Walking outside after a rage-filled thunderstorm, I felt the air shift. Swaths of heat and humidity alternated with bands of cooling and comfortable air, the temperature changing in tumultuous five-degree increments. It was unsettling weather, but good for rainbows and spectacular cloud formations. I was reminded that we are a few weeks away from the big seasonal upheaval from summer to fall, and I took a deep breath to bring the mind into a more thoughtful space. It reminded me of the end of 2019, when I first started meditating. It all felt so foreign and rocky then, and my first few spurts of meditation – only a few minutes at a time – felt awkward and stunted, like I might not be on the right path, like I was doing it all wrong. Yet instead of giving up, I pushed through, leaning into the discomfort, opening up to the pain.
Construction on the interior had begun in those final months of 2019, in the lead-up to the winter of a year we had no idea would turn so darkly treacherous. The renovation within would come just in time, as if the universe knew I’d never make it through without some sense of peace and calm, some inner sanctuary when the rest of the world, even in my own home, fell to pieces and crashed around me. When winter exploded in ice and wind, snow and darkness, I would take up the lotus position in the middle of a room lit only by a candle, swirled by a stick of palo santo incense, and filled only with the distant hum of a heater or the muffled rush of wind outside the window.
Silence and stillness in the midst of so much turmoil.
Here I found the breath.
Here I found the way to breathe again.
As far from the sunny season of summer as I was from a place of safety and security, I found the inner-sanctum of serenity just in time, and I clung to it desperately. Grasping that lifeline like the savior it would prove to be, I stumbled minute by minute into the way to peace. At first I took it in five minute increments. It was all I could manage. It was also, gratefully, enough. Pushing through the first few weeks of this, I gradually increased the minute by the week – six minutes a day, then seven minutes a day, then eight. The weeks passed, the worst of winter went by, and when spring finally arrived again, I was up to twenty minutes a day.
Sometimes it went by quickly: I’d lower myself into the lotus position, start breathing and counting, and soon the time was up. Other times moved slowly by, each second elongating into something greater, in ways both good and trying. Not every day did I find tranquility and peace in the meditation, but every day I tried.
My days of wishing for perfection had been replaced by a wish for whatever was good-enough. The perfect was perennially elusive, unattainable, impossible. A lovely wish, a lovely goal, a lovely vision to which we might strive, but best kept out of the realm of the expected or even simply the realm of the possible.
Ease of mind, ease of breath – there it is again, the reminder to breathe, not just to breathe in, but to breathe out. It’s possibly the most important part of breathing, and the one we neglect the most, so eager are we for new breath, new air, new life. We forget the necessity of releasing the breath that has come before, releasing the past – the immediate and long-distant past. When I tune into that, everything becomes a little easier, a little lighter, and I feel the renovating power of meditation again.
