The blog title comes from the song “Stillness is the Move” by the Dirty Projectors, which also has a lovely cover version by Solange.
Meditation practice was something I’d attempted and failed several times over my late teens and early twenties, after reading a book by Lawrence LeShan that offered a rather straightforward, earnest, and very Western approach to starting a meditation practice. He made it sound simple and profound, though he was dismissive of the spiritual and supernatural trappings that came out of religious traditions in which meditation was taught.
Yet I would get stuck often, thinking that the busyness of my mind meant I was not meditating properly. And my discipline would flag quickly, and I’d give up, thinking it was something only a particular kind of person was able to do. It wasn’t until after I graduated college and started studying with a teacher who insisted on daily meditation as part of our practice that I was able to work through my resistance.
A resistance with many layers, a resistance that persists even after fifteen years of daily practice.
The main resistance was confusing the practice with the results. Those of us who are not taught meditation in a religious context are often drawn to it with promises of overall ease, health, relaxation, and stillness of mind. We think that this is what meditation is—to clear the mind and sit in blissful silence and ease.
It is not. And our attachment to those experiences becomes a barrier to both meditation itself and having those experiences. It’s very sad, believe me, and it’s not about you as a person. It’s a human struggle. There is a reason we have all these different ways of meditating and all these teachings about “monkey mind.” Our minds do not naturally lend themselves to silence and stillness. Nor do we get there through internal force.
There are many forms of practice to meditation, but whatever it is, the practice is simply the practice. Focus on the posture, focus on the breath, focus on the way your body moves or does not move, focus on the sounds in your environment, focus on this icon, focus on your inner state. Count your breathing. Imagine you are a mountain. Chant the name of the divine or this holy mantra and be with the sound you are making.
Notice when you get distracted and lose your practice. Return to the practice.
That’s it.
When we take on the discipline of meditating, we are immediately confronted with everything in us that refuses and fears silence, stillness, and emptiness. We notice everything within us that strives for control and is so afraid of not having it. We see within us all the qualities that those controlling parts suppressed—which could be some deeply unsettling experiences and memories that need therapeutic support.
During my first few months of meditation practice, not only did I notice my busy mind, I became increasingly aware of how much tension I carried in my body. I was in my early twenties and would never have called myself a tense person. I imagined myself to be a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. I was praised for it.
Once, on a field trip in high school, I was waiting in line for food and a woman blatantly cut in front of me. I said nothing. My Catholic school teachers noted this and stopped me to praise me for my virtuous patience. In truth, I was utterly terrified of upsetting anyone in my life, and suppressed all my anger and all my wants and needs to be as small as possible. Now, I do not consider that to be patience, but rather allowing myself to be disrespected.
Patience might look like engaging in the conflict with as much kindness for myself and the woman as possible. Or it might be choosing to allow the cutting and being with my upset. What I did was less of a problem than the way I was when I was doing it.
Meditation teaches patience because it is the practice of patience. It is the practice of feeling one’s full experience, letting go of the controls, and staying with the discomfort of practice. And it is through this engagement that I discovered how much anger and tension was in my body. Letting go of the mental efforts to control my inner experience, I felt how that effort was embodied in the tightness of jaw, the tension in my joints.
One amazing morning I was sitting and noticed that my right leg was tensed and lifted slightly off the ground. As I noticed this, I noticed that this leg had always been, almost instinctively. And as I noticed this, I noticed I could allow my leg to relax so that my knee rested on the ground and I was not holding myself up so much.
Later, as a group we were all sitting together for longer than I usually would on my own. Group meditation practice for me offers a greater sense of stillness than I can find on my own, though I find this to be a reciprocal practice. The more I practice, the more stillness I offer the group, and the more stillness I am able to receive. My whole body began to tremble. It was unsettling but I kept breathing. Later, I asked my teacher about it, and I’m not sure they fully knew the answer but they offered that it sounded like an infusion of power into my being.
Fifteen years later, I think this is true. Stillness and discipline creates space for power to enter into my being. And, concurrently, I believe this shuddering to be a somatic release of tension and buried stress. This experience does not happen often these days, but when it does, I notice it tends to come after periods of time in which I felt particularly disconnected and avoidant. When I’ve spent a lot of time doomscrolling and checking out of my body. When my sitting practice feels shallow and twenty minutes go by with me feeling “I” wasn’t there. Then, some beautiful mornings, I show up ready to engage in the practice, and the shuddering happens. Afterward, I feel like I’m here. My body is touching the earth. I am connected with the people in my life.
It’s as though something in me was trying to hold its breath and get through the hard stuff. Breath-holding is something we instinctively do when we’re anxious. It’s a kind of bracing for impact, and in some ways it’s a way of trying to skip over the hard stuff. Like if I simply stop breathing then what happens won’t hurt so much, and when it’s over I can breathe again.
In meditation, the part of us able to endure the hard stuff comes to ground and the breath-holding parts get to relax. Like an adult shows up who can handle things and let the other parts of us take a break.
Much has been written of spiritual bypassing, which is very much a problem of people turning their spiritualities into shields against reality and their “enlightenment” into cruelty. The problems of spiritual bypassing in New Age and white spiritual communities seems to have flourished in the way so many of them have proven fertile ground for QAnon’s anti-Semitic conspiracies.
We struggle, I think, to balance our Western teachings around knowing and protecting the Self while also remembering we belong to a whole that is greater than us. To hold sacred both our joy and our grief, our kindness and our anger, our stillness and our action. When we cannot hold both, we see them as enemies and must take a side that divides us against ourselves and makes us brittle.
We need boundaries and connection. Conflict is ongoing and the work of justice will be ongoing. We cannot wait until we’ve solved every outer problem before we can take time for our own needs and wellbeing. And simply focusing on our own needs and wellbeing is its own bubble that again leads back to cruelty, apathy, and vulnerability to authoritarianism.
Spiritual practice is a stepping away from life for a period of time before re-engaging. We need both movements, to be able to step away and the intention to step back. It is like conflict with our loved ones. We need to be able to say we’ve reached our limit and need to take a break to gather ourselves, reflect, vent, and figure out what we need to do to resolve the conflict. Simply throwing more words, hurt, anger, and accusations upon each other is like adding too much wood to the fire and smothering it. We need space to breathe.
At the same time, if we say we need a break from the conflict and never come back to it, then we’ve added a different offense. We try to distract from the disrespect, hurt, and unmet needs but they do not go away, they simply linger and grow with resentment, waiting to burst out again in hot, explosive flame.
What we need is to say we are taking a break, and then to return and engage with a more sober and grounded mind. That is spiritual practice. Instead of sending the angry email, I go and spend ten minutes breathing and connecting to what is holy within me, and then I try to engage the angry email as a holy human person. The conflict needs to be dealt with, but I engage with my full self, and that changes how things unfold.
Spirituality is not about bypassing, it is about becoming more and more present and growing our Being in life. And noticing when we get distracted, and what we do to numb ourselves and make ourselves smaller, and then to return to that which grows presence.