Day 263: Dredging

Tired. Dammit I’m tired. Ill again. I can’t shake this illness. It lessens. It comes back worse than before.

Wrecked at work today, shivering, stretched thin. Emailing in the office, staff talking to me, What? What are they saying? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer. Go bother someone else. There is no one else, I’m in charge? Well I don’t know. OK. Fine. I’m coming. I’ll fix it. Forcing body up from sepulchral slumber, creaking, groaning, out into the pub.

Somehow the shift passes. I do the jobs I wanted to get done. Colour code the keg lines. Email breweries. Print sheets to arrange craft room by order of line checks.

Come home. Sit in back of taxi, not wanting driver to say one word. Reading Brexit debacle on my phone, no energy to figure it out. Head swimming. Shoulders aching. Taxi gliding through the blackness of the night.

Blood from stone, today. Dredging words one at a time up from the deep. Each sentence an aeon to write.

I’m getting in bed. Meditate for five minutes first, always meditate for five minutes, feel the field of awareness with all thoughts and ego conceptions snaking round and round. Feel field holding snaking, field larger, always empty, always silent, reposeful living space within which thoughts, frustrations, pains, come and go.

Then drink my glass of cold tap water, climb in bed, let go failures of the day and rest up to try again tomorrow. In baby steps keep journeying onwards, day after day after day.

...... 

Music: Indian Summer, by Beat Happening. 

Day 231: Why meditate?

It's the obvious question. If meditation is so difficult and frustrating and boring and slow, why do it? Why spend ten minutes every day of your life sitting still with no phone and no TV and no music, no entertainment, no stimuli, simply counting your breath over and over again?

The answer: because we have lost control of our brains. Our thoughts are running amok. We have evolved to be so good at thinking that we do not know how to let go of thinking, we do not know how to be grounded and present, rather than lost in thought, and this is lessening the value of our lives.

You've heard the aphorism that to the man with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail? Well we are like that with thought, with the narrow thinking of the intellect, the voice in our heads, which is but a minuscule portion of the far more diffuse and disparate and complex system that is the mind. We bring our intellect to bear on the world to such an extent that soon we forget that not everything in the world needs to be dealt with intellectually.

Rather than a hammer, picture a man with a sword. This is the intellect. Its great strength is that it cuts. It separates the world into component pieces - cuts Northern from Southern Hemisphere, cuts Europe from Asia, and Britain from Europe, us from them, cuts the self from the environment, one from two, nouns from verbs, now from then, observer from observed.

We've needed this swordsman to survive, to fight our way out of the primordial swamps and on to success. He has won us many battles, many wars. We have promoted him from guard to lieutenant to captain to general, and his confidence, and arrogance, has grown. He has started ruling for us, in our stead, and we have let him, because he did such a good job of getting us here.

But he isn't a wise and benevolent king. His heart is that of a simple swordsman, and thus, whenever a problem arises, whatever the problem may be, his first thought is to reach for his blade...

The intellect is vital to us. We need it when handling our company's accounts. When rewriting complex laws. When studying economics. When attempting our maths homework.

But what about when taking in a sunset? Admiring a work of art? When walking alone through a forest in the pale morning light with the spring's first bluebells coming to bud? When lying naked in bed with a lover?

Of course we always require the intellect to some degree. The swordsman must always be at our sides. But how much use is it, how worthwhile, to be stood on a mountaintop staring out at the expanse of land stretched below, and to be able to only focus on your little swordsman as he jabbers about this and that and the other, what happened last Tuesday, why Linda didn't reply to your email, when the next season of so-and-so is coming out, why it is that you'll never be happy?

Meditation is the antidote to this. It is a technique for putting the swordsman back in his place.

By focusing on your breath, or the sounds coming to you, or a repeated mantra ("om mani padme hum") you are giving your swordsman a block of wood. He has to be alert, has to be chopping continuously, to be prepared for danger, but with meditation you are giving him a block of wood and saying, Here, chop this!

And he chops at the wood, chop, chop, chop, and he chops away from the wood, and at the ground, and the air, and pretty soon he's chopping everything in your awareness again. And you bring him back to the wood, No, chop this!

And he chops at the wood, and away from the wood, and at...

No, chop this!

And you keep bringing him back. And slowly you give him a distraction while you build the strength of all the rest of your awareness. While you concentrate on ruling, and appreciating, this existence that your swordsman has won for you.

