Drain the Swamp*
*the swamp is my mind
The second week of November 2020 was one of the wildest times I can remember. The election was over, but the results were not finalized. Social and news media were abuzz with rumors and updates. Hunched over our phones, our faces bathed in the smooth blue light, we all anxiously watched to see what’d happen next. Amid this global unease, comedian Andy Curtain wrote a great article on meditation and devices, a piece of which I’ll share here:
“One of my main takeaways from meditation has been this: the human mind primarily deals with negative emotions and trauma when it’s still, undistracted, and is not externally stimulated. If the mind is like a cup that fills up during external stimulation, solitary moments are its mechanism for emptying itself. For washing things out. When it doesn’t have sufficient periods of stillness, these problems can remain trapped, or seep out in unhealthy ways. Ranging from general moodiness all the way to addictions, mental illness, abuse and suicide.
To take the cup analogy further, when bad things happen to us, negative emotions and trauma can colour whatever’s in the cup. Worse, they can stain the sides of the cup and make the walls of the mind soggy. This can severely impede its ability to function normally and ‘clean’ itself. The challenge with stillness is when there’s something unpleasant to be cleared from the cup, it can feel crappy. Suddenly our problems are front and centre in our mind. We have to face them, think about them, convince our ego to unseal the cup for a minute, and let them go. It’s something people understandably try to avoid, hence ‘our passion to escape the aloneness’.
This is where devices come in. They steal our stillness. A quick fix to distract us from the minor torment of facing ourselves.”
FULL ARTICLE FROM ANDY: https://andycurtain.com/devices-steal-our-stillness/
Andy has been a friend that’s always pushed me to try new things, from skydiving and getting my own website, to wearing shirts with sleeves and refraining from further agitating drunk audience members. For years, he’s been raving about the benefits of meditation, and following my old pattern, I’ve delayed trying it out, only to later find how life changing it can be.
His connection between meditation and devices is an interesting one to make for several reasons. While stillness is important for processing minor stresses to major traumas, it also allows us room to breathe. Everything in nature has a natural rhythm – a time of activity (Spring, Fall) and a time of dormancy (Winter, Summer). Humans are also made to follow these rhythms of activity and dormancy. To allow for this rhythm we are meant to spend a third of our lifespan sleeping. But we devalue the dormant periods and moments of life, while vastly overvaluing the periods of activity. Accomplishments, progress, and action are what modern culture tells us give life meaning. More specifically, we value these things on an individual level. Our accolades must make us personally shine, only then can we be secure in a life well lived.
In this context, our devices and social media become an irresistible enticement, a pocket-sized trap house for affirmation addicted junkies. In our online lives, the constant activity creates the illusion that something is happening, the constant noise creates the illusion that something is being said. We find false respite from the loneliness and boredom of this life.
David Foster Wallace prophetically foretold in his masterpiece Infinite Jest that we would wind up in this position. The book is named after a fictional videotape (called the Infinite Jest) that was so addictive to watch, viewers would abandon all activities, including sleeping and eating to continuously watch the tape. It was considered a weapon of mass destruction, as it had the power to bring down a society. All viewers of the tape eventually starved to death.
Sometimes my iPhone feels like Infinite Jest. Having binged on the screen, my soul feels starved.
***
Meditation in many ways is the inverse of devices. Devices distract, meditation slows you down. I become aware of my tortured relationship with time – impatience that things happen too slowly mixed with a fear that time is slipping away from me too quickly.
We most fear death and obscurity, though subconsciously know they are inevitable. We endeavor to leave some evidence we existed. Devices give you something to constantly work for – enlarge your platform, build your brand, curate your online image. Whereas meditation is seemingly a total waste of time – no resultant product to point to, a throwing of life’s precious moments into the abyss.
Devices feed our egos, the need to be approved of by others and the need to be right. Meditation brings those anxieties to the surface.
When we meditate, there is a connection to the larger whole, of which we are just a piece. My ego rages against this process, it wants desperately to be special. Sitting in stillness, my mind is filled with the details and noise of the life I’m trying to build. My brain grasps at thoughts and things to remember when the session is over.
One must be careful, as meditation quickly becomes just another notch in the ego’s belt. It can become all about me – a reduction in MY anxiety, an increase in MY insight, a bragging point about MY personal depth. An overly clever DrewTopian post.
***
With the way the world is now, it might be the perfect time to pick up meditation. I’ve been working at it consistently since February using the app Centering Prayer. Centering prayer is a form of Christian meditation where a scripture is read at the beginning and end of a session, with a period of silence (often 20 minutes) in the middle. There are many other good apps and methods for meditation that are not from the Christian tradition as well. (I often recommend the app Headspace to clients.)
In centering prayer, you sit in stillness and consent to release all thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations to God during the session. Much like other meditative and mindfulness-based exercises, practitioners do not try to actively push thoughts away, but rather allow them to come and go by on their own. A simple word or phrase is used to bring the person back into that place of stillness when thoughts and distractions run away from us.
There’s a misconception that meditation is a relaxing, mentally calming experience. I’ve found that my mind is often chaotic during the time and it is a struggle to remain present. It is interesting to see what pops into my head during those initial minutes. Usually, as soon as my eyes close I am bombarded by thoughts of all the tasks to be done that day. To use Andy’s cup analogy this is the sludge that needs to be drained. Moreover, this sludge has already stained the side of my cup – there are deep negative messages lodged in my unconscious that need clearing out. Intrusive thoughts about tasks for the day point to a larger anxiety about needing accomplishments to justify my existence.
Other thoughts and sensations can surface as well: boredom and panic indicate an addiction to constant stimulation and novelty. Negative emotions or tightness in the body may point to a bottling up of stress and resentment. The thought “I’m not doing this right” shows perfectionistic tendencies. And finally, sleepiness may represent burnout, exhaustion, or an extreme avoidance of the present.
If you think meditation and Centering Prayer is weird, I’ll tell you something even weirder – I’ve been inviting my six-year-old to participate in the practice with me. You may wonder, “How can that be? Six-year olds can’t sit still!”
Well, in reality neither can I. His squirming, whining, laughing, sighing, getting up and moving around, are just outward expressions of what’s going on inside my own head. In fact, watching him go through the 20 minutes is like having a child narrate my inner dialogue. Him and I are not so different, he just doesn’t yet have the neurological hardware to shove it all down like I do.
I’m trying to teach him (and me) there’s another way to pass the time, another way to unwind at the end of the day. Maybe it’s a colossal waste of time, but I figure it beats the two of us zoning out in front of a screen or a phone.
***
In the old days, deities required sacrifices as a form of worship – rams, bulls, doves, even other humans. Perhaps the greatest sacrifice modern westerners can make is of our time. When the weekly screen time report pops up on your phone, it is a revealing of priorities. In this sense, meditation is a burnt offering of time offered up to the flames of our finite existence.
In that place of quiet and stillness we are finally able to hear and see. We connect with the deep currents that run beneath our lives and the world. In these moments we meet our fears face to face and can accept life for what it is, rather than what we wish it were.
November 2020 came and went, but our teacups are still filled to the brim, sloshing over the side, spilling negative, stinky gunk all over the world. Stopping, stillness, and meditation give the mind a chance to do what it inherently knows – drain.