For a long time, I thought meditation was a complete waste of time.
I mean, it’s hard to think of anything more useless than sitting and doing nothing. Even drinking, in social contexts, can get you a job or something.
Then, one day, I sat in the park for a very long time. And it changed my life.
When I came home, I set a reminder in my calendar app called “ferment.” I knew I had to make “intentional unintention” daily practice, and I soon began to crave its solitude and silence.
And it was good . . . while it lasted.
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Our mind, like a mahout, makes a lot of plans:
I want to be present in daily life
I want to perform each action with full focus
I want to face each day with gratitude and serenity
Unfortunately, he isn’t going anywhere until the elephant decides to move his fat ass.
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I felt really awful this morning.
It’s always the times you think you “should” feel most happy that things feel the most odd. You grab an opportunity, it slips between your fingers, and you eventually make peace with that. Then, months later, everything floods back—all at once.
Worldly things have a funny way of dragging you back. You feel restless. Or decide against it—God can wait until I build a business and find a wife. Next thing you know, your quiet time is a particularly long line at Trader Joe’s.
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Most people think yoga is synonymous with stretching.
The first images that pop into my head are hot moms, white wine, and alo leggings. But yoga is far more that—it’s a path to God. In fact, yoga comes from the root word yuj, meaning “join” or “unite.” Physical training and asanas are helpful guides in this.
Swami Sarvapriyananda explains yoga is present in every action of an illumined one—from sweeping the floors to tying his shoes. The Swami’s description of the four types of yoga also resonate with my own experience:
Karma Yoga: Action without attachment to the results. The path of wu wei.
Bhakti Yoga: Love for the divine. The path of Faith.
Jnana Yoga: Using reason to find One. The path of Understanding.
Raja Yoga: Meditation to experience God. The path of fermentation.
All of these are tough elephants to tame, but let’s focus on the training the last for now. The first key to getting our elephant in shape is to:
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Make it daily
Meditation, like lifting or any other skill, needs progressive overload. Our elephant won’t start sprinting overnight, but if he walks an 1% further each day, he’ll go 37.7x faster after a year. Or 1427.6x after two.
But if my elephant gets trained only when he feels like it, he’ll never go anywhere. Swami Ashokananda gives us three tips on this process:
Meditate daily. Preferably 2 to 3 times.
Meditate at a fixed time
Meditate in a designated auspicious place.
I used to think of these as unnecessary crutches. Part of this is true—they absolutely are crutches—but I’m certainly in great need of them.
For auspicious places, I prefer the sunlight and fresh air of park benches. But quiet spots in the City are few and far between. I’ll find a spot by a big window and sit there up to three times a day: after waking, during the 2pm slump, and before bed.
No excuses; when life gets busy, we should be more protective of our quiet time. As Martin Luther writes:
I have so much to do that I shall have to spend the first three hours in prayer.
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Take out the trash
Think of your mental oasis as an apartment in another city. If you are bogged down in worldly things, you won’t go there very often. So when you do, all your copper pipes are gone and your silver spoons now have a higher use—literally.
We need to purge bad company, negativity, and chatter from every part of life. There’s a reason why temperance, regimen, and silence form the foundation of all virtue.
One drastic change for me was music. I’ve averaged 20,000 hours per year on Spotify for the past 7 years. Now I work in silence, but my appreciation for music has actually increased. I listen with intention, and not as background noise.
The same is true for news. Papers, commentators, and “experts” can overload us with data, leading to less informed decisions. Getting a separate phone for work also helped. I deleted all unnecessary apps, blocked all non-work people, and leave my fun-phone at home when I need to focus. Some people call me “boring,” but I’m ok with that.
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Trust the process
Imagine your mind as an ink well. When you first start washing it, the pot seems to spew out an never-ending stream of black. But over time, the water runs clear and you can see details previously obscured.
We also face many little sorrows. An ache in your back, a recent failure, illness, and countless other pests that try to distract you from yourself. On any given day, one or two are probably present. But instead of using them as an excuse to skip the session, we should look forward to overcoming them, as the reward is even greater.
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Find your mantra
From Patanjali to Zhuangzi, there are a lot of guides to meditation. The key is finding what works for you.
One of the biggest supports, recommended by Shankara, is holy company. I was a bit skeptical since I’ve had bad experiences with organized religion (i.e. argued with a pastor as a kid) but after meeting an enlightened man, it truly is eye-opening.
Another support is a point of focus. The bindu, mantra, and om are common tools for this purpose. I use a form of each in my process:
Renounce labels: What is one is one. What is not one is also one.
Renounce edges: Feel the floor under your legs and the air on your skin. Imagine the edge between them wiggling. Then blurring. And finally, melting together.
Renounce ego: Imagine yourself as a drop of ink in the ocean.
Think of meditation as a gas station. It’s not the only period of peace in a worldly day, but a way to refill your tank of serenity. Ease into it and ease out of it.
I sat in a room with big windows today. Air and sun poured in. Thirty minutes in half-lotus and my world was back at peace.