Because everything that the intellect does is about keeping you alive. But there's a whole depth of mindfulness within you that isn't just trying to stay alive, but is the reason for living.

We're talking sunsets, bluebells, lovers, croissants. Saint-Saëns. Tarkovsky's Solyaris. Sundays by the fire with the dog.

These things don't need cutting apart, analysing, measuring, weighing. They need experiencing. You don't think about them. You exist with them.

Meditation is a way to deepen your ability to exist with the world.

You should try it.

......

Music: The Swan, from The Carnival of the Animals, by Camille Saint-Saëns.

Day 230: Meditation

Here's one I've been meaning to write for a while now. I've begun meditating again, and I want to say something about it.

I’ve been meditating off and on (mostly off) for a decade now, and I want to talk a little about my process, and what I see as its point, because I think there’s still a fair amount of confusion about these things.

Meditation is a programme of training to help you pay attention to the present moment on purpose. Paying attention to the present moment on purpose is where we want to be. It’s like “being strong” in bodybuilding terms. It’s the end goal.

Meditation is the lifting of the weights. It’s how we get our minds strong.

Here’s how I do that:

I kneel on the floor upright and alert. I kneel on one cushion, and put another between my calves and thighs, to stop my heels digging into my bum. I rest my hands in my lap, palms upward, one on top of the other.

If I could get into the lotus position, or half lotus, or a similar pose, then I would do that. These are very stable positions, if you possess the flexibility for them. Conversely, if I couldn’t kneel then I would sit upright on a chair. If I couldn’t do that I would lie down. What’s important is that you feel comfortable, but alert, that you can breathe deeply, and that your posture embodies a willingness to face this moment, not slouch away from it.

Next I take a few deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, because this is a nice thing to do. If I’m feeling particularly stressed I might do a body scan, which involves focusing on my toes, then the balls of my feet, my heels, my ankles, shins, calves, knees, up through my body, spending a little time with each area, gently, in no rush, noting where there is tension, letting the tension go if it feels appropriate to do so.

And then I start meditating. And what, precisely does this occult, mystical process involve?

It involves paying attention as I breathe in and out.

That’s it. Sometimes I count my breaths, once after every out-breath, up to ten, and then start again from one. Sometimes I focus on the sounds around me instead, letting whatever comes to my ears be the object of my attention, holding it in loving awareness, simply watching it, allowing the sound to exist. Sometimes I repeat a neutral word, like “flower”, or “river”, over and over again. The object of attention doesn’t hugely matter; it is the attending to it, with mindfulness, that is important.

I pay attention as if this out-breath, this sound, this word, was the gaze of a lover, or a newborn child, or a treasure brought forth from the deep. I pay attention to this mundane moment of my life wholly, and lovingly, and with unquenchable wonder.

And what happens when I do this, when I attend to my breath, or to a repeated phrase, with watchful, loving, mindful awareness?

I get distracted. The voice in my head starts up, chundering on, and I lose myself in thought.

This usually takes a second or two to happen.

I get distracted. I cough, renew my focus, bring attention back to the breath. And I get distracted. I kick myself - you dummy - I shift my weight, get comfortable again, bring attention back to the breath. And I get distracted. I realise I’ve been thinking about… something or other, down twisting rabbit holes of thought, for minutes. I get annoyed. I feel anger rising. I quash the anger down. I feel despair that I’m spending my meditation time quashing down anger, that I can’t obey even the simplest of instructions, that I’m not a venerable Zen master cloaked in billowing robes immovable as a rock. I picture myself, kneeling on a dusty cushion on a carpet I should have hoovered weeks ago, and I… dammit, I bring attention back to the breath. And I get distracted. On a dusty cushion on a carpet I should have hoovered weeks ago. And I haven’t washed my sheets. Or done last nights dishes. And then there’s that presentation for work next week, I haven’t even started that. I sag. It’s hopeless. No. It’s not hopeless. I force myself to focus. I do it. I sit up straight again. I wrench my awareness away from negativity, bring attention back to the breath.

And I get distracted...

This happens. It happens to me. It happens to meditation teachers. It happens to billowy-robed Zen masters. And it will happen to you.

This is meditation. Bringing your attention back is meditation. If your attention didn’t need bringing back then you wouldn’t need meditation. If you could magically lift a car in one hand then you wouldn’t need to do bicep curls and press-ups.

