It's just weird!

I was listening to the 10% Happier podcast by Dan Harris where he was taking listener questions, and one of the questions was from a college student asking about how to deal with other people thinking that he’s weird for meditating. I have thought the same thing as I’m sure many others have. When you watch a video of people meditating or see a picture, it looks strange. Sitting quietly with eyes closed, not moving at all. We should be “doing” something, listening to music, looking at a phone or typing, being productive in some way. Why are you almost sleeping but you’re not even sleeping? Even more bizarre to the outsider, watching a walking meditation where people are moving in deliberate slow motion to try to pay attention to the tiny details, it could just appear to be people who are high on drugs or drunk or any other explanation for such odd behavior.

To summarize Dan Harris’s response, he mentioned that there are many famous celebrities and aspirational figures that meditate, so there are role models. He also mentioned that there is scientific research to talk about to skeptical or critical people. His last point is that mindfulness can get someone to the point of truly not caring about what others think. The whole concept of self-conscious embarrassment will diminish over time.

I just want to add a thought to that. When you become self-conscious or worried about how you appear to others, that is itself an opportunity. Because one of the possible outcomes of meditation is that you become aware of the “illusion of self”. This is very difficult to explain and there is a lot of discussion about this that I will not dive into here. But that feeling of embarrassment, self-consciousness, or possibly even shame, it can be investigated. What is the feeling? Does it have a color to it? Does it have a physical sensation associated with it? Can you put any words to it that don’t use other feelings?

Meditation teachers state that ultimately that feeling is the actual illusion. There is no subject and object, there is no person or soul or spirit or ego that is feeling the feeling. It’s all on the same meta level, there is not a thinker there are only thoughts, all of it comes from the same indescribable place. But the more you talk about it or think about it, the harder the concept may be to grasp. So it only requires that curiosity. Meditate and perhaps if someone catches you doing it, then that’s your chance. Examine your thoughts and emotions about being caught. You may end up catching something profound.

Rituals

I have worked with some novelists in my previous career, and writers are sometimes devoted to a particular set of habits, in order to stay consistently creative. As I mentioned before, my initial interest in meditation grew from hearing writers and comedians talk about it as a source of inspiration.  Even great writers like Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf found writing to be torturous. They found something to rely on, and that was their commitment to a daily ritual.

It could be anything that uses a mindful approach to basic tasks, even bathing or eating, taking a walk at a certain time of day, or cleaning your space. The repetition allows for a transition to a particular mindset. You are looking to be physically and mentally present.

Tennis legend Roger Federer was asked about his 20-year career by basketball coach Steve Kerr and he said, “I love my daily ritual.” The passion for competing that drives Federer is also seen in the basketball genius of Stephen Curry. He also plays with joy for the process and his pregame shooting ritual is mesmerizing, launching shots from half-court and even from tunnels off the court.

Steve Kerr says of Curry: "His routine, it's like a metronome. Every day, it's the exact same thing. He's in the training room, he's in the weight room, he's on the court. It's clockwork. But there's also a sense of joy and energy within that work.”

Rituals may not just be practice for self-improvement. Using rituals in a mindful sense may be best exemplified in my favorite tennis player, Rafael Nadal. He is deeply philosophical, embracing and enjoying the hard work just as the other greats have done. He also has adopted some thinking in line with Buddhists, ascetics, and Stoics, recognizing pain and loss must be accepted and managed with equanimity and discipline.

His mental skill is actually seen in the seconds between tennis points, in unique rituals that are now legendary. He has been called compulsive and superstitious. But for him, it isn’t about a superstition.

“I put the two bottles down at my feet, in front of my chair to my left, one neatly behind the other, diagonally aimed at the court. Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” said Nadal.

Nadal’s rituals are silly and odd and off-putting to his opponents, but they are his. Rituals can be highly personalized and may not make sense to others.

In regard to meditation as a ritual, I like that Steph Curry says: "Whatever it is, however you play, you have to keep coming back to the well to keep sharpening the toolkit and finding ways to evolve your game.”

I look forward to hearing about your rituals and how they integrate into your life.

Mission Impossible

Just wanted to note about some descriptions that really interested me in the publicity for the next Mission Impossible movie coming out in 2023.

The director Christopher McQuarrie said in an interview that he often gets the question from aspiring filmmakers: “How do you know when you’ve made it?” His reply: “You don’t make it. You’re making it. Actively. All the time. May you never make it. May you always be making it.”

It is a wonderful way of putting how to live your life more in the present. The goal of “making it” for the entertainment business is usually about fame, money and power, and “it” is a certain level of achievement. But taking “it” and shifting focus away from those typical aspirations and just defining it as being present, then the idea that you are actively making it all the time, and may you never make it, may you always be making it. Fantastically put.

The other story that stood out was a description of the professionalism of Tom Cruise. It described him in the context of doing extremely risky stunts himself and again it’s the words of McQuarrie: “His level of preparation is exceedingly present and aware. The bigger the stakes, the higher the awareness. That awareness is contagious and enormously clarifying.”

Even though death-defying stunts and meditation seem to be polar opposites, the mentality might be quite close. Be exceedingly present and aware, and it can be contagious and clarifying. Once again, just evokes a feeling of inspiration to continue to practice and advance. May we always be.

