Barriers to Meditation
Disclaimer & Context: I have made it a goal in March to write in my blog 5 days a week. My plan is to use my morning contemplative time to isolate a thought or idea I would like to flesh out a bit more and then write a blog about it. I’m not giving myself a lot of time to write the blog because this challenge isn’t about the quality of my writing. The goal of this challenge is to work on my conversion process of idea to blog. I have noticed I have dozens and dozens of insights and ideas every day but rarely do I flesh them out and share them. This is a challenge to help me strengthen that muscle. So it’s important you and I both know I’m not specifically trying to make these posts 100% true, educational, or helpful to you at all. If it’s any of that: frosting.
Yesterday I started working on a video to share with my Patreon supporters about my daily meditation practice (which, funny enough, while making it yesterday, I realized parts of it that I wanted to change, so the video is already outdated, but that’s the point isn’t it? showing up for yourself today? not based on a video?) Anyways!
I have fucking hated meditation with the fire of a thousand suns for a long time. Everyone suggested it to me. Those supporting my mental health were especially adamant about it. I really tried. No one can say that I didn’t try most anything that professionals recommended to me. I even took an MBSR course through the U of M which made things worse as they had me buy a thick book with 40 chapters of nonsense I could not wrap my head around.
It wasn’t until I came across the amazing Britt Frank that I saw someone validating my experience for the first time (see graphic below). As I begin to develop my Self knowledge, I have begun to realize just how dissociated I’ve been. I feel like my neocortex had been working overtime to try to perform for this existence & society as it demands of me, but its fuel and lense is created through my unprocessed thoughts, feelings, and experiences from a lifetime. Turns out they were right. The body does keep the score. I don’t just have a magical ability to forget shitty things and not feel them and not suffer from that at all. Everything I thought time had healed is still there, acting itself out in odd inverted ways that make me feel depressed, isolated, and rejected.
Britt was the first person I saw validate my experiences. I’m a huge Britt fan. HUGE. She’s fucking with our antiquated, racist, sexist, and anti-human mental health system/framing and I love it. When I meditate, I just hear 1000 voices telling me, “Ok, now just notice”, as I notice the chaos of my mind. OK, I’m noticing I feel like my mind is going to kill me, what do I do? I hear 1000 voices telling me, “Ok, just notice that”. I flinch and stare at this voices, unblinking. I’m sorry, what? Just notice that? Yup, just notice that. Ok,… I’ll “notice” that. But I’m kind of freaking out. I feel like I’m being attacked by evil ghosts. “Cool, cool, just notice that. Oh and make sure not to engage with it or judge it and definitely just notice it”. At this point, I tell 1000 voices to fuck right the fuck off and I’ll find my own fucking road to enlightenment because this is a sick game. I was not wrong. I realize now, I was incapable of meditating because I was not safe within my own mind by ANY MEANS. Before we go around prescribing meditation to everyone, I’d suggest we consider whether someone has a strong enough relationship with their sense of Self and show up as the observer only.
Fuck. It’s just been awful.
Anyways, what has CHANGED all of this for me is an accumulation of the following giving me a more congealed idea of what practicing meditation is:
Taking shrooms. Lesson: seeing how my Self could be experienced in a variety of ways yet I would still feel like ME. Means that “Me” is not so straight forward and perhaps it’s even a human element that can be molded and strengthened and tuned like many of our other organs. But reality seems really important to us to be seen consistently, so this is challenging.
