Truth, Meditation, and Me

July 24
Day 1.2

Truth, Meditation, and Me.

A few weeks ago I began an ambitious endeavor to meditate one hour a day for a hundred days. I had all these plans of miraculous transformation, agendas of human potential, mental efficiency and supreme happiness. Absurd. And needless to say, I fell off the wagon seven days in. I was grinding through every day, putting a lot of external pressure on my practice, I think I referred to one session as marching through the swamps of Burma. Well, life intervened, I got busy with projects I was working on, chores, tending to my relationship, it slipped off of the priority list. But the funny thing is, those seven days actually did transform me, just in ways that were not so easy to see, I got closer to myself, some self that I had lost and I began to be guided from this place. I began to trust intuition, but it wasn't a fully conscious thing, sometimes I'd have an inkling that it was going on, I knew something had changed, but I just went with it, and now, two weeks since I stopped, I feel it stronger than ever, and I know I have to start again. But now I believe I know what I have to do. Meditation is quite simply sitting and quietly being with yourself. And with no other agenda that is what I'm going to do.

Last night I went to an event called Brave New Voices, it was the national finals of Slam poetry for high school/college age kids. The raw truth pouring out of these kids, both on the stage and in the audience was a powerful reminder for me of what life is all about. Fearlessly striving to find and be the truth that we are. In this is the richness and meaning of life. In this I start my practice again, here, now.

11:15am

I feel like I just ate really yummy chocolate mind pudding.

Practice is personal. I'm going to call me my practice "Sitting With Me". Just sitting, not being afraid to be with oneself, maybe even accepting oneself, or forgiving, or maybe even loving. The difficulty of sitting with oneself is fear. Fear drives the distractions. Even the inquiry "Who Am I" or "Who is sitting?" is a distraction, it's a worthwhile inquiry, worthwhile to realize, that there is no there, there, but it is a distraction. Just sit and let yourself be. Learn to be with yourself, trust it, connect to yourself, your intuition will guide, do not fear it, it will not let you down.

When the Brave New Voices show ended, I checked my mobile device and saw that Ram Dass was following this blog on Twitter. As the power of the voices of these young people was resonating in me, I thought back to the first time I met him. I was at a birthday party for Timothy Leary at his house in Beverly Hills. I was there because I had recently interviewed him for a magazine, it was my first journalistic interview, and I had forgotten to put a tape in the recorder, a little lesson in impermanence -- my best rolls of film were shot without film in the camera, yet they live in me. So at the party I meet this roly poly bear of man and a few of us got into a conversation with him; and this man, who I would later find out was Ram Dass, was doing something I had never seen anyone do quite like this, he was listening. Someone would say something and Ram Dass would close his eyes and silently mull the words, to the point where you began to believe he may have spaced out and forgotten them entirely, and then he would open his eyes and speak, and in his responses you could hear that he had actually really listened to what had been said and really thought about the words and what they meant and as a result his responses had great power. I realize now what he was doing when he had his eyes closed, he was listening to himself, taking a minute and being with himself, really hearing himself before responding. This is what meditation is to me.

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