Hi readers,
This is the second installment of my new advice-type column. This correspondent’s note from earlier this year has stayed in my mind since. I’m going to respond to this bit here, which they’ve agreed sounds good. Periodic reminder you can send questions to whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com or contact me here. Here was the column’s first installment.
Dear Sandy,
I need to mediate, I want to mediate. I'm afraid and I'm also too busy to set aside, to find the time, to meditate. I know it would be good for me. Maybe JournalSpeak will launch me. I enjoy writing, once I start.
S.
Dear S.,
I’m often humbled by how hard it can feel, as a human, to make even one small change to my routines. Lately I’ve been working with a professional on something (I’ll explain later) and therefore I have homework every day. I have found myself absolutely overwhelmed by the thought of this, homework. I’ll remember the homework, my insides lighting up with shame. Fuck. Some days I walk around beating myself up all day about failing to do the homework, until I finally do it. Some days I fail to do it altogether. I’ve wondered what is wrong with me, given this is an entirely elective thing, this is something I’m paying somebody to assign me, and yet I find such intense mental fatigue at the mere premise of yet another thing.
Yet another thing, in addition to the already often daunting daily mental self-care checklist I let guide my life. Yet another thing in addition to the other bigger picture stuff like national politics or whether I’ll ever go to the DMV to update my license photo or what to cook for dinner.
There is this other truth that I feel creep up in me, which is once I do have a habit formed, even one I never thought would take, I can be marvelously devoted to it. An odd example perhaps but I’ve been thinking of something Nicole Byer was saying about quitting cigarettes. She was talking about how much effort she put into starting cigarettes, as a teenager, teaching herself to smoke cigarettes in her garage. She smoked faithfully for twenty years. This made me remember that, right, it was work to start smoking cigarettes, which I forgot, lost later on in the long work of quitting. (I started as a teen as well, and had my last cigarette during one of those 2016 debates.)
It can be easy to forget how hard it was to start all sorts of things you now do every day without thought. I guess I go there first because I hope you’ll be kind to yourself when it comes to when and how you start meditating. I have discussed my own journey towards becoming a meditates-daily kind of guy before. It’s been a long road, one that involved many, many, many failed attempts. Now all those failures look less like failures and more like the path itself.
Many times I was taught to meditate but it never felt like something that was ‘for me’; I always felt an outsider to all that. Maybe because I grew up a townie adjacent to a big Buddhist retreat center. I walked my dog through their organic gardens and by their odd-looking buildings but wasn’t allowed to actually go study there. When I was a teenager I dated a guy whose father had gotten real into Buddhism and he began giving me books on mindfulness and delivering me lectures over coffee. He’d have me join for group meditations, ceremonies or whatever. Mostly I’d be petrified of messing anything up.
Whenever I closed my eyes and “tried to meditate,” what I encountered was a hellscape of worries and shame and fear and sorrow and anger, my internal scene overwhelming in every respect. I wonder when you say ‘I’m afraid,’ if this is what you mean. I was terrible at meditation, was all I knew back then, and every time I tried and failed yet again this felt like proof.
The best part about meditation is you can’t actually mess it up. I know it may seem otherwise. I for sure used to tell myself and anyone who’d listen that I was the actual worst when it came to meditating. How if I tried I’d just be overwhelmed by my awful thoughts in there. I learned to avoid group meditation scenarios for fear my thoughts would take me somewhere so dark so quickly I’d get embarrassingly emotional.
But then I’d wind up in situations where group meditation was nonetheless required — like a professor who taught a class on Eastern mysticism in college led off every session with minutes of silence, all of us at our desks. Or when I started taking yoga classes back then, I found to my dismay they always ended with the savasana, ten minutes or whatever of closed eyes, back flat on the floor. Excruciating, for me, but I just endured these moments because, I supposed, I did believe something about meditating must be worthwhile. Why else would everyone always be going on about it? All I knew for sure was I was the worst at meditating — and also generally.