Learning I have ADHD. Learning this and unpacking my entire life has consequently untangled all the negative stories I’ve been absolutely inundated with for my entire life. I no longer feel belligerent during my meditative practice. Some have called me willful. Some have called me skeptical. Some say I think too much or that I’m overcomplicating things. You know what? No, I am not. I had undiagnosed ADHD for 39 years and the C-PTSD that accompanies an unacknowledged and invisible neurological variance (choosing not to use “disability” for the moment). Everyone I know who has ADHD has said meditation is a shitshow for them. Commence meditation and Self-distrust culture rant: Maybe people teaching meditation should keep in mind that humans have varying neurological capacities that may make meditation difficult. Maybe if we stopped treating meditation like a spiritual soak in the tub and more of a legit mental exercise that has legit obstacles (like executive function disregulation) we could actually help people master meditation without the spiritual jargon and vague directions of “just noticing”. Now that I’m finally NOTICING, I’m realizing this wasn’t that complicated to explain, but no one seems to be explaining it from the level of the brain/trauma/subconscious/attachment theory within communities that recommend meditation. You can’t just take a learning machine and tell it to act like it didn’t learn anything at all and can just zero out itself with enough focus. Perhaps mental hygiene is a lot less sexy than we think. Maybe we’re not very sexy as we sit on a chair and meditate alone, watching time slow down but having no solutions to the attack on the people in the land called Ukraine. Maybe it doesn’t give us that sense of control that we’re looking for, but it gives us the peace of surrendering to existence and subjective experience. Maybe this last vestige of spiritual euphoria is actually just a form of giving up and “when in Rome” do as the Brain does. Meaning, deconstruct the narrative that you cannot be trusted. That your mind cannot be trusted. Your thoughts cannot be trusted. Your impulses are embarrassing and your desires are offensive. You feel things you shouldn’t feel and think things you shouldn’t think. What if judging them like that is the basic philosophical/neurological Self issue that we are collectively having here as humans. We don’t think our minds/bodies are trustworthy because we 1) are under so much social pressure to conform and 2) there’s a basic belief across humans that there is more to us than the experience of the mind and it’s maker, the body. But our embarrassing thoughts and feelings aren’t “wrong” nor “sinful” nor indicative of a longer character flaw. Heck, even if they are, the point is that we have access to a higher, more intelligent, more critical way of thinking and triaging these impulses we’re getting from our subconscious. It’s not shameful at all to experience life as a human mind. But we need to be honest with ourselves about how minds work, how they don’t, and what that does or doesn’t say about how we feel about ourselves as people, and whether we need to feel any way at all about ourselves.
WHEW! Interrupting this bullet list to acknowledge holy hell did I just go off on that! Whew. This blog post is turning into something else. I was going to tell you about my meditative practice, but that might just have to be tomorrow! OK, back to the bullet list.
Self-Knowledge being the domain of religion and other spiritual practices. It’s like we are avoiding the issue. We are knowable. We are predictable. We are understandable. We are human. We’re not that unique from each other in terms of our mind machinery. We’re not the same, but we’re not that different that we’re incomprehensible to each other or could never understand why someone becomes who they become. This is all very basic stuff once you see it. The knowledge around this doesn’t need to be so vague, euphemistic, and often gaslighting without any sense of what you’re actually trying to do in your mind. I lacked a map for understanding my existence and that’s what caused me the most pain in my life at a foundational level. Now that I see it better, I realize it wasn’t that hard to understand and the right person could probably do a damn fine job of distilling it down so that we could all have a basic idea of what it is to be a human mind. But that would challenge all kinds of cherished American ideals about free will, souls, and god mucking about influencing your thoughts and feelings. It would also mean we’d have to reconsider how we treat those who are hurting most in our society, like those imprisoned (how did that ever become a good idea????), those who are violent, those who are isolated or abandoned, those who cannot provide for themselves or their family, those who have been judged and rejected by their communities for knowing who they are, those who are told they are invited but have to dress the part even if it’s oppressive, … We’d have to think hard about how we treat our homeless, how we treat the poor, how we treat those of different faiths or ideologies or nationalities. If we really, really, really reckoned with WHAT WE ARE, it would have the unfortunate consequence of moving us towards a utopian future where the highest standard of the land at all levels is BE KIND. Everyone is who they are for a reason and what we feel personally offended by is just some unprocessed feelings or thoughts in someone and throughout their lineage or culture. We are all hurting. We could all heal by being honest with what we are.
Related to the bullet above, I was never educated on where to find my Self. My communities were all about dying to the Self. Or that our beautiful thoughts were from god and our bad thoughts were from the devil. So most of the time was spent in subservient awe and scatteredness as god spoke to you or profound shame and avoidance when we’d have “bad thoughts”. Though I’ve left this god in the rear-view mirror, the pathways are still in my brain and a layer of me still doesn’t grasp that we ARE those good and bad thoughts. I don’t have to sift through them anymore with the aggression of someone profoundly ashamed of their truth. Moreover, now that I’m on Adderall, I finally have the chemical support to focus on unpacking all of these things I missed understanding about my Self and how to experience it instead of the projected rejection from my junior high ghost who is still playing out her unaddressed terror.
There’s probably more I meant to list, but the morning is moving forward and I need to go earn symbolic value to exchange for services or other objects of value that I cannot provide for myself or have no interest in doing so. Yay capitalism!
