I devote much of Sunday to what I call a Contemplation/Meditation day, when I take four or five hours to look at my life, see what I need to change, and look ahead to the future I want.
The idea is knowing who I really am. I didn’t like me at first, but I like me more now. Meditation is a powerful tool in a tense and divided culture.
For centuries, meditation was almost exclusively a sacred meditation of worship, mostly by monks in the Roman Catholic Church. I came across the writings of Thomas Merton, a brilliant monk who wrote about meditation as something that could go beyond the church and into the lives of almost anyone seeking a spiritual existence.
I was transfixed by his writing and bought a small house in upstate New York to read his books and try to figure out where I belonged in this world and this life. It took me a year.
He got me going on Meditation and Contemplation, two very different things I try to practice regularly.
It took a lot of introspection and honesty to get my life in order. I am grateful to Morton for that. And I’m not done yet, or ever.
Meditation, he wrote, was a discipline with two primary functions for me.
One is to give me sufficient control over my mind, memory, and will, to enable me to recollect myself, understand myself, and begin the hard and long withdrawal from my familiar life and from most of the things I had learned after a lifetime of working in corporate jobs and media companies (both the same thing now).
For Merton, this was the way he could communicate with God, but he also wrote for people like me, soul searchers yearning for a more spiritual life and defining God in my own way. Worshiping Christ is not the only purpose of meditation now; in our tense and dizzying world, it can make all the difference. It is my grounding center and change teacher.
It is in meditation that I finally learned who I was, good and bad.
For me, meditation’s purpose is to teach someone how to work to free myself from created ideas and a suffocating life of corporate values, as they took over America, day by day, business by business, corporation by corporation. In that work, I found only confusion, sorrow, exhaustion of the soul, and cruelty. Money is important to all of us, but when it becomes the sole purpose for work and life, it has gone too far.
The soul of the country was steadily corrupted by work focused only on money, no longer on the lives of the individuals who work everywhere. I discovered Contemplation as well, although I find it too complicated and personal to write coherently about yet. All around me, I saw people fired, laid off, and become anxious dollar signs, not workers with pride.
Meditation has been good for me. It has given me strength to accept growing older and the reality of dying. It has helped me to soften my soul and move past the anger that defined my childhood and the first decades of my life, including now.
I am more tolerant, less judgemental, and best of all, much less anxious. I was on medication for my anxiety for most of my life; I have little panic now, and no medication is necessary. I listen better and learn more.
I understand the need and impulse to bring good work into my life and to work to be a better human being, a man capable of love and empathy and the ability to love others more than myself.
I am wiser, for sure, calmer, and most of the time, at peace with myself. My marriage is stronger, loving, and understanding. There are no gender boundaries in our relationship, just equality, respect, and rich and trusting love.
I credit meditation for much of this. It helped me look at myself, understand why I was so unhappy, and see what I needed to do about my problems and obstacles.
I might actually be one of those satisfying humans who leaves the world a tiny bit better than I found it. Meditation got me there.