Stickiness

The idea of “stickiness” is really important in the business world. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discussed the concept of “The Stickiness Factor.” This refers to a unique quality that something has to “stick” in people’s minds. It is easy to recall how a commercial jingle or a pop song gets “stuck in your head”.

So stickiness has become not only a buzzword, but something to admire and strive for. It may be something worth reflecting on, especially when it comes to mindfulness and meditation.

As we meditate, we want to rest comfortably in the moment and not follow the mind as it jumps around. But there are times when something sticks and keeps coming up. It doesn’t have to be a jingle or a tune, it could be thinking about a particular event that is coming up in the future, or a strong memory, good or bad. If the mind keeps returning to something, you get trained to let it bring you there and keep you there.

A practice of mindfulness is in some ways trying to get to a place of anti-stickiness. Let your thoughts become slippery, like a sheet of ice or a smooth surface that lets everything slide across it.

Rethink a little on how business and culture are prioritizing something that is unhelpful at times, and building up habits that we do not necessarily need.

Pursuit of Happiness

One of the founding principles of the American idea was that everyone has a right to the pursuit of happiness. There has been much debate and conflict these past years about equality and fairness. Who has had more access to the pursuit of happiness and who has been denied that access? Who has had that right taken or stolen from them?

Maybe another way to tackle it is to examine that last inalienable right, the pursuit of happiness. We take those words at face value and have adopted them as our driving ambition and goal in life. But when you look at that phrase, the pursuit of happiness makes it sound like happiness is something to chase down, capture and trap. At best, it appears to be a prize to be won. But one of the principles of Buddhism states that craving and wanting is an endless cycle. Anything that you desire and actually achieve will not satisfy you, it will become the next desire, and the following desire after that. So it’s possible that a Buddhist interpretation of the pursuit of happiness tells us that the pursuit will never end and we can never actually capture that idea of happiness.

But happiness has been studied extensively and seems to be more grounded in the present and in the now. I’m not sure the exact quote, but it’s something like: “How you live now is how you live your life.”

So maybe all of us have access and opportunity for happiness, just not quite in the way that we have been told.

Fear Itself

There are some quotes that seem to endure, such as President Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR made the speech during the Great Depression, in order to stir a country to get past a harrowing time. But then the phrase itself, with different wording but the same sentiment, was used by others before Roosevelt, possibly four centuries before in French and/or English literature.

Perhaps it’s partially because the phrase reflects a key theme from the practice of mindfulness, which has been around for centuries beyond Western literature. By the time you react to an emotion, it almost always is already past. The instant of fear or anger or excitement appears, but then the reaction is what lingers. There’s nothing wrong with feeling any particular emotion, it’s the next action, the next resulting move that needs addressing, especially when it becomes a trap of cyclical negative feelings.

So even though FDR was using the words to inspire an entire country to be positive and courageous in a particular historical period, taking the sentiment today and using it as motivation to reconfigure our own behaviors and habits can be the next step in the evolution of a timeless quote.

Jordan as modern myth

Michael Jordan has been recognized as the greatest basketball player that has ever lived for an entire generation. At the peak of his prime, he was possibly the most famous person in the world, at least for those who consumed media and sports. For someone with such a focus on winning, he appeared to many to have won at the game of life. But when the documentary about his final years playing in Chicago came out in 2020, he quickly became a meme and a parody for his “took that personally” mentality. He was scrutinized for obsessing over losing even the smallest gambling game.

Maybe one day, Jordan will be become a mythical figure like the Greek king Sisyphus. In that tale, the gods cursed Sisyphus to roll a boulder up a steep hill for eternity. But the Jordan myth in a mindful context may not be about Jordan’s legendary basketball genius or his curse of competitive fire burning too hot. It may turn out to be that we look at him playing games throughout his life to the point that life itself was something to be won. The lesson might be that life is not a game. We all may come to see that the desire to win or to have respect or glory or anything in particular is a game that we have created ourselves, but it doesn’t really exist. As Jordan created stories in his mind to motivate himself, we all create entire stories that only serve to distract.

There is no game. There is nothing to win or lose, and so nothing to savor or suffer.

TV inspiration #1 - Who Watches the Watchers

Starting out this post by acknowledging the Star Trek The Next Generation episode written by Richard Manning and Hans Beimler called Who Watches the Watchers. It’s about first contact with an alien race, an adventure that comes up when scientists who have been using a hidden observation post, which is referred to as a “duck blind” because it is camouflaged in nature, are discovered by their subjects, the aliens.

It’s interesting to think of the scientific approach of observing without judgment or assumption, only documenting and recording for further study. Meditation can be thought of in this way, observation only, specifically of the thoughts that appear in the mind. Many analogies for meditation on thoughts are used to describe the practice, such as imagining that one is sitting by the side of a road, watching thoughts pass by like cars. Or imagining thoughts as if they were bubbles, rising up and then popping as they move on their way.

Just wondering whether this idea of hidden observation and this phrase, “watching the watcher” has any resonance for meditation practitioners. It may be too abstract or too analytical. I just find the phrase interesting and appreciate the writing.