Meditation is Work: Weakness
Coming to Terms with Your Inner Screw-Up.
Don’t worry; it’s just you in there. Settle yourself and find just one moment where you broke. Watch yourself from the outside. Don’t white-wash the moment or invent false outcomes. Do your best to remain true to what happened. Most importantly: don’t judge yourself.
A precursor to change is contemplation. Change is not always easy and you need to prepare your mind and body for the experience. If you’re not meditating already, you’ve gotta start.
There’s no shortage of literature out there about meditation and how good it is for you. Go ahead and Google it and count how many pictures you see of trim, attractive, people in Lululemon pants sitting in the quarter lotus position facing the sunrise on a paddle board. Good for them.
For you and me, though, it’s a centerpiece of well-being and a staple of our journey toward growth. And it ain’t always easy.
Sure, we meditate to practice finding self-awareness and heighten our ability to self-monitor. We do it to reduce stress or to simply get a 20 minute block of peace and quiet in our lives. But where do we go once we’ve mastered our breathing? Is it always about stilling the mind? My answer is no.
I did a touch-and-go on the subject of meditation in the first installment of A Guide to Suffering. In that article I stressed the importance of imagery as a means of mental preparation but I also touched on the need to scope out our weakness vis-a-vis a particular activity. How far into exertion before we start feeling hungry? What triggers a craving for something we’re trying to avoid? In what situations do we simply collapse in on ourselves and surrender to failure?
As humans we do a great job of isolating and building upon our strengths. In doing so we end up getting even better at what we’re already good at and avoiding what we’re bad at. It’s like Survivorship Bias for habits. In coming to grips with the attendant suffering that accompanies change, we must force ourselves to come to grips with our own physical and moral weakness.
Once we’ve freed up cerebral bandwidth by centering our mind and body we can focus our energies on a journey within. There are many paths we can take in this quiet space, but I think we can all agree that the Library of Weakness is a looming edifice on the horizon.
Nothing forces us to be so honest and sincere with ourselves than to re-live that moment when we should have stood up for ourselves or others but didn’t. Perhaps there’s an episode where you completely lost it on someone weaker than you, and even though you’ve done a fantastic job of burying that moment deep inside, it’s time to confront yourself.
Shame? Dishonor? Serve it up…there’s no shortage of it in any one of us.
…there will come a time when you reach the utmost point of honesty with yourself in a quiet moment.
Don’t worry; it’s just you in there. Settle yourself and find just one moment where you broke. Watch yourself from the outside. Don’t white-wash the moment or invent false outcomes. Do your best to remain true to what happened.
Most importantly: don’t judge yourself.That stuff was in the past. You can’t change it — time and energy has been spent and there’s no getting it back. History cannot be re-written.
You’re going to sail into some dark and uncomfortable waters as you sit there with your eyes closed, controlling your breathing. You’ll want to open your eyes and get up and leave. Don’t.
Judging your former self is a normal tendancy, but not necessary. It won’t do any good now. There it is, though: your weakness. You were drunk and hungry and didn’t have enough money so you stole food and ran off. Someone you admired showed you some attention and you compromised your integrity to gain their allegiance. You lied to someone you respected. You used your roommate’s toothbrush and didn’t tell him.
There’s a neat quote by Achaan Chah who said “If you haven’t cried a number of times, your meditation hasn’t really begun.” I don’t necessarily think we need to cry each and every time we meditate, but we do need to bring ourselves to reach an undeniable point of honesty during a quiet moment to make it worthwhile. You’ll relive the deed and maybe feel a touch of the pain, dread, and guilt that came with it.
But what’s really happening is that your’re coming to terms with yourself in full, not just the portion of you that is strong and reasonable or tends to do good and decent things. You’re in the mental confines of the Suffer Lab and there you are examining the subject: weakness. Observe it, take some mental notes. It is what it is. Try to learn from it, figure out how to avoid having to repeat the observation in the future and move on.
Meditating on weakness is not merely seeking reconciliation from within or steeling ourselves for some future moment of truth. It is certanly not designed to beat yourself up; that does nothing. Rather, it’s an exercise in becoming honest with ourselves. Acknowledging weakness is the same as acknowledging our own limits as human beings. They’re not concrete and everlasting, but they’re there.
We cannot fully transform if we continue to bullshit ourselves into thinking we are constantly strong and upright. A mental trip into our own weakness can be fantastically hard but is, above all, an occasional necessity.
