If you need a refresher before reading Chapter Five, you can click here to read Chapter 4. If you’re new here, you can click here to start from the beginning. Or you can get started right away on Chapter 5 below!
5
What happened to me on that Father’s Day morning in 2008?
What was this prison cell I’d stepped out of and, if leaving it was such ecstasy, why would I so gladly return to it? And perhaps most importantly of all, how did it happen? What had created the conditions for the experience? Sorting out the answers to those questions quickly became the calling of my life. The answers themselves were a little slower in coming. It took years, actually, to understand this:
Unbeknownst to me, I was practicing a single discipline that can change your life and, I believe, transform the world.
I know that is the sort of thing gurus say right before you find out they have a secret harem of wives or they’ve used all of their followers’ money to buy a private jet. I can assure you: I love my only wife dearly, and small planes sort of terrify me. For that matter, the word guru, when spoken in my general direction, makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. The only thing that separates a guru from the rest of us is the height from which they will eventually fall.
No, the practice I’m speaking of is not the thing of gurus and movements. It’s not a secret that will make you rich with a little positive thinking. It’s not a way to produce a new earth in two-hundred pages. It’s much smaller than all of that. Slower. Grittier. Usually two steps forward and one step back, though three steps back is never out of the question. Here’s the practice, in four words.
Meditating on your ego.
Two of those words—meditating and ego—can be defined in countless ways. For example, I grew up in a church in which a particular category of forbidden practices was made to sound particularly ominous. We had a word for it: New-Age-y. By the time I entered kindergarten, I was pretty sure if you did something “New-Age-y,” you’d wind up spending eternity with your eyebrows singed off.
Meditation was one of those New-Age-y practices, and for years I assumed it was the kind of thing long-haired, bearded guys did while sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop, wearing linen, and smoking opium. It was an entryway into evil for some vague reason no one ever explained, so I didn’t give it much thought. And yet, on a Marine base in 2008, it was meditation in the simplest sense—not prayer in the traditional sense—that paved the way for me to hear the voice of grace within me.
Clearly, it is essential to define our terms.
Let’s begin with meditation, which has a long and storied history, beginning thousands of years ago with Buddhism and other Eastern traditions, continuing all the way up to modern times with its incorporation into scientifically proven treatments for anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic pain, and countless other ailments. Here’s one definition: Meditation is simply the practice of choosing a singular focus, being mindful of our focus wandering, and redirecting it back to our chosen target. This is why you so often hear of breathing in meditation practice. It’s not a psychological trick to relax you. It’s simply a matter of choosing some point in your body where you can feel the breathing sensations most vividly, focusing on that point, and bringing your attention back to it every time your mind wanders.
Yesterday, I went for a walk at dawn and made my focus the quickly shifting daylight. Every time my mind wandered to this chapter, or all the ways I’m failing as a dad, or what drills I’d run at soccer practice in the afternoon, I noticed the wandering and brought my attention back to the brightening blue sky, the glint of sun on a kid’s bike laying in a yard, the shadow of an oak on a budding tiger lily. That’s meditation. There’s nothing “New-Age-y” about actually paying attention to your life, rather than all the chatter in your head.
The inner muscle you are strengthening in this process is called mindfulness. And like any muscle, it hurts at first to strengthen it. It’s tedious and boring and frustrating at best. You feel weak. Like a failure. It seems like a waste of time. You might even see some things in you that you’ve been trying not to see. In the beginning, it’s like the first day of a couch to 5k training regimen. It feels grueling. Which is why most people don’t persist with meditation for very long.
Furthermore, these days, we’re being sold meditation as a product, with the promise that it will make you more peaceful, more happy, more successful. However, meditation in its purest sense is not designed to make you feel a certain way. That’s TikTok you’re thinking of. Rather, meditation is meant to help you be present to whatever you’re experiencing. It’s not about a pleasant destination, it’s about presence to the journey, wherever it might be leading. TikTok is definitely an easier sell.
Here’s an even harder sell: shifting the focus of our meditation from our breath or daylight, to our ego.