Showed Up for the Science; Staying for the Way of Being
Lessons from 18 Months of Practicing Mindfulness
Since moving to Southern California, the outdoors has called my name.
Sure, the beautiful weather helps. But it’s also the accessibility of diverse landscapes. The lifestyle. The desire to connect with nature.
My outdoor experiences on this coast have been limited to urban or heavily crowded areas: cycling along the coast, swimming in the Pacific or local pools, and running on sidewalks. There’s also the occasional hike at Griffith Park.
Despite wanting to, I had not yet jumped into the depths of camping or being truly in the wilderness.
This was all going to change this weekend.
About a month ago, I reached out to a friend in San Francisco to let her know I’d be in town for a work trip. My training ended on a Thursday, and I offered to extend my stay through Sunday so we could “do something in nature,” as I put it. There are many options in Northern California.
It turned out that a local Zen center was organizing a backpacking trip in Point Reyes National Seashore, about 40 minutes north of the city. The dates aligned perfectly. All we had to do was pay a small fee, bring our gear, and the organizers would take care of the rest. It seemed it was meant to be.
After borrowing supplies from friends and a trip to REI, I was ready to go. I flew to San Francisco last week with a giant, 49.9 pound suitcase stuffed with everything needed for the entire trip.
On day 8, after the training concluded, my friend and I traveled to the Zen center for a mandatory meeting to review safety, logistics, and supplies. As we got into the Lyft, I noticed my lower back, which has been prone to injury in the past, started aching. We were running a little late, but once we arrived, the group welcomed us inside.
And then, the anxiety set in.
Suddenly, I realized…
I did not want to go on this backpacking trip.
A flurry of thoughts raced through my mind:
Your back hurts after carrying your gear for about three minutes. You will not be able to get through a weekend of this.
Why are you still having back problems? You’re too young for this!!
You just spent eight days in a row talking to dozens of people about mindfulness — it’s been emotionally exhausting. It’s time to be alone.
If you don’t go, you’ll never be an “outdoorsy-person.”
Your friend is counting on you to go on this trip. You’ve been planning it for weeks.
As these thoughts surfaced, feelings of shame, embarrassment and fear set in. I felt a tightness in my chest. Tingling down my arms. A constricted throat. Tear ducts widening.
I went through my thoughts and assessed them one by one to determine if they were unfounded insecurities or real issues to address. I quickly concluded that (1) my lower back was a real problem and (2) the last eight days had in fact been deeply draining.
As soon as the meeting adjourned, I told my friend about my concerns. She was incredibly supportive and understanding. She knew a number of people in the room, so I didn’t feel like I would be abandoning her.
I decided right then to skip the trip and fly home the next day.
In that moment, I knew I had made the right decision. The previous 20 minutes was a process of answering the question “what do I need right now?” And what I needed was to take care of myself. I no longer felt embarassed, ashamed, or fearful. The feelings subsided instantly.
I spoke to the trip organizer, called Southwest Airlines, and was home the next day by noon.
And still, I have no regrets. In fact, I feel great.
People often ask me, “What’s changed about you since you began meditating?”
If the situation above had happened prior to my discovery of mindfulness, I probably would have still skipped the trip. But I would have spent the entire evening in a state of panic, ruminating about if it was the “right” decision, and feeling guilty for leaving my friend. This rumination would have extended into my time at home, perhaps manifesting in feelings of “FOMO” and regret. I may have even believed that I’d “never be an outdoorsy person.”
In October 2016, I began practicing meditation. Over that time, I’ve spent over 300 hours, or nearly 13 days, meditating. There have been many tangible changes to my mind. I “show up” differently. I respond more often than react in challenging situations. But I’ve also learned a lot about how mindfulness can help us live more fulfilling lives.
The research behind the benefits of meditation brought me to it in the first place: stress and anxiety reduction, resilience against depression, and attention training. As I’ve written about before, over the last decade I’ve felt a gradual decline in my ability to focus and stay present…and I blame it on my iPhone and social media.
The ability to literally rewire and reshape parts of my brain was compelling.
In November 2016 I read Search Inside Yourself and attended a 2-day workshop based on the book. The experience was powerful. I learned that our minds are really good at wandering — and that noticing when it wanders is a moment of mindfulness; a mental bicep-curl. Each repetition builds the muscle of attention. Thus meditation is really another way of saying “attention training.”
This was a significant “a-ha” moment. When I tried meditating years earlier, I thought I was “doing it wrong” because I couldn’t clear my head.
Since I began meditating, I’ve seen improvements in the benefits mentioned above. I’m less stressed and anxious than I was 18 months ago. And even when I feel stressed or anxious, I don’t identify with the feelings as closely as I used to. It’s a shift from existential to experiential: saying “I feel stressed” instead of “I am stressed.” When I sat at the Zen center while deciding the fate of my trip, I felt a burst of emotions, but I knew they were not a part of me, just part of my present experience.
