It’s day 10 and I can’t decide if I hate Jeff Warren or is he like one of those popular kids I use to pretend to hate in high school, but in reality wanted to be like and liked by them. And then there’s his girlfriend, Tamara Levitt, with her calm sexy voice dropping pearls of wisdom at the end of each session. Together they are the bane of my early morning existence.
I so want to sit down and start my day with twenty minutes of quite energizing meditation. Something that will take me through the day in a Zen like state that has others saying to themselves, “he’s like Outcast, just the coolest motherfunker on the planet”
I want to be Jeff, cool and in control, with a touch of Tamara, who always has just the right antidotal story to illustrate a point. Instead my brain and thoughts are a jumbled garden with bees alighting on flower after flower never taking the time to settle before they are off to the next thought.
I’ve never actually met Jeff or Tamara and despite my time with them in my head over the last ten day, I have no idea if they are boyfriend and girlfriend.
The last ten days sitting on my living room floor in the last of the night’s darkness at 5:30am with these two in my ears coaxing me towards a calmer more enlightened me have been unexpectedly hard. So far I’ve learned about equanimity (I don’t have it), my homebase, which feel likes a house party, and popping out of my thoughts with inner smoothness. I hear it, understand it but I can’t get it.
You only have to try and mediate or just try to sit still with your eyes closed for ten minutes to realize that mediating is hard work. Jeff reminds me of this daily, that mediating is about using brain muscle we didn’t know we had, before he puts me through another round of exercises that leaves my gray matter mushier than when we started.
I’ve come to befriend Jeff and Tamara via the Calm app. With their help and too hold myself accountable, I have paid up front for a whole year of this subscription based service that is going to teach me to meditate and in turn find a new inner calm.
That may sound a bit cliche and hokey but it’s not far from the truth. The last year I’ve spent a lot of time with my own thoughts as I laid around recovering from surgery, stretched out on a table getting blasted with radiation or just walking the neighborhood trying to get my strength back. All of this down time has helped me realize is that I don’t know myself as well as I thought I did. Crazy, after 52 years, I don’t know myself completely. I am hoping that a deliberate dive into meditating will help me get to know me better.
It’s a process. I get it. Ten days is just a drop in the bucket, but come on brain, calm down and throw me a bone.
Whoooaaa! What just happened?
It’s the next day. I stopped writing the above because trying to explain mediation, much less understand it on a personal level and how to do it correctly was making my brain hurt. Yet, some how today, early this morning it all clicked. Just for a second but somehow on day 11 I meditated (or at least what I think it did) for a split second and then it was gone like a tendril of smoke I could see it drifting further and further away from me until the wind broke it in to a thousand indistinguishable particles.
The rest of the meditation session was not nearly as fulfilling as my mind kept wandering (according to Jeff and Tamara wandering is part of the process as you should acknowledge it and gently bring yourself back to your home base) back to that split second.
Imagining putting together that split second with another split second and another and evidentially those seconds become minutes have me excited for this small break through that happened while seated on the dog bed in my living room this morning.
I really don’t hate Jeff and Tamara but like anyone that pushes you into a state of discomfort there is a certain amount of resistance you have to that person as they push you. Once the break throughs happen the resistances become a challenge.
“Is that all you got?” becomes my mindset.
And yes I know that meditation is not a competitive sport but if the push to do better moves me to a place of quite contemplative deeper and better understanding of myself I’ll take it.
Bikes Kill Cancer 