Most days, I feel completely lost in my own head. I wake up and feel like I’m stuck in a surreal bubble spirited away from reality and thrown into some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare. I know on an intellectual level that this isn’t actually the case, but that doesn’t make it feel any less depressing.
Life feels as if I’m floating around in a torrent of chaos and noise with no sense of which way is up or down, just letting the currents of time pull me wherever I’ll end up going. Every choice becomes the wrong one. Every end becomes a dead one.
The war drum of rage, confusion, and frustration sound off in my head. It doesn’t even sound like noise anymore; it’s now the norm. The more I try to tune it out, the louder it gets.
Something had to give.
You’ll notice that everything about how I feel was in the present tense, that’s because none of the basic feelings have actually changed, but how I deal with them has. I found meditation. It may not be a silver bullet, but damn I’ll take it.
I learned to quiet the noise in my head. The screaming voice in the back of my head, the voice of doubt, the voice of pessimism, the voice of cynicism may as well be miles away now.
Meditation has many forms, I prefer Zazen myself. Guided meditations just turn into a twisted day dream in my head, but Zazen ironically keeps me most focused on myself by “focusing” on nothing.
Image by Johannes Plenio from Pixabay
Zazen is deceptively easy, after all, all you do is close your eyes and become without thought while counting breaths until you don’t need to count them anymore. Turns out, it’s far harder than it seems. It’s easy for 30 seconds, but a lot harder after a few minutes, and even harder after twenty.
Meditation is like standing in the ocean feeling the waves as a storm blows in over the horizon. In the beginning, the waves are calm and easy to just let flow past. As the storm comes closer, the waves get stronger and stronger and the current begins to tug at you unless you relax and just focus on staying where you are. Feel the waves but don’t fight them.
Your thoughts are like the waves, the more you ignore them, the more they affect you. They become more and more intrusive vying for attention. If you fight a wave, it just pushes back. If you fight a thought, it just becomes more intrusive.
Image by The only way to win is to acknowledge it and let it go on its way. Count your breaths and let the thoughts flow on by. Acknowledge but do not dwell. Accept but do not indulge.
Eventually all you are left with is calmness and silence… and yourself.
It wasn’t until I actually got serious about meditation that I realized how hard the sound of silence hit me. The silence was deafening, but also liberating in a way nothing else was. I was trapped with myself with nothing else to fixate on. There were no more crises, there were no more world-ending problems, there was no more sky falling, there was just me and myself, alone.
The onslaught of thoughts which beat me down over and over just didn’t matter anymore. I stopped fighting the waves and just let them flow past. Who cares about figuring out a card payment that you can’t do anything about right this second because you need to go to the bank tomorrow to shuffle money around, or some work assignment where you need some piece from someone else that will be there tomorrow when you can just focus on the moment?
None of it really matters anymore outside of when it actually matters. That’s not to say I don’t care about resolving personal issues or my work, but actually the opposite. I care more that I can stop caring.
A few minutes of meditation where I can squeeze them in help me in ways that nothing else really can. The cessation of thought (or at least, my best faith attempt) means that when I do think it’s more meaningful and intentional. I’m not fixated on every thought that comes through, good or bad.
Each thought gets its acknowledgment then goes its own way unless it is imperative. Each session of meditation makes that acknowledgment a little quicker and a little easier. The thoughts don’t linger unless they have a good reason to.
Like I said before, it’s no silver bullet, but it just makes things easier and puts everything else in context. The Kafkaesque nightmare of my own thoughts still rears its head, but now it’s for minutes rather than days. I can recenter myself and move my own baseline of normalcy until existential dread seems like melodrama rather than just the state of things.
This isn’t some crazy next level ecstasy or enlightenment. It’s just setting the baseline to where you can actually focus on either if you want. We’re not playing our favorite song by meditating, we’re just making the room quiet when we need it.
By not thinking, all I can do is think of everything that actually matters afterwards. Losing myself in my head is no longer losing myself in anxiety and dread. I feel more alive than I ever have, and it’s all thanks to sitting around not thinking.
Featured image by Pexels from Pixabay