Meditation against meditation
Meditation against meditation
The paradox of "the inner life" and thoughts on an active contemplative practice for the anxious and angry among us
“I know that we don’t have to withdraw from the world to tend to an esoteric fire.” —Mary Rose O’Reilley
“The poem climbs inside you, like a window.” — Lesley Wheeler
I’ve been dreaming of world’s-end hotels. I don’t sleep much, but when I do, the dreams are always nightmares. Sometimes these terrors take the shape of events that happened in real life—the funerals of the dead I attended during my time as a reporter, the open mouths of weeping mothers, the pulled-back flesh of my breasts, gone and scooped out and angry from the taking after my cancer diagnosis in October.
Recently, though, the landscape is fantastical in its writhing.
One night last week, for example, there I was, a body made up of nakedness and surgical drains, at an insurance banquet in a seaside hotel. On one floor, my father screamed abuses at my mother after a client berated him for his racism. On another open-air level, people launched their cars maniacally off the edge of the building. Omnipresent, I floated above the scents of exhaust and scream as one sedan nudged up to the jump. A flurry of ER doctors and nurses surrounding the landing site below, preparing to respond. Their unilaterally bald heads expanded like wet cottonballs in the moonlight. At the top of the hotel, I tried to enter an elevator with a woman bellhop. The gunk from my chest wounds threatened to overwhelm everything, and the carriage broke down into claustrophobia and stuckness. Don’t worry, we’ll make it down, the woman told me as I woke up. Hours later, as light finally came in through window over my daily altar, I drew the reversed Chariot from Irene Mudd’s Guided Hand tarot deck: Here was the carriage from dream, untethered, reversed, awash in anger and space.
I’ve never been much good at meditating, and I’ve often used the intensity of my bad dreams—the oceanic imagination of my doomsday brain—as arguments against the recommendations from various therapists, doctors, and yoga teachers to shut my eyes, focus my senses, descend into the breath. But this year, as the South Node moved into my Twelfth House, making sleep even more difficult to come by (hello, any other Sag risings struggling with this?), I decided to waylay my ever-the-argumentative-contrarian approach to anything offered up as medicine by the establishment. What would it mean to create a contemplative framework that didn’t shy away from the livid churning of my inner life? What would meditation against meditation even look like?
Of course, one of the gratifying experiences of setting aside one’s stubbornness for curiosity is that one discovers the naivety and fault in believing that one had the corner on any kind of experience of suffering or difficulty at all. That’s a lot of ones in that sentence. Let me revise for specificity: In my attempts to learn how to meditate, I found that my anger at the thought of spending precious time in still contemplation and my anxiety over where, exactly, such a time commitment would take me were not isolated or individual feelings or failings so much as the nearly universal bedrock upon which all attempts at and developments in meditation occur.
It’s been seven months now since I’ve started meditating with weird regularity.
I cannot report much better sleep, or less severe nightmares, or more productivity and wealth, the latter as promoted by online articles here and there praising the meditative pursuits of whoever stands in for your current definition of boss.
But I can say that my particular way of cobbling together an active descent into the terrain of my subconscious has enriched an aspect of my life I’m not quite sure how to define. For now, I’ll call it my ability to keep the esoteric fire burning in the midst of daily bullshit. Or else my ability to be well at the same time as being crazy and sick. The poet Jan Beatty might call this an attentiveness to my “red sugar body,” an understanding that individual meaning cannot be extricated from the pulsing feel of the body, the memory of sharpness attached to past pain—how “self” and its fractals become known to us through flesh and blood, our imaginative responses to flesh and blood.
I first encountered Beatty’s poem in Lesley Wheeler’s brilliant new essay collection Poetry’s Possible Worlds. My own reading of it follows Wheeler’s, as she considers “Red Sugar” for its immersive possibilities, its dismantling of the notion that an inner life necessarily means one that is removed from the external world’s “scents of exhaust and scream.” Recounting a story of a bicycle accident and the resulting car ride to the ER, the stitches and scar that came after, Wheeler mobilizes narrative from her own childhood to this end:
“This is what inner life means. When red sugar spills, there is screaming. Even when round-bellied, well-coiffed women hold the pieces of your leg together and whisper comforting remarks all the way to the ER, exposure is violent. It hurts. I still have a shiny pink caterpillar of a keloid scar radiating insect-leg stitches. I mentally feel for it to tell left from right.”
