 

A key theme in Pema’s audiobook and many of her books is that “Everything we encounter in our lives, both the outward and inward manifestations is our path to enlightenment. In our practice, there is opening and lots of closing. We think that as our meditation practice grows, we will stop closing down, but it doesn’t and this is also included in the path to awaken.”

In this essay, based on Pema’s audiobook, we will explore three key questions.

1. What is the purpose of a meditation practice?

2. What are our motivations to practice?

3. What attitude is helpful in establishing a meditation practice?

What is the purpose of a meditation practice?

A glance at the Insight Timer app reveals countless meditation pracitces. Here, I clarify what I mean by meditation in the context of this newsletter and essay.  Meditation is a practice aligned to one of the Buddhist traditions where we dive into our habitual patterns, tendencies and uncover our real issues that keep us stuck in a cycle of ignorance and escalating suffering.

This means a fundamental shift in how we we approach the world, events, outer lives and inner lives. It is training to see things as just they are and to approach every single thing in our life as our path of awakening. It is about learning to stay no matter what is going on. “Stay, stay, stay” with whatever is coming up and whatever we encounter.

Meditation is not an escape from reality. It is not a place where we go to “feel calm” when we are in pain or turmoil. It is a practice of cultivating deep honesty and intimacy with ourselves so that we can see clearly with kindness, compassion and wisdom what is actually going on within ourselves.

What are our motivations to practice?

Understanding our motivation for meditation is crucial.  If we seek  to feel “calmer” or “peaceful” after meditation, practices following Buddha’s teachings may not provide that, thought these states may arise through intense training as a byproduct of concentration and insight. The teachings are progressively about working with challenging emotions and letting go of any “states” that we get attached to.  The ultimate goal of a meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition is to progressively wake us up.

Some times during a sitting, all the challenging emotions that I have not given myself the space to feel during the day. They would hit me with full force, and I’d find myself sobbing during sitting, even if I began without a heavy heart.  As the session progressed, the sobbing would subside, and my mind would get hooked onto something else. Things keep changing and nothing is permanent. This is one of the experiential realisations that we come to when we sit with ourselves, long enough.

Expecting a specific state of mind from meditation can be an obstacle to establishing a regular meditation habit. I had to examine this expectation closely when I struggled to maintain a consistent meditation practice, despite having life-changing and life-saving experiences with it.

What attitude is helpful in establishing a meditation practice?

Pema emphasizes noticing the inner voice that resides in our heads. She urges  to become aware of this voice when we meditate. For most of us, this inner voice is critical, judgemental, stern, harsh and unyielding.

This is one of the first things we could start to pay attention to when we begin our sitting practice. What is the quality of my inner voice? What is the tone? What words do I use to speak to myself? How does it make me feel when I speak to myself like that?

I became aware of my inner voice during my first silent Vipassana retreat. When all else was quiet and when the sources of external distraction were all taken away, this voice unleashed its full force onto me. I became aware that I had this inner voice which was unyielding, firm, critical, unhappy, dissatisfied, harsh - the tone, voice and language that I had picked up during my time on this planet thus far.

When I became aware of it, my longing for a kind and compassionate voice started growing and I was convinced that this voice would need come from outside of me. But the more I learned to stay with my inner voice, the way it presented itself and working with acceptance, I have been able to find a small opening in which I am trying to cultivate a warm, gentle, open tone and attitude towards myself.

How do I cultivate a meditation practice for myself?

In the past few years, there has been a lot of emphasis (going by the popularity of books and Youtube channels that have habits and routines as themes) on habits. A habit framework involves setting up cue, routine and reward (variations of it) to create, embed and sustain a habit or to break a habit. In the case of meditation, a typical habit formation statement would be “ will meditate for 15 mins as soon as I get out of bed and I will reward myself with x when I do my habit”.

Pema urges us to cultivate maitri, which is developing unconditional friendship with ourselves. This is something we cannot just cultivate in the meditation practice, but also in how we approach cultivating the habit itself, and in other aspects of our lives. We’ll explore maitri in more detail in the next edition.

Reflect, Reflect, Reflect

Whether we are a beginner or an experienced practitioner, periodic reflection on our practice, attitudes, motivations and expectations is essential and helpful.  These aspects change over time and reflection would help us to understand what is alive in the moment and work with what is.

P.S. Thank you for subscribing and sticking with me. As a parting thought, I will finish this edition with a well known Zen story. I’d love to hear about your meditation practice, and what has worked for you.

Crossing the muddy road

Two monks were traveling down a path during heavy rain, which was making the road muddy. As they turned a corner, they encountered a young girl in a silk kimono and sash. She could not cross the intersection in her attire.

One of the monks offered to carry her across the muddy road. The girl agreed, and he lifted her in his arms, helping her cross and set her down. The other monk was troubled, for their monastic vows prohibited them from from coming near women.

As they continued walking, the agitated monk asked, “You broke your vowl we’re not supposed to be near women or touch them. Why did you carry her?”

The monk who carried the girl replied, “I left her at the intersection. Why are you still carrying her?”

I’d love to hear from you, so do reply to this post or leave a comment!