Maybe Superman can just be strong without effort, because he's a special alien. And maybe there are super-meditators who are equanimous and tranquil as the morning sun’s first shining rays, with minds like softly bubbling brooks. But the rest of us need practice.

Meditation is practice. It isn’t having a calm mind. It is the training of calming your insanely fractured and ever-leaping mind. And it takes a lifetime. You don’t do ten press-ups and then find yourself able to lift a car forever afterwards. You do ten press-ups every morning, and gradually, over many months, you find your strength improving, your physical grounding in the world becoming more vibrant and active and alive. And if you stop doing those daily press-ups, you lose it.

Of course some people become obsessed with bodybuilding, and spend every hour of every day lifting enormous weights. There are good things that can come from this: being part of a community of like-minded individuals, developing a life with structure and routine, setting and achieving difficult goals - and there are bad things that can come from this: obsession, addiction, the feeding of the ego, the irony that the singular fanatical drive to be strong in many ways only shows that underneath it all you are so very weak.

Similarly, there are people for whom meditation becomes their all. They join clubs, post in groups, obsess over correct posture, argue about schools of Buddhism, pay large figures to attend intensive meditation retreats.

And if you want to do this, more power to you. It’s not wrong. But be aware that the necessity for meditation is the necessity to assuage ego and overthinking, and devoting yourself to the cult of meditation can increase your vulnerability to precisely these problems of ego and overthinking.

(But then so can everything. I have to be aware that my ego is playing the game here, playing at being modester-than-thou. We all have egos, and they all do ego things. Meditation is in fact a great way of watching the ego, accepting it, and not taking it too seriously.)

What I’m saying is: don’t worry about not being fully invested. You don’t need to shave your head and sit in zazen, just as you don’t need to bench-press like Hulk Hogan. In many ways doing so can make you less whole. Ten press-ups and five minutes meditation a night is a fine way to live.

So, then. Sit down. Bring your attention to your breath. Every time your mind wanders, bring it back. When you notice yourself feeling pathetic at how many times your mind wanders, simply ask, are you still lost in thought right now, or are you bringing attention back to the breath? When you find yourself thinking how bored you are, simply ask, are you still lost in thought, or are you bringing attention back to the breath? When you’re thinking about how you’re going to bring your attention back to the breath, simply ask, are you still lost in thought, or are you bringing your attention back to the breath?

There is only the bringing of attention back to the breath. Everything else is distraction. You will have a mind full of distractions. These are your weights. Lift them. Bring attention back to the breath, over and over and over again.

This is meditation.

Next time: but why?

...... 

Music: kinda want to do some dirty Run the Jewels hip hop, for the incongruity, but no. Let's go with the lilting, soaring Tibetan folk of Tenzin Choegyal and the Metta String Ensemble. It's no Run the Jewels, but it's pretty good.

Day 40: Recalibrations

Day 40. If this blog challenge was as old in years as it is in days it would currently be going through a mid-life crisis, buying an expensive sports car and getting a tattoo. But it's not, and blogs can't get finance for luxury road vehicles, and they don't have any skin that a tattoo would go on, so why don't you shut up?

I've been feeling myself slipping back into bad habits. It takes energy and awareness to keep ingraining the grooves of new habits, and mostly I've been too busy and tired for either of late.

I've noticed myself pushing bedtime from 2am to ten or so minutes later, and then more like 2:30, and then more like 3. Consequently I've been allowing myself to sleep in until 10:30, or 11, or beyond. I've been on a string of closes recently, coming home around 1:30, and while when I started this challenge I was very good at just getting a glass of water, doing some stretches and getting into bed, the past few weeks I've been sitting up on my PC or phone, reading Twitter, watching Netflix or Youtube, wallowing in the empty lethargic depression that has characterised so much of my recent life.

I guess I've been feeling sad, a lack of connection, a frustration with the meaninglessness of work, and my go-to method for so long for dealing with that sadness has been to sort of lie back into it, like a lukewarm bath, distracting myself with screens and noises and colour. Feel sad, stay up for too long looking at crap in an attempt to hide from that sadness, wake up late into yet more sadness. Repeat ad nauseam.

I'm like the cardboard VR headset I've been playing with, its horizon drifting inexorably off on one side. Not enough to notice in the moment, but look back after an extended session and you find your centre-point has swung round wildly from where you began.