Wheeler is not, of course, talking explicitly about meditation here. And yet her description of the initial violence of exposure—as what was inside and hidden, becomes exposed, messy, known on “the outside”—approaches an important emotional reality of beginning meditation that is too often overlooked. It hurts. We call it boring, or time-consuming, to sit down and turn our attention inward, but boredom and busyness have long been protective “feelings” for gnarlier things.
In Wheeler’s anecdote, the bicycle accident functions not simply as wound, but also, later, as orientation: As an adult, she “mentally feels” for her scar as a quick reminder of direction. But the inner life aspect of the story comes not solely from the initial accident nor later scar-as-compass, but rather from the meditation on this particularly individual process of witnessing one’s past, the changing feel of it in the body—as well as the meaning that rises only through the work of time, space, and language on the flesh. Wheeler does this through writing and reading poetry alongside writing and reading criticism and personal narrative. As a book, Poetry’s Possible Worlds turns on the notion that lyric poetry can offer readers both feeling and journey—prayer and (as) an ethics of movement—in its ability to transport, immerse, implicate, and change. “After all,” she writes, “while poetry may seem to stop time, the meditation it shelters can enable action.”
Probably this is why, when I began meditating through cancer last fall, I began with verse. Stray lines of favorite poems—some of them, like Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” first encountered while I was a confused and hapless college student in Wheeler’s introduction to poetry class—scraps from comps-list memoirs that stuck, favorite interpretations of hated tarot cards. I’d get some short lines of literature in my teeth, walk circles around our neighborhood park, eyes half-closed in tears and concentration. Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go. followed by The presence of the dead person is imaginary but his absence is very real followed by Ozeki is my face, the face I chose, a nominal face that keeps them safe from me, and me safe from them followed by One offers comfort, one offers hope; the Five of Swords concerns itself with both. Not trusting my own brain to come up with words that would spur self-reflection with both gentleness and detachment, I allowed myself to begin active contemplation with the de-narratavized language of others.
My body moved slowly around the soccer fields, the tennis court, the bone-stomach of the drained pool. My mind circled Bishop, Ozeki, Weil, Chang. Both frames of movement began a paradoxical process of distracting me from while also encouraging me to look more intently at the felt experience of my life. That jumping along the base of my breasts, my too-erect nipples? That is fear and preparation for surgery, radiation, chemo, whatever is to come, I told myself, from a distance, behind the recitations. The dead tissue that tingled along my c-section scar, the hip-flexor skin I can only feel as strange radio static since giving birth? That was prediction; that was knowing what other kinds of scalpled healing would feel like. One offers comfort, one offers hope.
In The Garden At Night, Mary Rose O’Reilly offers a view of meditation that negotiates the straits between comfort and hope, risk and survival. Rather than a method for capitalism-assisted self-optimization, on the one hand, or apathetic self-retreat, on the other, O’Reilly discusses active contemplation as at once sacred and un-precious:
“It is perhaps not widely enough recognized that most healthy contemplative traditions were designed to be practiced in the midst of noise, because noise is what is. For me, contemplation has been not a retreat but a path of tender emergence into the world. Spiritual practice has helped me, a shy and introverted person, to enjoy parties, to brook hostility, to find voice, and to get out of the house as a passionate environmentalist and amateur naturalist. The contemplative does not resist the world, but learns to enter it.”
