Learning To Meditate

Learning to meditate is hard. This is my experience with learning to meditate. I was coming up on six months clean and sober. My sponsor’s sponsor, which I jokingly used to call my grand sponsor, was coming up on 40 years sober. I used to enjoy talking with old Bill often. He was kind, respectful, direct, and openhearted. These were all qualities that I had desired, but I did not know how to express them myself or know many people who did, for that matter. So I used to like to talk with him whenever possible. He was one of the few people I trusted even a little.

One night after a meeting, Bill came over and sat next to me. He smiled that soft, gentle smile that typically made me feel safe, if only momentary. On that particular Friday night, I was not able to tap into his smile in order to shift the sadness, desperation, and frustration I was experiencing. Bill noticed this immediately. He leaned over and put his right hand on my left elbow, “How are you doing, young man?”. Bill was old enough to forget pretty much everyone’s name, and we were all either Young Man or Young Woman, regardless of age or any other identifying factors.

I let out a deep sigh and felt my belly clinch, “I’m not doing so good, Bill. I go to meetings, I talk to my sponsor, I hang out with all my recovering friends, I pray every night before I go to bed, and every morning when I wake up, I still feel miserable. I feel like it’s never going to get better for me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve been there. I can give you a suggestion, but I’ll only do so if you agree right now before I tell you what it is that you will do it every day for ninety days. Otherwise, it’s not gonna really help. You need to do it every single day.”

I felt several muscles twitch throughout my body. They were just little minor tremors, enough to let me know that I was too scared to say yes and even more scared to say no. I took a deep breath, “OK. I’ll do it.”

“Great!  This is what I need you to do. Every morning, I need you to sit on the floor or sit on a chair in your bedroom, read First Corinthians 13, and then sit there for five minutes afterward. Just sit there in silence. Just sit there for five minutes. I need you to do this every day for the next ninety days. And if you hang in there to do it for ninety days, I want you to come and tell me about it. That’s what I need you to do!”.

What felt like a pretty high level of fear when trying to decide if I was going to commit and say yes or just say no and still be miserable quickly shifted to what I would now identify as terror, filling my whole being. This was the dialogue in my head to the best of my memory. “First Corinthians? Is that in the Bible? Does he really want me to read the fucking Bible? Does he know who I am? I’m not even sure if I believe in God; forget about Jesus and the fucking Bible. The Bible? Every morning? And sit and do nothing for five minutes? Is he out of his mind? Ninety days?!?”

“You committed to do it. I asked you in advance if you would be willing to commit, and you said yes. You said you want to feel better, and you were sick of being miserable.” He stood up and tapped me on the shoulder. Bull smiled as he walked away. I sat there for what seemed like forever, but I imagine it was about a minute, staring fiercely at nothing or nobody. My body felt like it was trembling. I wanted to get up but didn’t feel solid enough to try. I sat there for a little longer, then I stood up and joined my friends who were getting ready to go to the diner.  I said nothing to them about my agreement with Bill.

When I got home later that night, I dug out the Bible that some woman gave me when I was in rehab. I had never read the Bible in any shape or form in my thirty years of life.

The next morning, I woke up and started my day as I did most days. Then I noticed the red NIV Bible sitting on my dresser. I had forgotten completely about the commitment I had made just the night before. I cursed under my breath. Then I cursed at Bill under my breath. I grabbed the Bible, sat on the floor with my back leaning against my bed, and I opened it. I looked in the table of contents to see if I had heard him correctly about the passage he told me I was to read. I saw Corinthians I.  When I found that chapter, I flipped to 13, took a deep breath, and silently read the part he asked me to read.

I understood little. This was the part I understood. “And then these three remain, faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love”. I understood that. And it made me very uncomfortable. I had very little faith, very little hope, and little or no clue of what love was. I closed the book, put it on my bed, grabbed my red LED digital alarm clock on my night table, and set the alarm to go off in five minutes. My mind vacillated between how much I hated Bill, how stupid it was to read the Bible, how stupid it was to sit there and do nothing, and how mortified I was about how desperately I needed/wanted to experience faith, hope, and love. I came close to tears and was saved by the alarm clock. I bolted into the shower as quickly as possible to remove that experience and all of the thoughts that transpired as quickly as possible.

I woke up the next day and did the same thing. I had a very similar result. I may have cursed at Bill under my breath more on the second day than the first day, which was less than the third day, which was less than the fourth day, which was less than the fifth day. And so it went for the bulk of those ninety days of sitting and reading First Corinthians and being in silence for five minutes. On the ninetieth morning, all I could think about during my five minutes of silence was that I couldn’t wait to see Bill that night to tell him that it was a complete waste of my fucking time and it was the stupidest thing I ever did. When I saw him later on that night after the meeting, I walked up to him and let him know that I had done my ninety days of reading the Bible and sitting for five minutes.

