Meditation

Chasing Silence

Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash

When I meditate I always, always feel better. Unfortunately, I am rarely consistent. I first started meditating—silent Vipassana tradition—a few months after I got sober at age 27, in late fall, 2010. At the time I was full of anxiety and emotional tumult. Creativity—writing—was pouring out of me, which was incredible, but I didn’t know what to do with all the excess physical and emotional energy I had. And so I joined a meditation group. The Shambala Center. This was in Portland, Oregon.

Less than a year after moving to Portland I left and moved back to the Bay Area. I found a tiny illegal former-garage-turned-studio in a trendy part of North Oakland for the staggeringly low amount of $795/month all utilities included. (This was 2011.) While here I joined another Shambala Group in downtown Berkeley. While there I met a tall thin bald man who looked like Billy Zane. He and I made fast, easy friends and he convinced me to start going to the San Francisco Zen Center. He'd drive us across the Bay Bridge and we’d talk Buddhism and sobriety.

Years later I started going to Dharma Punx groups started by Noah Levine in S.F. (He later got #MeToo’d.) This was a large Friday night gathering of usually something around 150 people, if I had to guess. Maybe 200. Vinnie Farraro led the group. It was an odd mix of punk rockers, ex punks, sober AA people in recovery, misfits, yoga-obsessed hippies, and mainstream average Bay Area people. I’d often catch a ride with half a dozen guys from my AA men’s group in Oakland.

The last major group I belonged to was Will Kabat-Zinn’s group in Berkeley, off San Pablo. Zinn was the son of Jon Kabat-Zinn, well-known Buddhist meditation teacher and mindfulness author. He was also the grandson of the famous lefty historian Howard Zinn. There were usually about 50-70 people I’d guess. Will was fantastic: Wry, intelligent, funny, self-deprecating, honest, realistic and kind. I attended his group on and off for about five years, until around 2018.

That was the last meditation group I belonged to.

During all of this I of course meditated alone, at home, on my own. This was always—just like my group attendance—on and off, come and go, hit and miss. I’d get a good routine going of say 15-25 minute silent sits in the mornings, and then for seemingly no rational reason I’d fall “off the wagon” and wouldn’t sit for five, six, seven months. Then something would happen or click in my brain and I’d start again.

At my zenith—2021, while living in the upper east side of Manhattan—I consistently did silent meditation every morning for a whole hour for probably around six months straight. Then my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I left NYC never to return. I lived the first three months with my parents (for the first time in nearly 20 years) in the spare downstairs bedroom of their new home in Santa Barbara.

I kept up with the hour silent sit each morning for perhaps a month, and then it started to feel too difficult. My mom always needed something right after I woke up. The length of the sit began to feel too long, oppressive, spiritually draining. Why didn’t I just switch to 20 minute sits or something?

I think that’s my alcoholic “addict brain.” All or nothing, right? Well, it’s not exactly that simple or binary. It’s more nuanced and complex than that. But not by a lot.

When I meditate I often say the following out loud to myself in a calm, relaxed voice:

Can I sit here, right now, in this moment, and be with what is?

Can I see that thoughts are simply random mental phenomena that arise and fall, come and go, appear and dissolve within the vast, open space of awareness?

Can I let go?

What’s actually happening right now?

May all beings be free from suffering. May I be free from suffering.

And then I’ll go through lengthy periods of total, glorious silence. I cherish silence. It’s so rare in today’s world, isn’t it? We’re always talking or else thinking or else acting, or else distracted by TV or the internet or social media or our own wild, unharnessed minds. I love the Buddhist line, Don’t just do something; sit there. Exactly. Backpacking is one of my favorite pastimes because you lose cell service, you do physical work, and you can bask in the lovely, lush silence. I like the sound of wind rushing through trees; rivers flowing; creeks rumbling; animals making sounds. But also that beautiful, total silence. There’s something so fundamentally human about silence, something antithetical—in a good way—to our self-created chaos.

Wrapped within solid silence, I discover things about myself. Not cognitively, but spiritually. Not language-based revelations but emotional, human epiphanies. New awareness rises to the surface of consciousness. Culture war fighting, politics, activism, rage: All of these things soften and weak and begin to beautifully dissolve. Things fall apart. I crave things falling apart. The only constant in life is continual change, internally and externally.

Silence struts, self-satisfied, between these two poles. Not struts, actually, but simply sits. Silence wraps you up in its invisible blanket. Silence allows you to roll simply along the river. Silence envelops the human condition, contrasting our constant movement. We’re always moving. But what’s actually happening right now, in this very perfect precise moment?