Through the years that followed, once in a while I’d give my own meditation practice a try. Maybe I’d force my eyes shut for ten minutes or even longer. I’d emerge consumed not only with whatever terrors were encountered therein but also newly awash in such shame that I’m so bad at this. Having been taught meditation plenty, I knew when you are melting down in negative thoughts inside you are supposed to just think to yourself thinking thinking. Or notice the thoughts like they are bubbles, or like passing clouds on the expanse of blue sky. But all that crap never seemed to matter once I was inside and overtaken by my own treacherous tides.
What changed is a long story, one that I admit won’t make really sense to anyone else until I’ve published this next book. But in short I started meditating because now I have to. It no longer feels elective, a fact that relates to a broader, irrevocable shift to my reality. I meditate every day, if only for five minutes or ten. Though often I do fifteen or more. I make time, even if there is seemingly none, or if there’s seemingly no space — a house full of guests, children around, whatever. I will literally meditate on the toilet or excuse myself to walk into the woods. Nowadays, those closest to me will even ask if I’ve meditated yet today and encourage it if I’ve not.
So I just want to underscore, I get that it’s hard. Hard to find the time. My thought would be, don’t worry big picture, like how are you going to do this every day. Just worry about today. Try meditating today. Just for five minutes, maybe ten if you really want. Tomorrow, see if you can try meditating again, again just for five minutes. I highly suggest using a guided meditation app, like InsightTimer which I use. It has many selections to choose from. Put on something that appeals to you. If it turns out you hate what you selected, discard it and try another.
Don’t worry if you spend the whole five minutes feeling terrible or like you suck at this or worried about something in your life or everything in the world. Just get through the five minutes. Then tomorrow, again, just do the five minutes. As you get used to it, meditation will no longer seem as harsh, as my younger self was always annoyed to be told. As I’ve now experienced, you can eventually find yourself not only not dreading meditation, but rather craving that dark space, that retreat. This is in no small part because of the benefits of having meditated, as they start to express elsewhere in one’s daily life.
You mentioned JournalSpeak, a companion-to-meditation practice I’m often recommending; no surprise I agree JournalSpeak can be a good gateway drug in terms of forming the meditation habit. I also know adding JournalSpeak to a mindfulness practice can make the overall task more daunting, time-wise. As in, you’re committing to thirty minutes rather than just meditating for five (or ten, as is recommended after JournalSpeak). And then there’s the psychic lift of tuning all the way into those negative thoughts in writing for twenty whole minutes before then going inside to meditate.
But JournalSpeak does make for a much clearer meditation experience, I find. So it’s your call (obviously). For me, meditating on its own is often sufficient these days. Or some days it’s all I make time for. But JournalSpeak remains super helpful, in terms of checking in with my own situation inside, noticing what emotions or thoughts I am attempting to repress, sorting out how I actually feel, discovering what wisdom may be contained therein. I lean on JournalSpeak harder during high stress times or times when I notice I’m having spikes of embodied stress symptoms, which in my case means back pain, IBS, anxiety/panic attacks, insomnia, depression, it goes on. As I mentioned last time, I’m trying to stick to daily triples (term around here for JournalSpeak, meditation and yoga) during this darkest part of the year.
JournalSpeak is challenging. It is worth considering whether you are actually up for it, this task of looking directly at that which you typically avoid. Something I have said before but I’ll repeat, activities like JournalSpeak are best undertaken if you also have adequate professional support, i.e. a therapist or somebody like that. If you are seeking to excavate that hardest stuff inside, that is really brave. Doing so in solitude may yield big results and it’s important you are not actually alone to afterwards process what came up.
