An Intro to Meditation
by Wesley Birch
I woke up today at 4:53 with no alarm, feeling fully rested and ready for the day. Bre and the girls are still asleep, and will be for the next 2 hours. I sat down on my meditation cushion and drew my awareness to my breath. The 5:00 hour is my favorite time to meditate. Much of my normal world is still fast asleep, and my brain has not had enough time to make its daily firing of neurons to stir up the waters of my mind. I feel and hear only calm, peaceful serenity as I sit there in complete stillness and silence until the clock says 6:00; an hour of sitting still.
What does meditation help me achieve? In a sense, meditation achieves nothing; it’s almost the opposite of achievement, and yet it has helped me achieve so much. Before I began practicing meditation, my mind controlled me. I would believe every stupid thing that my brain told me, and I gave my brain complete power and control over me. I remember talking to someone one day and they brought about a concept that was completely novel to me. He said to me, “There are people that have trained their mind so that they have complete awareness of their thoughts and they, in a sense, know that they are thinking, and can stop their brain from continuing down certain trains of thought and can control where they focus their mind.”
To my anxiety riddled mind, this sounded like a mythical dream; a fantasy well outside of reach, but at the same time, it brought me so much hope. I have always loved the idea of training my body. In high-school, I started lifting weights and experimenting with different diet techniques to train the musculoskeletal side of my body. I loved the process of building my body, but I never loved my body. It was never “enough”. “I’m too skinny, I’m too fat, I don’t have enough muscle here, I wish I could lift more weight, once I hit my next goal then I’ll be happy…” but that happiness never came; it always sat illusively around the corner of my mind; a future goal that seemed so attainable, and yet was so far out of reach. Could I train my mind to be happy? Could I train my mind so that I can control where my thoughts go?
At this point in my life, the idea of controlling my mind seemed laughable, but I remembered back before I started training my body and the thought of becoming strong and being able to lift heavy seemed to be laughable, but now I could deadlift 385 pounds, squat 375 pounds, and bench press 235 pounds. And while I was never fully happy with my body, I was able to recognize that what I was capable of after spending years training my body was no longer “laughable”, but instead, very respectable. I had a choice, do I continue living life with my bain controlling me, or do I push forward and try to train my brain so that I can control it? The decision to pick the latter of the options came easily. I was so tired of being pelted with anxiety every day, so tired of my brain dictating how I feel, so tired of my brain constantly playing the victim (a role that was easy to play given my upbringing), so tired of being miserable and craving for the grave. It’s time to train this.
I used to think that training the brain meant learning all that I could. The more knowledge I possessed, the stronger my brain would be. I read book after book, and listened to countless hours of philosophy podcasts. “I’m training my brain” I would say to myself. I kept going, filling my head with knowledge; I couldn’t get enough. And yet I didn’t seem to be able to control my brain any better; it was almost getting worse. Since filling my brain was not working, I thought I should try the opposite and start emptying my brain.
One of the books that I got hold of was “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts. I had never read any author that could so gracefully explain the art of meditation and the practice of Zen in a way that a Western reader, such as me, would understand. Meditation was a concept I was familiar with. At 18 years old, I had an introduction to meditation in my psychology 101 class, and had dabbled a little bit in meditation practice, but the way Watts described brought a whole new level of understanding. One of the most helpful bits was him explaining that the easiest way to get into a meditative state is to sit comfortably with your eyes closed, and, with the awareness on the breath, simply allow your ears to hear whatever finds them. “Don’t try to make sense of these sounds, or try to label them” he would say, “simply allow them to be”. He would write that if the mind was busy and full, it was comparable to a lake or a body of water that was rough and choppy. If a person is actively trying to calm down the mind, it is like taking a flat iron and hitting the surface of the water to try and calm down the water, which in turn only makes the water more aggravated and stirs it up even more. The only way to calm down the mind is to sit and observe your thoughts as the choppy waters of the mind return to a state of peaceful clarity on their own. See your thoughts, touch them with your awareness, and let them go.
He had a way of making this journey to controlling one’s own mind seem so simple, so I gave it a go. In 2019 I spent the whole year waking up every morning, walking half a mile to a private pond that sits on the property that I live on, and meditating for a period of time before walking back home. This practice was mind transforming. I could observe the harsh currents of my mind whipping about violently as they processed every bit of information going on around me. I could see how hyperactive my mind was. I could see how powerful its currents were, and I could sit there and observe them slowly settling down on their own as I gave up my desire to forcefully calm them down (like hitting the waters with a flat iron). As these waters became calmer, they turned clearer and clearer. I could start seeing into the depths of my mind, just as you can see into the depths of a calm body of water. I would start drawing my awareness to a deeper and deeper depth of my mind, and as my awareness expanding into the depths of my soul and mind, I would see deep traumas starting to surface, horrors that I had experienced in the past starting coming to the surface, chopping up the waters and muddying the clear depths of my soul.
While I thought I had made huge strides in my training, I had realized that my path to self realization and taking control of my own mind had only just began; A path that promised hope and joy; a path that never ends and never begins, and when I started walking this path, I felt I had arrived; I’m home; a path of true eternal life. I seemed to have found the straight and narrow path worth walking for the rest of my life, and even longer than that. This is a path welcome to all; come walk with me.
“Where I am is where I’m going and I’m going to the Promised Land.” – Mike Love and the Full Circle.
