What I Talk About When I Talk About Meditating, Day 1: A Walk in the Park

Starting Over

It’s been a few months since I started meditating regularly again. I meditated on and off for 8 years, but a long series of bad decisions in my life led me to drop it almost entirely for two years or so. Now I’m doing it for an hour a day.

Recently, I’ve written a little bit about the why and how of meditation. If you read those posts, you may have noticed that I failed to include more than allusions and links to actual meditation methods. I am by no means a master, and there is no reason why I should be teaching when others do it much better.

What I can do, however, is share my experiences. If you’re curious about what a daily meditation practice looks like on a practical level, this is for you. I’ll be writing a daily log here, with some diarylike narration and some observations on what I experience on any given day.

In my writing, I will avoid any kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo or spiritual experiences. It is not that these things can’t be interesting, or that they’re not common in meditation, but rather that they’re entirely idiosyncratic and nonessential. It makes no more sense to include these experiences than to try to explain the particulates of an LSD trip to someone — it’s just your own baggage, okay?

Day 1

There is a vague smell of exhaust in the air. Nearby, a woman is shouting in Polish. She has been shouting for a while. I don’t understand much, but can just about make out repeated curse words. She seems extraordinarily angry, but I can’t tell if she’s mentally ill, on drugs or just having a very bad day. I look over and notice her shouting at the passing cars and pedestrians on the distant side of the street. Probably not just a bad day, then.

I am walking through a park, leisurely pushing a baby stroller containing a sleeping baby — my baby — ahead of me. Normally I would be gripping the handles with a lot of force, but this deep in meditation I am finding it more comfortable to just push the cart ahead of me every few steps. We are going uphill, so it’s not particularly risky.

Sunlight is shining through the canopy of trees above, occasionally illuminating floating dust or pollen. The constant background noise — of birds, cars and people — is not so much distracting as smothering. There is too much sensory input to take in everything. Sometimes the noise of the birds and the people come through deafeningly loud and close, but then they receed just as fast.

I walk like this for an hour and a half, occasionally losing myself in stray thoughts before resuming my attentive stance. Underneath everything there is a sort of clear awareness that rarely fades for long — an awarness of being aware, for lack of a better word. It floats in and out between other sensations, sometimes captivating in its clarity, sometimes just a backdrop against which everything else plays out.

Observations

Some days I get to meditate by sitting down quitely for an hour or so. Other days, like today, the obligations of fatherhood get in the way. Thus I am forced to meditate while, for example, taking the baby for a walk. I find it difficult to meditate with any particular focus — mantra, breath, emotions or otherwise — when I’m walking. Instead, I practice a sort of open awareness meditation — one where I let sensations come and fade on their own accord, while trying to stay as aware of everything as possible. Buddhists call this style of meditation Vispassana.

A few years ago, one of the first things I noticed about walking meditation was how little intention goes into it. While you can will yourself in any direction and will yourself to change speeds, this rarely comes from any particular conscious thought , except perhaps a sudden, intrusive “shit, I’m late”. Because of this, the process of walking takes on the appearance of something that happens to you — rather than something you do.

Once this realization takes hold, it is often a simple process to notice how other bodily sensations follow the same pattern. Indeed, everything bodily immediately feels much more samey. Everything, but everything is a sensation. You are a walking gaggle of sensations, all competing for primacy.

If you walk like this for long enough, a strange feeling of lightness sets in. Everything seems less effortful, and this feeling often persist for a long while afterwards. Asort of clarity emerges from realizing that there is no need to hold on so tightly — your body is quite capable of handling itself.