Category Archives: Mindfulness

On certain days, when no matter how much effort you put into remaining calm and distant from the maelstrom of madness that is survival you still run up against walls of chaos and obstacles of derision, the only thing to do is give in to the defeat, and succumb to the melancholy. The very act of surrender can sometimes be the surprising solution to a problem that gnaws at you without ever fully revealing itself. 

In the light of a candle, an absolute mystery and miracle when you think about it, there is a secret that is only hinted at, only ever partly revealed. You cannot completely predict which way the flame will bend, where the edge of light will flicker and fade. It wavers and wanders, defying order and orders, dimming or glowing as only it sees fit. Sometimes the candle’s flame stays perfectly still. Sometimes, even in the stillest and most motionless room, the candle’s flame flickers and bounces. 

Only the candle knows why.

Back when we first met, Andy told me about a method of meditation that used a candle. You would sit in a quiet room before a candle, then focus on the candlelight for a moment before closing your eyes and envisioning the candle in your mind. It was a manner of focusing on one item and thus clearing out the rest of your mind to allow the space and silence for meditation to unfurl. We shared the method with my Mom, who seemed to have a better handle on meditating when using something concrete like that. 

Meditation is different for everyone, and I believe can be beneficial for everyone as well. There is no right or wrong to do it – and sometimes simply making the effort, and making the place for it in your consciousness, is enough. 

Amid the delights and distractions of summer, my daily meditation practice has taken a bit of a hiatus. In its place has been a daily dip in the pool, whenever the weather has afforded, and sometimes even when it hasn’t, because this summer has been a dud as far as sunny days go. As soon as the work day is done, I will wade into the pool, and float, making a few slow and gentle laps – back and forth – letting the mind drain of its worries from work, letting the tension leech out into the water and leaving it there when I finally emerge and dry off. Meditation comes in many forms and manners, and for summer this little ritual was enough to see me through, but I realize it’s not quite enough, and the worry and tension of life was slowly building and accumulating. And so the other day I went back to my traditional method of meditating, and already my mind feels a little clearer and less cluttered. 

Lighting a stick of Palo Santo incense and picking up where I left off, I cradled the egg-like form of rose quartz in my palms and returned to the slow breathing – a long, slow intake of air through a slightly-constricted windpipe to aid in the drawn-out breath, and letting it out slowly and deliberately in the same way. It took a while to find the comfort again, but soon – sooner than my first awkward days of meditating – it all came back in calm and tranquil fashion. 

Entering the final weeks of summer comes with its own worries and consternation, and this is the ideal time to get back into meditation. It’s seen me through difficult falls and winters, and as the tensions of the world build for all of us, this is the best way to tune out those things over which I have no control or say. These moments of meditation clear out the nagging thoughts that the mind will produce when taxed and burdened with anxiety. It creates a safe space, empty and pristine and expansive, pushing away bothersome worst-case scenarios that might otherwise start to take root. This calm centeredness short-circuits the instant tripping of annoyance or anger, giving me pause when the first instinct might be to snap back or attack. Inner-peace sounds so hokey, but it really does beget outer-peace. 

I’m starting out with fifteen minutes a day, but that may quickly increase once I get back in the habit of things. It’s time.

In the pool on the first sunny Saturday we’ve had since forever, I continued the mindful mental state in which I found myself that morning. It was blessedly and unusually quiet with no neighbors, so I made the most of it and kept the music off as well. Birdsong was the only music I needed, and even the distant rumble of a lawnmower was more summer comfort than annoyance. I floated into the deep end and saw the hummingbird from earlier in the morning return. I could watch it from the water, where it must have sensed my inability to instantly embody a threat, as it allowed me to move closer.

I got a better look at its sleek design, and at one point it flew directly at my head, hovering in mid-air mere inches from my face before darting back to the collection of nectar at hand. It felt almost other-worldly in a magnificently spiritual way, like some spirit had come to say a friendly hello from an alternate universe. Watching it flit from bloom to bloom was a giddy reminder that summer was still with us, and there were still days that might be filled with sun and fun and hummingbird excitement.

Did the hummingbird arrive as a result of my mindful meditation, or did my meditation allow for the sort of comfort and ease that simply stirred my awareness? On this day, it all felt right, and all of it felt possible. 

