Life becomes Meditation

I find that my entire life has become a meditation.  And that it has brought me peace.

With practice, with introspection and awareness, and with a willingness to embrace change, peace can be found through meditation. Since I have found peace, it seems not unreasonable to assume that anybody can.

The blurring of the boundaries between life and meditation must have come about of its own volition, since I cannot recall having made any conscious decision on the matter. As the days have drifted by, I have found my mind ever clearer and ever emptier of the preoccupations which seem to engulf those possessing a more driven mindset.

It is clear to me that, like so many, I have been searching for something my entire life. It is now obvious that I mistook what it was that I thought I wanted. With the benefit of hindsight it seems evident that all I ever wanted was peace, but for so many years I believed I wanted happiness and that is something subtly different.

And even in chasing happiness, I looked in all the wrong places. Money, different countries, freedom from work, success, fame. Bits of some of which I partially achieved.

A propensity for deep and perennial blackness developed unusually early, the combination, I imagine, of a less than useful genetic inheritance, coupled with an upbringing in an environment which proved to be not ideal. Again, with the benefit of hindsight.

To this day I still have dreams about my days as a City lawyer, and of the years spent as an investment banker in far corners of some foreign field.

I never seemed able to find a way out of my prison. You can not just switch peace on. You can try thinking of nothing and sitting under a banyan tree in a loincloth but it never worked that way for me.

My nature has always been contemplative and religion has always held a strong attraction. The chanting of psalms, the glory of stained glass. Temples and buddhas, incense and incantation. The tales of a simple life of goodness and decency.

And yet driven by deep and intractable insecurity from my childhood, I sought money. From a world in which I did not belong.

My attempts to use meditation to alleviate often severe suffering met with scant success for many, many years.

And now, almost suddenly, I have met with dramatic success after a renewed and determined attempt.  It’s been creeping up on me, becoming successively more effective, for two or three years.

Physically speaking, I undertake around an hour of sitting meditation each morning, before even getting out of bed. Often enough I will do a further hour or so during the remainder of the day. In addition, often as not I find myself using the technique while out walking or sitting on the bus.

The second and equally important daily practice is meditative exercise. For an hour or sometimes two.  Most of us will have heard of the runner’s high, but my own practice does not require me to run a sweaty marathon or pound along on a machine in the gym.

I undertake resistance exercises, developed, loosely, from pilates. But I suspect that yoga or tai chi would have much the same effect, if I could be bothered to learn the moves.

And as to the “high”, it is very real, and infallibly reliable.  Scientists say that chemically speaking such exercises may produce endocannabinoids and although subtly different, the mental and even physical effects share a resemblance to that achieved on cannabis or psychedelics.

The same quale, the same emotions seem to come to mind. Without exaggeration, a form of physical and mental bliss is reliably reproduced every time I undertake the routine.

Equally importantly, my mind empties. I feel, I am, but I am not thinking. No mind, no problem.

But returning to the generalities, cause and effect are very difficult to disentangle. Which came first, the horse or the carriage, the chicken or the egg.

Has meditation changed my life, or have changes I have made in my life made my meditation possible.

My best guess is that there is an element of both involved.

Without meditation my life would not have improved, and without some subtle changes in both my outlook on life and my physical practices, meditation may not have met with success.

I look back on the posts I have made in this blog and I can see these changes writ large.

In 2018 I embarked on a perhaps foolhardy attempt to eradicate my often severe depression using psychedelics.  They were all the rage – research was emerging every day from the likes of John Hopkins in the US and UCL in London. Papers were being written every day and the usual plethora of capitalist sharks were rushing to set up everything psychedelic.  Documentaries poured out, each more effulgent, each more optimistic.

I found the reality somewhat different.  Eventually, the use of psychedelics produced, in me at least, serious fear and paranoia.  Which continued for many, many months after I had abandoned this dangerous and over hyped attempt at self medication.

But I do believe that the catharsis which my adventures brought about has been key in my development.  My writing became prolific and brought about what I can rather grandiloquently call my weltanschauung.  At first I railed against man and the universe, I expressed my deep discontent and despair with our species.  The shocking indignity of birth, illness and decline into death.  The obscenity of the divide between haves and have nots. The endless violence, cruelty and greed which has ever dominated human society .

Slowly, in conjunction with much thought and word and deed, I was able to let go. To let it pass.  To retreat into silence. To accept that while I would like our world and our species to be very different, the high probability was that all would for ever remain the same.

I retreated within more and more each day, and found it a place I was very happy to be.  I found myself ever less likely to argue, even to venture a view. Conflict became ever more intolerable. 

Peace is to be found by burying one’s head in the sand.  By accepting the world for what it is and letting it pass by.  Eventually I found my entire outlook on life had subtly altered and with it my health and wellbeing.

I still have to try. Sometimes very hard. To bite my tongue, to refrain from expressing any opinion. To live and let live. To cease to blame or to judge. Anything or anyone.

And that is where I find myself.  Happier attending sext at St Wandrille than  battling at the coalface of grim and selfish capitalism.  More content quietly playing the piano than attending a meeting, or slapping my metaphorical member on the table with my erstwhile investment banking colleagues.

And if I was not relatively well off and living in relative civilization? Would I find peace in war torn Syria or the hell of the Sudan.  God knows, I hope I don’t have to find out.

But I do wonder whether, even in those places and those circumstances, I might not find peace.  Living as an ascetic somewhere as remote as I could get.  Keeping my head down and living on nothing.

Pointless to hypothesize. Senseless to wonder.

I am as I am. I am where I am. Until I cease to be. And for the first time in my life, that is enough.