i remember when i was a kid i would get really excited and filled with energy and then i would run around my house manically skipping and flailing my arms and moving my hands up and down and making noises
at some point, in a moment i can’t remember with my mind but can’t forget with my heart, someone must have shamed me for this very big, very weird-looking, likely intensely-uncomfortable-for-them motion and i totally stopped doing it for years
in high school Ms. Roth introduced me to the famous Rainer Maria Rilke quote from Letters to a Young Poet about living your questions and i found it deeply inspiring of course but it was another decade before i really started to actively ask questions of my life
sometimes you hold a question in your heart for weeks or months or years or decades or lifetimes before you finally find the answer in an explosive moment of realization or more likely the whimper of release and acceptance and surrender to the quiet simplicity of what has always been true but you simply hadn’t noticed, or refused to
sometimes you don’t realize for a long time that there even is a question. sometimes it takes even longer to discern how to describe it. often you can only say in retrospect, once you’ve found the answer, what you were even asking about
for example, i held the question of “should i stay or should i go” for about eight months but did not, like Nico, decide that i’d be leaving in “The Fairest of the Seasons” (perhaps because it was still winter in Vermont) and instead i decided to leave the monastery for the second time
and upon leaving i asked the question “what is my life’s work” (or, as it was posed to me by Dinesh, “why not just become the world’s best loving-kindness teacher?”) for eight, nine months to a year before finally settling on, discovering, revealing love, curiosity, and empowerment, taking another year and change to finish getting them tattooed to my body
so it’s really only over the last four months or so that i’ve realized i’ve been asking a question for two and half years now, because it’s only just recently that i’ve started to feel like i have the answer
or maybe i started asking this question in the exact moment i stopped moving my body in the intuitive, excited, ecstatic speaking-in-tongues casting-out-the-demons energy-flowing joy-generating way i knew how to as a spazzy little kid, with all the simple genius of everything you were born knowing and somehow are persuaded by others to repress and forget
or maybe i started asking this question in a little house in South San Francisco, mopping the floor, listening to Rob Burbea for the first time, giving a series of talks about Questioning Awakening, questioning the assumptions underneath the way we conceive of Dharma, looking at the myths and fantasies associated with practice, seeing if new or different views or stories might serve us better, asking what it would be like if practicing Dharma was more like art than science or religion
the question i had in my heart was something like this: what is meditation, anyway? what’s it for? why don’t i like doing it any more? why do i get all fidgety when i meditate in stillness? do i have to meditate in stillness? in silence? do i have to meditate every day? how do i meditate regularly out of genuine desire and devotion rather than some big idea or a sense of obligation or guilt or forcing or self-coercion? how do i unwind, undo the stories and habits that helped me so much in my 20’s to meditate but just ain’t cutting it any longer? how can i get to the point where i meditate for many hours a day simply because i want to? what would meditation have to mean for me to do that? what story or conception of practice would inspire me that deeply?
when i was 19 i read a little bit of the eastern mystical traditions and a little more of the western religious texts and a healthy handful of some contemporary spiritual pop psych type books or the like and i watched a Shinzen Young YouTube video where he said he’d rather live one day with the consciousness he had after decades of meditating than the rest of his natural life without it and then decided i should probably start practicing meditation
so for years i practiced every day for half an hour like it was flossing or brushing my teeth, spiritual hygiene, a chore “just because,” and i hated it just about as much as i hated flossing as a kid, because i was just distracted and fidgety and felt like doing other things and wasn’t enjoying it and just got angry and frustrated with myself
i realized i needed help, and, there but for the grace of God i go, i set my mind on training in a monastery, and eventually did, for nearly five years in two stints (which may sound like a lot but really isn’t in the name of the game, just enough time to be humbled by how much there is to learn and how little you’ve really seen, at least that was my experience)
i say i set my mind on it because this whole endeavor was very much a head-first, top-down affair where my mind was set on figuring out the best possible life and the purpose of it all and then ordering the rest of me (whatever the body and soul and all that are anyway) around to go about doing its carefully calculated bidding, because, it reasoned, then no one could possibly get angry at me, because then i couldn’t possibly die without regrets
i made a deal with an angel, as it were—i put myself in a situation where i had to meditate for several hours every day, where i had to go on a weeklong retreat nearly every month, where it made sense to go into solitary retreat in a cabin in the woods for several months at a time—and i would get better at meditation practice, something i cared about very deeply, or my head thought i did at least