As has become custom over the past few summers (and, worse, winters) we lost power a couple of days ago. Fortunately it was only for a few hours, but on sultry and humid summer nights the heat builds back quickly, particularly when you’re burning a bunch of candles. While Andy revved up ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil‘ on his HBO Max App, I ventured into the brightest room in the house – the attic – and quickly lit the space with all the candles I could find. 

There, in that quiet and in that space, I was reminded of being mindful at all times, and I took the pause in the usual noise and mad rush of evening to reconnect with the moment. When summer arrived last month in all its fanfare and excitement, attention shifted to outside garden work and pool jaunts, and my daily meditations went somewhat by the wayside. There were meditative moments to be had in the outdoors, and somehow the peace that imbues summer took the place of my more-formal meditations, but maybe I was missing them. Lately I’ve been returning to the practice, sitting quietly and doing deep breathing in the living room as I started a couple of years ago.

It’s always good to return to the basics, especially when the power is out. The universe reminds us what we need to do. We just need to stop and listen. 

Sitting in my usual afternoon position – lotus-style, eyes-closed, hands surrounding a crystal of rose quartz – I felt the pull of the sunny day just outside the window. My thirty minutes of daily meditation was not quite up, but I’d already run through my usual focus items and was getting antsy to get outside to fill more lawn bags. Instantly, I realized the error, and immediately I went back to the deep breathing, trying to hold onto the blankness I’d almost, but not quite, achieved. It wasn’t a ruined session – I don’t think there is such a thing as a ruined meditation. Each one is perfectly imperfect and unique and beneficial in its own way. 

Part of my meditative challenges over the past year has been in quelling the racing thoughts of the mind – which is the challenge for most people when they begin meditating. At half an hour, some days I find it goes by in a flash. On others, it feels drawn out, and I find myself squirming a bit toward the final minutes. The time limit/expanse itself seems antithetical to the whole idea of meditation, but it’s helpful for me. Within a boundary is the ability to embrace some sort of contained chaos. It allows me to not worry about time itself – the gentle electronic chimes will alert me to when the session is over – and it will not be rushed or hurried or slowed: time will advance as it will advance, and we have no control over that. 

My daily meditation has ticked up to 30 minutes, just in time to find an extra minute of calm per day as winter’s last month decides whether or not to leave in peace. For the most part, my meditation takes place right after my work day, to differentiate work from home in a work-from-home situation, and that placement is ideal. Sometimes, though, the day slips away, and I’m called to do other things and make other trips. On those days the meditation gets pushed off into the night, when the only light is a lamp and a candle. There is peace there too, and this is actually when I started meditating well over a year ago. The world is much different now, but the meditation has remained the same. In fact, it’s grown to the full half-hour, a lovely window of time that allows for further expansion of the space and peace that seeps so beautifully into every other aspect of life – which is the real gift of meditation. 

When you find that space, even if it’s just for a few minutes a day, it’s something you can access, often in lesser form, at those times when you need it most. We all have stressful moments – they seem to be coming in regular tidal wave fashion these days – and no amount of meditation will quell the worst of them, but taking the edge off and calming those minor ones contributes to an overall quieting of such maelstroms. Every little bit helps, and cumulatively meditation has eased the past year and all the tribulations we’ve had. The lesson in that is that no matter how small or insignificant some things may seem, when done en masse and every day, they add up to great changes, miraculous changes that shift one’s entire existence. And little changes are easy to make, especially when taken in little steps. 

“For instance, there is no light without darkness—and this troubles many of us—but without it, how else would we tell one from the other? We spend half of every day in darkness; surely we should make our peace with this.” ~ Mark Frost

Clocking in at a precise 29 minutes, my daily meditations (and Virgo-like tracking of them) will expand to half an hour come March 1, a good plane on which to keep them for a while. It’s my own little system of what works thus far in this meditation journey, and it’s nice to see how neatly they have become part of my daily routine, as natural and easy as taking a shower (even in COVID times). 