Here was my post with some thoughts about mental health professionals and how to set about finding someone who suits you. Here is the page describing the JournalSpeak practice by its creator, therapist Nicole Sachs. Here is her podcast, which I’ve recommended often and has been invaluable to my own healing. As the explainer page describes, JournalSpeak involves a bit of housekeeping-type setup the first time you do it but afterwards is pretty straightforward. Even though I do it nearly every day, I find JournalSpeak mostly awful, still. It can feel like the absolute worst. And it’s changed my life. As has daily meditation, profoundly.
You did say something else I wanted to respond to, about liking writing once you start. I know what you mean. I do like writing, love it in fact more than anything, it can sometimes feel (which is good given my line of work). Even as a professional writer though, I hate writing some days and avoid it. Sometimes to even imagine sitting down to write sounds 🤮🤮🤮.
For what it’s worth, to me there’s a significant distinction between JournalSpeak-type writing and writing-writing, like what I do here, let alone in my essays or books. A writer friend I was trying to convince to try JournalSpeak basically said, no, he can’t imagine giving his writing energy to something he’s going to destroy. I tried to explain that to me, these are alike only in that they are about putting one word after another. What I do in my actual writing is a highly intentional act. I trace and retrace every last keystroke. This is because it’s intended for others and I want it to both be true and make sense.
JournalSpeak is sorta the opposite — hurried, reactionary, highly imperfect, intended to be read by no one, not even myself. There is no pressure to make it make sense nor to say anything nicely nor well. Manners, mechanics, spelling, that’s all gone. I swear fucktons. I say whatever feels most awful, most forbidden. I really try to just let it out. As I’ve described before, I JournalSpeak longhand with pencil. I don’t even use the eraser; I just cross out.
The result is raw thoughts, that muck. Some of it is truth; most of it is bullshit. The act of articulation, of slowing it all down and verbalizing it, getting it out on the page, it is super helpful, I find at least. If you hate writing, you can JournalSpeak aloud, like into a voice memo you then delete. As I’ve mentioned before, no matter how you do it, the best part of JournalSpeaking is when you destroy it.
But when I’m doing JournalSpeak and it feels awful, maybe I’m writing really unpleasant stuff and it’s hard, I’m sobbing or feeling all-consuming rage or whatever, I just keep going. I force myself to just get to that 20 minute mark, no matter how much I do not want to. Because feeling these unpleasant feelings, that is the point. From this comes the release.
So perhaps I think of JournalSpeak as being like an unpleasant chore, cleaning out a gnarly cat box or something. I know the moment is yucky and it’ll pass.
After, I’ll be glad I did it.
Good luck, as you figure out how to start your own meditation practice. I hope you can be kind to yourself, as you do. If you “fail” a lot at first, again, that’s fine. Trust, I think, is key to this. Trust in yourself, trust that you can shift, if incrementally. Even a subtle shift can make for a very different trajectory, over time.
My best,
Sandy
p.s. What’s Helping Today: Asking for help, which for me can feel hard to do. But I was forced to, kinda, this last week. I was here alone at the house when we got a big dump of snow and lost power for nearly two days, which meant no water too. I eventually reached out to a neighbor friend who brought me some extra water, just in case. It felt good knowing I had the water and that someone was there who cared. Once we got power back, I made him some cranberry hand pies in thanks.
p.p.s. I really appreciated what Michael Hobbes had to say on this episode about trans rights and how cis people remain frighteningly silent and apathetic about what is happening.
p.p.p.s. I quit twitter some time ago because I found being harassed by hoards of transphobes quite unpleasant and the situation overall seemed real bad and like it was only getting worse and like no one seemed to give a shit. (Sound familiar??) Anyway now that twitter’s finally officially dead, we can at least enjoy what was good: the LOLs we had along the way.
p.p.p.p.s. I abstain from Christmas but if you’re a buys-gifts type, occasional reminder that I did write a book and I am biased but I think it’s great. I would love if you bought it and gave it to whoever you think might enjoy it, maybe yourself. In brief, the book is about who gets to tell the story, when we talk about “mental health.”