I came to meditation for the reasons above. But I’ve learned there’s a lot more to this practice than simply feeling less stressed.
And it has to do with how we perceive feelings.
As a man in American culture, I feel there is a stigma against talking about feelings. I’m supposed to be strong. Confident. Decisive. This is something I’ve struggled with for a long time.
But this stigma ignores the fact that we are all deeply emotional creatures. There is strong evidence suggesting that every decision we make has an emotional charge to it. Even if our modern, rational brain comes to a “logical conclusion,” it’s how we feel about that conclusion that drives our decision.
This begs the question, what is an emotion? An emotion is physiological feedback in response to an internal or external stimulus. It’s a sensation you experience in your body, in response to an internal stimulus (a thought, for example) or an external stimulus (for instance, running into a friend on the street).
Try it out. Try to conjure up the feeling of sadness. Think about something that makes you feel sad. Sink into it. Feel into it. Where do you feel it in your body?
I experience sadness as a cool sensation in my chest, a losening in the back of throat, and swelling around my eyes.
An even shorter definition of an emotion is that it is simply feedback from a stimulus. But the stimulus that causes the feedback is where things get fuzzy. Stimulus and feedback are deeply intertwined. They can happen so rapidly that we miss one of them and come to false conclusions about what “caused” the feeling. But if we hone the ability to create a space between stimulus and response and see them for what they are, we can learn a lot about our experience and see things more objectively.
For example, last week at my training, one of my new friends approached me on the last day and gave me several deeply kind and geniune compliments. At first I felt joyful — I experienced sensations of lightness and a warmth radiating from heart. After a few moments, this feeling transformed into embarrassment. My heart contracted, and this tightness expanded into the rest of my chest.
It felt embarrassed to be complimented. Weird, huh?
So, what was the stimulus in this situation? At first, it was my friend’s compliments. But between the feelings of joy and embarassment was another stimulus, one that happened so quickly that to the untrained mind, it would have been unnoticable. Without further inquiry, I may have come to the conclusion that this new friend makes me uncomfortable or that I’m simply bad at receiving compliments.
The world, our workplaces, and even our families are too complex for us to understand. Our experiences — made up over a lifetime — shape how we understand and relate to the world and ourselves. We subconsciously build mental models (also know as mental shortcuts, or biases) to help us make sense of this thing we call life. These models can range in scope and scale, from explicit to unconscious, from being about ourselves to being about others.
I’ve recently uncovered a mental model about myself on the topic of worthiness of love and belonging. I experience a cognitive dissonance between wanting to be “seen” by others while also being ashamed of being seen. Various experiences throughout my life have embedded and strengthened this model into my subconscious. And it impacts how I live.
When my friend complimented me, the brief stimulus I experienced between joy and embarassment was this deeply held believe that I am not worthy of love and belonging. In this moment, I was really being seen for who I am, and I was ashamed of it.
The implications of this insight are enormous.
Think about other stimuli that may happen below our level of awareness. Take job recruiting.
Have you ever interviewed someone who was perfect on paper, but for some reason you didn’t like him? Most people would simply pass on the candidate because “he gave me a bad feeling.” But further inquiry could help provide more clarity. Perhaps he intimidates you because of his deep expertise in subject matter you are unfamiliar with. Or maybe he reminds you of an ex. Both are not necessarily reasons to pass on a qualified candidate.
This is why mindfulness is so important.
It provides a tangible way to address the major issue of unconscious bias and mental models that don’t serve us.
Mindfulness has helped me cultivate a space between stimulus and response. I am slowly cultivating the ability slow down my mind, and see what’s really happening in my experience.
This is how I’ve been able to shine a light on, and eventually will be able to re-write, my mental model of feeling unworthy of love and belonging.
When we see, with clarity and fullness, what is happening in our moment to moment experience — when we allow for a space before we respond— we can tear down walls. We can see all people as human beings. We can even treat ourselves better, letting go of the mental models holding us back from living a fulfilled life.
This is why some say that meditation is the key to world peace (a claim that, I admit, sounded absurd the first time I heard it).
More trust. More connection. More belonging.
At a conference last week, I watched author Michael Carroll give a beautiful and compelling talk on mindfulness. He said:
“Meditation is not about achieving anything — it’s about becoming utterly aware of our experience…the practice causes us to drop our mindset and allows us to see things through different lenses. What was once fixed is now fluid and agile.”
Every single person has the innate capacity to become aware.
Every single person has the ability to see things from a new perspective.
Every single person has the potential to show compassion for others.
It is for these reasons that I am committed to this work on a personal and professional level.
Life is too short to live any other way.
