the divine meditation newsletter: a letter to my mind

In June, I attended a silent meditation retreat, at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. I appreciate how extended periods of meditation allow us to watch the mind and notice patterns. This time, I became intimately familiar with the nature of my mind to rehearse and plan. This month’s newsletter is a loving letter to this mind state.

I will not hate you. I will not try to eradicate you out of existence. Or idealize a “pure” me that no longer struggles with inner judgment, criticism, and perfection. The self-hatred is what hurts, after all.

In meditation, we have intimate time together. You help me rehearse what I’m going to say. You help me plan the day. You practice our lines. You edit our ideas. You care so much about doing a good job. 

You want me to be liked! To make others laugh, to bring people joy. You write our jokes. You set a scene and allow me to rehearse my way through it. You give me infinite chances to express myself.

You anticipate the future. You offer me control. A controlled environment in a human existence which is highly unknowable, unplannable, and uncertain. I see how much you care. I see how far you’ve gotten me. How you’ve shaped me into a writer and developed my imagination.

Somewhere along the way I think we started to believe that our performance of life is what makes us lovable. That how well we perform is what makes us worthy, valuable, care for-able.

When I feel where in me I am living from when you are driving us, the energy is in the edges of my head, face, and neck. You hold it down above the shoulders. With you, I am a light bulb. I am practicing connection as it was taught to me, and success as I see it rewarded in our culture.

This year, and really moving forward, I want to live from my heart. You were there, helping me sit down on the first days of January to set our 2024 intentions, as I wrote, “this year I want to be able to say that I lived with an open heart.” I think we both know that the heart longs for our presence. We’ve packed ourselves away in the upstairs part of the house, but there’s a whole hearth downstairs that’s waiting for us to warm it up. To let our people in. To grow our sense of community and true friendship. To let ourselves be felt, or as our somatics teachers say, “to let ourselves out and to let others in.”

We’re in an interesting place, you and I. We’re really seeing that we’re in this world, but not completely of it. And it’s this knowing that compels us to love the world, beyond the self. Yet also, to fully inhabit this human form, and love the world from this embodiment. (And not only loving what we’re attached to, or what we enjoy, but that immeasurable love which Thomas Davis talks about.)

It’s so precious to be alive. To be in awe and play and feel our way through all of it. When we’re bargaining with the universe to stay alive as the airplane takes off, it’s not to live for big lofty reasons. It’s for experiencing flowers and to watch the sunlight flicker on Karuna while she naps on the couch. When faced with the possibility of it all ending in a moment, it’s what came to us so freely that opens the heart.

I came across this Susan Sontag quote on Instagram:

“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little–have few verbal means. Eloquence– thinking in words– is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it’s more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.”

I hadn’t quite put it together that being a writer could come from the pain of isolation and individualism. Dear mind, you were indeed, “born by pressure.” Like many people who write, I don’t think there’s much that could stop me from it. I don’t even enjoy doing it all the time! But that’s devotion for you. The flame stays lit. I’m heartened to know that you took the pain of loneliness and shaped to the creativity of it, like a Frank Ocean album. And now, here we are, ready to risk leaving our safe perch from where we rehearse and philosophize, to choose feeling. 

I think our art became a small corner through which our depth could be felt. How do you express a depth like that into connection, into relationship? I have this recurring experience where I’m with people but I can’t really feel them. And I think they can’t feel me either, because I don’t let them. You gave me a safe place from which to give and receive vulnerability. 

Our therapist Nathan Shara reminds us that humans are one of the few animals whose internal organs (i.e. heart, guts) face out into the world. They’re not facing the ground – protected and covered. We’re built to face each other. We’re built for vulnerability and connection, and you found a way for us to experience it from the comfort of our solitude. And yet, experiencing connection includes facing what is unfamiliar and not knowable. It can’t be rehearsed.

To be felt is to risk feeling rejection, embarrassment, and shame. (The pain of being illegible in childhood may not go away. I’ve come to see my vitiligo, which developed at age six, as the wisdom of the body to express the irreconcilable alien-ness I felt inside.) Let the pain connect you to the people.

Living for only what feels familiar, in an effort to avoid all discomfort and protect our ego, is to shrink away from being human. I think of this Anaïs Nin quote in the email signature of a meditation friend:

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

And the day came.