is it any surprise that there was so much kicking and screaming and crying and challenge and difficulty? i hurt my body and fractured my internal harmony and lost my self-trust. but yes i did get better at meditation just like i hoped and planned and bargained for
it wasn’t such a bad deal, all in all. i grew up in monastic training, far more than i did in my hometown or my college education. as far as credentials go, monasteries are pretty thin on that sort of thing but i learned far more practical skills there than anywhere else i’d been exposed to in my adult life, including traditional educational and vocational avenues
and most importantly, i became a man in my own eyes, with courage and strength and kindness and a tiny little teardrop of wisdom in the teeming ocean of splendor that is the vastness of this existence and the universe we find ourselves in
but eventually i realized it was dirty fuel i was filling my tank with and i couldn’t do that any more, much less drive full speed in that direction. i was a sizzling, dancing hot mess of life energy just waiting to explode out of the awfully tight and confining box of monastic training
the implicit view of practice that I had was something like this: you are supposed to meditate daily for half an hour or ideally much more, sitting very still in an uncomfortable position, and focus really hard until you somehow ???!?! mysteriously ??!?!!? awaken !!!?!?!?! which is the purpose of life, of course, and then you disappear?? are extinguished??? never to be reborn in this carnival-themepark-horrorshow we like to call “samsara”
what a bloody brutalist view and myth of practice, maybe you can see why that wasn’t doing it for me any longer, if i have to shed my Buddhist bona fides so be it, it’s a raft not the other shore, i don’t want to escape, it’s a gift to be alive, this universe is a miracle, it’s a delight to play and enjoy and learn and grow and serve others
i don’t want to have somewhere to go. i don’t want to have something to achieve. i don’t want to have to sit still and be quiet. i don’t want to force myself to meditate every day at a certain time of day for a certain duration using a specific technique. i don’t want to have to do something every day, i don’t want to have to hit a certain quota of an arbitrary number before i can feel good about myself. i don’t want to force myself to do anything! no forcing allowed! no forcing!
when a real answer to this question began arising, i decided to consummate what i was finding by making a piece of art embodying, signifying what i’d discovered, remembered:
all the pieces were already there, but they were connected in a new way, seen as such
the answer i found, remembered, rediscovered: practice is for recharging. it can be a treat i get to give myself, sneaking off between meetings or service projects
i don’t have to force myself to nap or take a shower or dance or work on my projects or do other fun things, so let meditation be like that, something fun i get to explore if i feel like it. it’s about regularity, not consistency
i don’t need to be quiet or still. i can listen to music and move or dance or make noises, cry or scream or talk or sing. i can do any technique i want to, feel called to. it’s all fair game. let myself rest, recharge, unlock my super powers
it’s ok to journal about my experience, it’s okay to reflect, that will help me to integrate what i’m learning
i don’t have to get anywhere, i can just enjoy this moment and ask my bodyheartmind what it wants, what would feel good, and take it from there
earlier this year i let myself try the move i did as a kid again. i felt such a surge of happiness and joy and energy and aliveness and self-love that i started sobbing and had to do Bio-Emotive with the phrase “i feel happy and loved” to integrate the positive feelings
it felt like a pure hit of the most intense happiness and energy and aliveness that i’ve ever felt, like going super saiyan, like i just hit the nitro
it was weeks before i gave myself permission to try it again, to taste that forbidden fruit. then there were months of sneaking it in from time to time, when i half-remembered its power
my power level is directly correlated to how willing i am to do this move, how regularly i let myself do it, along with sobbing and screaming and all the other moves i’ve found to live by
i give myself permission to do this often, to accept all the power and energy within me, to let it flow through my bodymind cleanly and swiftly, to let it fuel my projects and my service in the world—to look weird doing it, to love myself fully, anyway
it is nine thirty in the morning and i’ve slept four and a half hours and my body is filled with energy, i am ready to go, i love myself and i love all beings, i am here to serve the world. i am a grown ass adult man and i am running around manically flapping my arms and smiling and giggling. in the parlance of our times, “i am cringe, i am free”
to write this piece i looked over my journal entries on this topic for the last two and a half years, from April 2021 to November 2023. if reading excerpts of someone else’s journal is the kind of thing that tickles your fancy you can read them and watch me unwinding all these tangles and discovering a new sensibility of what practice is, why to do it
thanks to Jogen, the Worlding Sangha, all the communities i journal in, Sílvia and her meditation crew, Drew Schorno, and all the many people who inspired my practice and this post