I like O’Reilly’s book because it isn’t prescriptive, the tendency of many 20th- and 21st-century texts on meditation. But neither is it wishy-washy. To tend to one’s inner life, to keep an esoteric fire burning, one has to practice, O’Reilly asserts—we must do things habitually, after all, if we want to change habits of mind. But O’Reilly is writing for fellow teachers who are burnt out and broken down in the face of the academy’s systemic problems of injustice and inequality; she doesn’t spend time lecturing that a person has to be seated in a specific way, maintaining the posture of the gods, to access, cultivate, and begin to converse with a rich inner landscape.
For months, I only approached meditation through walking and literary fixation. But as my body began to heal, and as my toddler’s health also began to improve, I decided to try scheduling moments throughout my day to lie down and enter the starless beach of my brain on my own terms, with my own words. It’s impossible to study the tarot and magic without encountering texts describing mystical journey- or path-work, others offering up specific guidelines for meditating on, with, or through the archetypes. Most of these describe similar techniques for entering into active contemplation, many building from or closely following Jung’s work on active imagination. Enter through a cave, Edwin Steinbrecher says, follow the cave through to a door, which is the entryway into your own unique inner landscape. Keep a tarot card with you, Rachel Pollack writes, hold it in front of you or place it on the floor where you’re sitting. Allow the archetype of The Empress, or The Moon, to guide you into conversation with that figure within yourself. Imagine a golden ball of healing at your feet, Donald Michael Kraig advises, know that it is really there; it can really heal you.
I tried to hold these voices in my head lightly, as lightly as I hold my own criticism of all of them, as lightly as I had tried to hold the anger and the anxiety that shook my body and disallowed me from eating in the early weeks of my diagnosis. I closed my eyes, and yes, there it was: a cave, and a red door, and through the door, an ocean I had not known was my own. Are you there? I called out, noting the new moon, somehow visible, a distant ship, no stars. The sand blew around my sweatpants in easy heat. Are you there? Can you come here, I said again, feeling stupid, knowing I was making all of this up, and also a bit awed as I watched a lion approach alongside a curly-haired figure, dressed in gold. Over months I would come to know them as Pascal and Taimons. Over months, my conversations with them and, yes, with The Empress, and The Moon, and a host of “others” would come to be the dialogues I turned to at night, woken in usual terror. Or during the day, writhing with routine anxiety.
These meditative encounters have now lost their fearful, angry edge; they’ve become moments of reflection and generativity for me, operating in a kairotic time that offers a multiplicity of selves within me that, in turn, insist on humility, action, and engagement with the world beyond my own tight flesh. Trust me, I know this sounds weird. For Olga Tokarczuk, though, “kairos is the god of eccentricity, if by eccentricity we mean abandoning the “centric” point of view, the well-trodden paths of thinking and acting, going beyond areas that are well known and somehow agreed upon by communal thought habits, rituals, and stabilized worldviews.”
I am always interested in going beyond “somehow agreed upon” communality; I’ve always wanted something more than what my birth family sold me as the white, ableist, patriarchal metrics of a successful life, a thriving stability. Turning toward my “red sugar body,” knowing that my first encounter with it was raw, hurting, messy, has been one way I’ve learned to reach for Tokarczuk’s definition of eccentricity, as well as to embrace my own.
As I mentioned in the preview of this series on meditation, on Thursday, I’m publishing a post for paid subscribers offering a view into the specifics of the active contemplation practice I’ve cultivated for myself over the last seven months. It will also give you clear, concise advice on how to use the tarot, astrology, and what the late astrologer Edwin Steinbrecher called “the inner guide” to support a meditation ritual that can happen amidst the noise, chaos, and banality of daily life.
Do you have specific questions or comments that you’d like me to address in that post? Let me know below!
Favorite Books for/on/adjacent to Active Contemplation
The Garden at Night: Burnout and Breakdown in the Teaching Life by Mary Rose O’Reilley
Poetry’s Possible Worlds by Lesley Wheeler
The Face: A Time Code by Ruth Ozeki
Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks
The last chapters of Touching Feeling by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil
Inner Guide Meditation by Edwin Steinbrecher
36 Secrets: A Decanic Journey through the Minor Arcana of the Tarot by T. Susan Chang