Memories, memoirs, meditation—2
Between 1968 and 1970, I lived in Chicago, where my then-husband was in law school. I hated Chicago, partly because the winters were so cold—I kept getting sick; partly because the South Side, where we lived, was then a dangerous place where women especially couldn’t walk around freely; and partly because the “Battle of Chicago” between antiwar protestors and the police during the Democratic Convention of 1968 left in its wake a miasma of hatred that you breathed in with the coal soot in the air.
Chicago Skyway with skyscrapers very faint in background
So when we finally left, and I gazed backward as we drove along the Skyway toward Indiana, I was astonished to feel a wave of nostalgia sweep over me at the sight of the city center skyscrapers receding behind us.
Just like when I visited my childhood house, only more surprising, since I had no long-standing history with Chicago: nostalgia from nowhere. But it made me see that attachment to the past can be a trap your feelings play on you, not a true, healthy connection.
Still, those feelings are there. We need to know them, if not necessarily believe in them. So perhaps the memoir is the way to do this.
Recently I tried my hand at memoir with an essay about an experience of community I had some years ago when I was quite sick. Writing about an experience is quite different from thinking—or meditating—about it, since writing forces you to formulate and organize your thoughts far more rigorously. So I figured out things I’d never have understood otherwise.
Perhaps there are two levels of experience: absolute and relative. On the absolute level there is no past, only present. But on the relative level, what happens in the past still matters. Perhaps the trick is to understand how to move between them.
Writing & anxiety
At a meditation retreat recently I discovered that even when all sorts of events were going on in my body and mind—physical pain or tension, intrusive thoughts, uncomfortable emotions—I could inhabit a place of stillness, where I was aware of these things but unaffected by them. To get to that place, though, I had first to experience fully each disagreeable detail. This was new: I realized that previously I’d let my mind jump away from the really unpleasant sensations. Plus, instead of accepting their presence enough to get that complete experience, I’d been very subtly trying to get rid of them.
- Example: constant tension at the base of my throat, most intense during the pause between the out breath and the in breath. My mind would fly out through that little gap and start generating thoughts. But as I made the effort to track every single moment of the out-pause-in sequence, the stillness appeared.
"Anxious face," photo by Wrote
What’s the connection with writing? Think of the unpleasant events that go on while you’re trying to write—like anxiety. As noted before, I learned a long time ago that being anxious about writing something doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It means you do it while you’re anxious. I may use my trick of pretending I’m just doing a first draft that doesn’t count. Or I simply summon up some determination and grit my teeth. In either case the anxiety becomes like those distracting body/mind events: I can coexist with it while staying focused on the job at hand.
The key is to change how you relate to the presence of anxiety: instead of feeling victimized by it, or making heroic efforts to ignore it, make peace with the fact that it exists. It’s just there. So?
A great benefit of meditation practice is learning to handle negative emotions. One teacher I sat with remarked, “If you’re not afraid to feel a feeling, there’s nothing else it can do to you—it has no power over you.” It’s very liberating to find that these mood states—fear, anger, whatever—don’t have to control you. For sure they’re unpleasant, but that’s all.