Meditation has proven to be quite a benefit in my life, something I’d hoped for but didn’t always trust to come to fruition, possibly because it sounded too good to be true, and possibly because I wasn’t sure I’d have the patience to sustain it to the point where I’d see a difference. Luckily, I stuck with it, and the differences have been gradual but profound. The older I get, the quicker time seems to pass, and so I can observe the past year and the gentle changes this meditation journey has produced, starting with an overall sense of calm and serenity. That’s not always easy to gauge or notice when it’s happening in such small increments; revisiting the past year of daily meditation allows me to see such changes on a broader scale, and they have been remarkable.

Honestly, I don’t think I realized how big an influence such a practice was having on me, but when I pause to consider what we’ve all been through in the past year, it’s certainly something to consider how relatively calmly I walked through it. (I wasn’t always so serene or accepting of such things.) That I did it all without any other crutches like alcohol or distracting entertainment like travel is a testament to the power of meditation. It’s not something that became clear until I started to look back. 

It’s strange and wonderful the way the world works – or the universe or God or whatever entity that you believe fuels and guides us on our way – how the state of mindfulness, and being present in the moment, doesn’t reveal its full grace until patience and acceptance come into genuine existence. Wonderful because the work of mindfulness is immediately and at once a state of grace, while over time it transforms some lives into a greater state of grace. It feels like my mind is on the cusp of something, and that might mean what I’m saying isn’t completely clear or making much sense. I’ll work to refine that. For now, the call of meditation is precisely what was needed at this time, and I’m grateful to have that practice at hand. 

For much of my life, Thursday night was my favorite night of the week. Everyone else usually picked Friday or Saturday, no one picked Monday, and my choice was, looking back on it, a reflection of my enjoyment of the anticipation and planning. I’ve spent the last year or so altering that take, finally realizing that in placing my enjoyment on the anticipatory time, I was sacrificing the real moments of life, and at those times when I was supposed to be enjoying things, my mind was already racing ahead to the next event or party. Many times I would find myself in the midst of a celebration or milestone event, after weeks and sometimes months of planning, and rather than inhabiting the moment, I was lamenting the passing of it, my head already working on the next thing, already living in the future. And that’s no way to live, to be present, to be mindful.

On this Friday night, I embrace the freedom, the way the weekend unfurls before us, even if it’s a frigid one in early February. Inhabiting this very moment, I pause and take in a deep breath, letting it slowly out as I release a work-week of the typical stresses that an average 45-year-old feels: the worries over aging parents, the concerns of work responsibilities, the bowl of chocolates that should have lasted five days but was finished in five hours. I breathe in and out again, releasing the realization that we are going on almost a year of pandemic social isolation, a year of this altered existence where seeing people interact in close proximity to each other on television now feels dangerous and foreign – and I wonder what that does to someone who has already had issues with social anxiety, and whether it will be easier or more difficult if and when we ever return to the state of normal we once had. Acknowledging those struggles, and nodding as they pass through my head, I breathe slowly in and slowly out, knowing that there is no wrong, and there is no right, in how we each choose to deal with this strange, weird, wild and wonderful world. 

On the window, the reflection of a candle hovers as if suspended from the snow-laden branches of a Chinese dogwood tree. Winter magic mingled with vague thoughts of spring blooms… 

In my earliest days of meditating, well over a year ago, I would often begin a session at the end of the afternoon, closer to bedtime. The living room would be dark, except for maybe a candle, and in the hushed light and reverential silence it was also cool, that space being the closest to the largest window of the house. Winter nights left the floor a cool expanse, broken only by a small area rug on which I sat and began my meditation.

Every time I wondered if I should put on a pair of socks, or grab a robe for around my shoulders, but something told me I wouldn’t need such comforts. And every time that turned out to be true. By the end of my meditation – be it five minutes or 29 minutes – my body would have generated its own heat, and my mind would be so occupied with its own empty consciousness that I wouldn’t be able to give such thought to the temperature of the room. Something about the steady deep breathing and the focused lack of focus would emanate heat and warmth from within, and often I would have broken a sweat without even realizing it.

I don’t have an explanation to such a physical manifestation of meditation, and I’m not going to probe very deeply into online research that may or may not be grounded in reality. All I know is that when I meditate, I have no need for socks or warm clothes – not even in the darkest nights of winter. My mind goes to a place that conjures its own comfortable warmth for my body, and I find it best not to question such wonders.