“Great. How did it go?” His smile was as big as I had ever seen.

All of that vigor and brashness that I experienced in the morning disappeared. “I have to be honest, I hated it. I don’t think I learned a lot. I don’t think if I got out of it, whatever it was, I was supposed to get out of it.”

“So what did you think about most during those five minutes every morning? Specifically, which did you think about more, how much you need to have faith, hope, and love, or how much you wanted to kill me for making you read the Bible?”

I broke out hysterically, laughing. “Probably how much I wanted to kill you for making me read the Bible. Sometimes, I did think about faith, hope, and love, too. I really didn’t understand a lot of the rest of it very much. It seems like if you read something for ninety days, you should be able to understand it, but I didn’t really get it except for the faith, hope, and love part.”

“Good job! I’m glad you were able to be honest with me. I’ve been reading that same passage for forty years now, and I haven’t figured out most of it yet myself. But I think I understand the faith, hope, and love part. So when you are reading that chapter every morning and sitting in silence for five minutes, how much time were you thinking about how miserable you are, how much your life sucks, and how it’s never going to get better?”

I wiggled my body a little bit. I then settled my feet back on the ground. “Wow! I never really thought about it, but that was really the only time of the day that I didn’t think about those things. I was so busy being pissed off at you and trying to figure out what the fuck the Bible was about that I forgot to be miserable and pissed off at my own life! Huh.”

“Well then, you did your job well!”

“So what do I do now?”

“You do it again!” He laughed a hearty laugh that everybody in the room heard and smiled.

So I did it again. And after that second ninety days, I did it again. None of the stores had books on meditation back then. I was living in New Jersey and was petrified of going to NYC while in early recovery. Somebody had told me there was a bookstore in New Hope, Pennsylvania, that might sell some books on meditation. So I took a road trip out there and walked around for several hours before I finally found the bookstore they were talking about. I bought a book by Louise Hay, another by Emmet Fox, and a cassette tape by Joan Borysenko.   I was so excited about the entire two-hour ride home. All I could think about was that I now had books on how to meditate! In my mind, the books would tell me how to meditate, I would master it and everything in my life would be fixed. Little did I know…

Three decades later of daily meditation practice, I still have not mastered meditation, and certainly not everything in my life is “fixed”.  My meditation practice has changed many times. These days, my practice is a combination of sitting and movement. I learned meditation by sitting and meditating. I realize how simplistic that sounds, but it is accurate. I did not have a Meditation Teacher. Neither of the books that I bought actually taught me how to meditate. There were no classes to take. There were no YouTubes. There were no apps for my phone. I just kept plugging along. I imagine if I had a Teacher or an app or a video, I would’ve learned quicker and more efficiently.

Over the years, I have practiced and taught many forms and methods of meditation. The good news is that meditation is not one-size-fits-all. For some people, sitting on the floor with their legs crossed and hands in the Mudra position in silence is like water in the desert. To other people, it’s the desert with no water. For some people, Hatha Yoga is the answer to every question they have in life. To other people, Yoga is a way to be reminded of everything they don’t like about their body. If you have not found a method that works for you, I have three suggestions.  Keep exploring and discovering different methods till something feels “right” for you. Keep practicing a specific form daily while exploring other forms. If neither of these two recommendations works, find a Teacher and work with them for at least six months.

I learned to meditate by meditating. That is not the system that will be effective or successful for everyone. I believe one of the greatest obstacles people have in wanting to start or be more consistent with meditation practice is they have so many choices, options, and expectations about meditation and what it should be like. I had the “benefit” of ignorance. I also had the benefit of being desperate. My life was a mess, as was I. Some part of me knew that meditation was going to be part of my survival and development. I had no idea what it was supposed to be like or what I was supposed to feel. This was beneficial for me. I did not have access to videos or websites of Gurus or New Age pop-culture superstars. There are many great teachers out there that I would encourage you to explore to support your meditation practice. Tich Nhat Hahn, Pema Chodron, and Thomas Merton are three that come to mind for sitting and walking meditation from a Monk’s experience, which has been incredibly valuable to me. The key is to give your practice at least six months before determining if it is “working” for you or not. Six months of daily practice. If you miss a day, just get back to it. Are you motivated enough by misery, self-doubt, fear, depression, anxiety, or loneliness to show up for yourself every day for six months?

I invite you to share your experiences in the comments below on learning to meditate. What was/is it like for you to learn to meditate?

Other posts you may enjoy:

Fear of Silence – It Can Be Loud

How Successful People Stay Calm

Can Success and Sex Sell Mindfulness?

Benefits of Meditation: Being Present in Your Life

Harvard Unveils MRI Study Proving Meditation Literally Rebuilds The Brain’s Gray Matter In 8 Weeks

Michael Swerdloff

Providence Holistic Counselor, Coach and Reiki