So I'm just going to re-centre myself. I'm not sure what else I can do. A more balanced gyroscope would help, one less prone to outside influence -- but for the moment, while that's still being honed in the lab, I'll have to stick with regular recalibration of my internal instruments. Bring myself back, again, and again, and again.

So last night I got through the door at 1:35am and I pushed myself up the stairs, brushed my teeth, stripped to my boxers, did some gentle yoga poses (namaste), sat for five minutes of meditation, then got into bed and read a few pages of my book before closing the cover and lying down and turning out the light.

This morning I did not want to get up, nothing in me wanted to get up, but I forced myself through the fog into a sitting position and drank my bottle of water and read a few more pages of my book, and then when enough brain cells had come awake I got into the shower and started another day.

It's not glamorous, it's not exciting, but it is the necessary work to keep me from sliding too far off course.

Would You Just... Talk About It? Part Four

I've been struggling with depression again recently. It has been creeping back in over the months since restarting the antidepressants, creeping back through any cracks it can find. The medication holds it mostly at bay, but here and there it still trickles back in.

Getting up, getting moving, going to work are all more effort than they should be. I'm more tired at the end of even the easiest days. And days off when I have nothing I am forced to do it is all too easy to simply do nothing. Sticking with the writing is proving especially tough -- I'm finding I just don't care enough about it, or enough about anything.

Depression wears away at your ability to care, at your desires, your hopes, your passions, it blunts your essential life-force, whatever that is, whatever that means. At the milder end of the spectrum this life-force is only dulled round its edges, reigned in, but the more severe the depression, the more your spirit crumbles, right down to the complete collapse of a breakdown, and to the dark places beyond.

I am somewhere nearer the easier end at the moment, for sure, but I still feel it daily, am still plodding rather than skipping through my life. My spirit is still weak.

The antidepressants help, for me, but they are not a cure. As the writer Andrew Solomon puts it in The Noonday Demon, his superlative book on the subject, if depression is a vine entwining and strangling a healthy tree, then medication can push back the vine, but the tree beneath may still be withered and fragile, and pills alone will do little to help fresh shoots to grow.

This is an excellent analogy, but I am not sure if even this is completely true, if there even is a universal truth to depression to ever fully be understood. It is too nebulous a thing, too idiosyncratic, too intimately connected to who each of us is as a complete, living being. Unlike the vine and the tree, in reality there is no obvious dichotomy between what is the depression and what is the person underneath. Depression cannot simply be zapped away, like a patch of infected skin, because it infects everything, is a part of everything -- it is a curling at the edges of existence itself.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to treatment. Katie Hopkins recently Tweeted that "People with depression do not need a doctor and a bottle of something that rattles. They need a pair of running shoes and fresh air." This comment is clearly intended to be incendiary, to keep the spotlight on desperate, wretched Hopkins, and of course it is stupid and wrong, but I understand why it might have made sense in her head.

There are a million ways to maintain and refresh mental health -- exercise, yes, fresh air, yes, and eating well, getting early nights, getting up early in the mornings, having plenty of hobbies, meeting friends and socialising, discussing rather than bottling up problems, doing maths puzzles, reading, especially fiction and poetry, involving yourself in some kind of creative pursuit, limiting your time on social media, meditating, doing the morning pages, practising gratitude -- all of these things can either prevent or overcome depression.

The problem, however, is that they are all the things that are the hardest to do when you are depressed. Depression, in fact, basically is the inability to do these things.

When you are depressed you withdraw from life, your spirit withdraws, and so of course examples of a life lived to the full, which is what that list is, are the opposite of that. Not the antidote, but simply its opposite. Telling someone who is unable to get up and live their life that they would feel better if they got up and lived their life is tantamount to telling a diabetic that they should just produce more insulin.

Medication can, I think, cut away much of the pain of depression, and the various forms of therapy involve handing over your withdrawn spirit to a trained professional who can teach you routines and habits of thinking that will benefit that spirit -- but truly reigniting a dulled or extinguished life-force is a far more complex and involved undertaking than any health service can be reasonably expected to survive. There are no simple solutions.

Another analogy I like to use, although again, of course, it is only useful up to a point, is one of flower beds. If a depressed mind is like a flower bed where only sad and choking weeds grow, then medication is like the weed-killer that, sprayed every day, will continually push back the tangles, while therapy is like paying an experienced gardener to come down every week to teach you how to pull out the weeds by their roots and cultivate the rough soil and encourage more beautiful plants to grow.

But what I have found from my own experience, and this I believe corresponds to the data, is that once those sessions with the gardener are over, it is all too easy to start slipping back to your old ways, over perhaps years, and for more and more weeds to begin sprouting once again. It takes such an enormous strength of will to prevent this from happening, when the old ways are so ingrained. And strength of will is precisely what depression attacks first. Perhaps someone close to you comments that your garden is starting to look a little ragged again, that maybe you need to spend more time out there with the trowel, and you know this is true, of course you know, but you find you don't care enough to do it, you simply do not by yourself have the drive to work that soil, to grow those plants, to live your life.

And yet. People do recover from depression. They overcome it completely, or, more likely, they find a way to accept it, to structure their lives in a way to get the gardening done despite often not feeling like it, they create a reality that contains the fact of having a weaker spirit without being ruled by that fact.

Yes, an element to their garden will perhaps forever be darker, shrouded, they might always have to work harder to achieve less, and that danger of the weeds one day overcoming them and reclaiming all will never utterly be banished -- but they will have a garden, still, one for which they have battled hard, and the parts of it that blossom will appear to them, in comparison to the decay, more vital and glorious than anything they would ever otherwise have known.

So my depression is still here. I guess I wanted the medication and the work on this blog to have eradicated it, and that has not been the case. I don't think that ever will be the case. But that is all right. I get to be here, on this insane fabulous world, having this sometimes wonderful sometimes terrible adventure. If you are struggling as well, I am there with you, I understand. I'm not sure if it is the stronger, but as well as depression there also exists love. Whether you are in a position to feel it, there is also love. Hold onto that truth.

Would You Just... Leave Next Tuesday Alone?

Folks who are into the whole mindfulness thing often talk about the importance of bringing yourself back to the present moment. Back to now. This is a bit confusing, because you're always in the present moment. It is always now. It's not like unless you pay close attention you will suddenly wake up and find you're in the Palaeolithic era, or in next Tuesday.

But you can find yourself thinking about the Palaeolithic era, which is I guess what they mean. Although of course the thinking that you're doing about the Palaeolithic era is happening now, so you've not really gone anywhere.

I'm not being quite as facetious as all of this sounds. The point of mindfulness is simply to pay more direct attention in your life, as you live it. And when you do start paying attention, start dropping in on yourself, you notice that, although you actually exist in a completely tranquil empty realm of pure being we call the present, in practice you're probably just off worrying about what Brenda said about you last week.

The phrase "lost in thoughts" is apposite here. It's not that you consciously chose to bend the full weight of your intellect towards solving the pressing issue of whether Brenda is or is not in fact a total bitch, it's that without meaning to do it your thoughts wandered off and got lost circling the same old boring paths.

Not that I'm saying thoughts are bad. The intellect is obviously a wonderful tool. Without it we would be sitting in mounds of our own poo mashing our fists into our faces watching BBC Three all day. But the intellect is such a tiny sliver of intelligence, of mind. Out of all the things to be aware of -- the soft sighing of the breeze in the trees, the curve of the quilt cover on the creaking bed, the taste of green tea on the tongue, the glugging of heart, touch of pyjama on skin, interoception of hunger, proprioception of limbs, tiredness, uncertainty, gentle aching of soul, tension melting from shoulders, breath swaying back and forth, back and forth -- out of all these many noticings I bet you that if you drop in on yourself you'll 99.9999% of the time find you're just thinking, by which I mean pointlessly abusing that tool of conceptual touch that imagines a reality, creates a model in your head, of a conversation, a possibility, a Brenda, and then rotates it, manipulates it, takes it apart and puts it back together a million different ways, grinding ever on and on and on.

Which, like I said, has helped get us where we are now. It's cool. But it's at least worth noticing that it happens, I reckon. How often we're chuntering away in imagination pouring over some invented map rather than living here in the actual territory, the present moment, this silent expansive clarity of thusness in which all is as it should be.

And maybe by simply noticing we can readjust the balance and occasionally let the Palaeolithic rest and next Tuesday arrive when it arrives, and have now to be present for whatever it brings.

I can't much help with the Brenda thing though, I'm afraid.