Meditating in the Intersections

My experience with meditation has been messy. I don’t think that is unusual. But it isn’t very aesthetic, that mess. Even when we hear long time teachers give their background, it somehow becomes aesthetic when it’s integrated into the larger narrative. The beautiful arc of the arrow that brought them to the joyous glow is elevating to the muck that they squelched through. If they ever squelched at all. Yes, everyone suffers, but let’s not ignore that some people have to squelch and others don’t. It is a little uncomfortable to sit in the mud while listening to advice from someone who only ever brushed dust. Especially if those who brushed dust aren’t aware that it ever rains.

It’s hard to see from the shining results if a meditation teacher can see what their student brings. With most of us in the U.S. learning from books or short courses, online videos, or people who aren’t actually teachers that complicates things further. There is no teacher to see what we bring as students. Further, many who teach meditation and share their messy beginnings aren’t far enough through their own journey to see beyond their own experiences, which is another sort of complication.

When I looked for how to begin meditating there was plenty of advice, and today there is even more. A flood of views. A choking glut. There are schools and retreats which teach it. There are classes, workshops, you can learn in a temple, an ashram, a yoga studio, a community center, the library, the internet, and the list continually increases. I first tried in my backyard. I had my first “successes” during yoga practice and at yoga studio meditation classes.

Most of what I was hearing from experienced meditators who taught didn’t match with the experiences that I had which mostly felt like I was a tea kettle and the water was trying to escape rather than boil. And when I had a “good” experience in some classes it didn’t feel helpful. The most pleasant meditation experience I ever had felt like a red flag to me, like a lovely opiate that I could see chasing as an escape from life that didn’t actually seem like the best plan of action for me personally. I think people were trying to teach me transcendence and my very soul was telling me that wasn’t my path. The weirdest thing about any of this was the idea I had in my head that I could just meditate like other people when to that point in my life I had pretty much failed to do anything like other people. 

And then I found the meditators with the most messy of minds, the ones who weren’t trying to escape that mess. The ones who were using it to learn about the mess. And while many of them have dedicated structured practices, my whole being resisted the formal approach and for a moment I was once again back where I started, among the “tried it, not for me” crowd. But something inside me wouldn’t stop pulling. 

So I decided to go rogue.

Just sit. Just breathe.

That doesn’t sound very rogue, if you have ever sat with zen or chan practitioners. Those phrases get thrown around a lot, and then they get immediately followed with a shitload of instructions about what to do while you are just sitting and breathing. But I learned to ignore that.

What if I literally just sit and breathe? No expectations, no judgment.

It was a nightmare at first. My social programming tells me that I am not allowed to JUST sit and JUST breathe. It must be productive. And if it’s not actively productive the byproduct must be production. Nothing has acquainted me more deeply with my internalized “Protestant Work Ethic and [...] Capitalism” like just sitting and breathing. Sometimes meditation is just that for me, holding space for the screaming water in the teapot. The practice is holding space for myself, for my no-self, my selves, whatever they feel like that day poisons of that or whatever program is running scream their way out. The practice is not judging myself for having that inside me. The practice is having compassion for the fact that I am coping with that actively the rest of the day.

And that has been my whole practice for years. Sitting quietly while I learn to hold space for myself and tolerate the stillness, tolerate what my body is throwing out of me. I am very lucky to have in-house a person who has read so much of the (translated) Buddhist Pali canon, attended retreats, spent time studying with monastic teachers, and generally just deeply interested in Buddhism and the mind (my weirdo husband). Because when weird shit happens in meditation I can just be like, “hey, babe?” and he can point me to a common experience and/or help me find what is under it. AND YES weird things can happen when you meditate, your mind and body have so much they’ve been waiting to tell you if you would just listen. Most days are not screaming anymore. Most days are quiet. Some days I close my eyes and feel relief and then bliss. Occasionally as I sit my mind presents to me fully formed the solution to a problem I have worried about, as if to show me that if I had just been quiet and calm I could have seen the answer, it was always there.

I believe that what I needed to hear back when people were telling me that I needed to meditate (unsolicited advice, by the way, wow) was that for some people this will be the whole practice. Sit, observe, seek to understand, or just hold the space. Am I going to become enlightened through this practice? Who knows? I don’t care, maybe you could say I am unattached to that outcome (Buddhist joke). I deeply care that it has helped me live better in this world, understand my own values, hold boundaries with myself and others, have compassion for people that I have never before been able to, regulate my emotions, and a whole host of other benefits.

I didn’t Invent this approach, by any means. It’s actually a very stripped down approach that a lot of other people come fumbling into on their own. I fumbled in. I just thought it would be amazing if someone could hear this and maybe save themselves some fumbling.

As to the reason I think I couldn’t find this message when I needed it, the answer actually came up in meditation. WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT.

We are all meditating in intersections.

In 1993 Kimberly Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” as a way to help us understand the complicated situatedness that we all experience as individuals. The more power and privilege you have the less complicating the web of identities is for you. I won’t include too much information, but if you haven’t read her work directly, I encourage you to. I accept that her conceptual framework really does a lot of work. And as I play with it, if I err, I err on my own.

As I sit and meditate I sit in the intersection of all the identities and roles, all the selfs I contain. If I want to learn to meditate (or to do anything for that matter) I generally have to pick up one of my identities as a thread to follow. This identity/thread becomes a line on a map that takes me to a certain place. For example, I practice yoga, such that it is part of my identity. I could follow that identity/thread to learn to meditate at a yoga studio, and be taught as a yoga student. Perhaps that meditation paradigm doesn’t work well for the other giant net of identity/threads that I normally sit in, my intersection. So, do I abandon those parts of myself to meditate as a yogi? If I decided instead to meditate with a women’s group, I am generally presented with a preformed concept of what it means to be a woman that holds well enough for the group and again have to figure out on my own whether the rest of my identity/threads can use this approach. 

Once you enter into very traditional, formal meditation practices these conceptions of identity may seem not just at odds, but incoherent. Since the goal of many meditation practices is a specific outcome, such as a specific form of concentration, the student is always to conform to that. The identity, identities, selves, are not just irrelevant, but something that the meditator actively works toward the annihilation of. Now, I understand fully that not all theologies operate this way, and many acknowledge the usefulness of the not-self. But when you are walking into meditation for the first time, as I was, a shattered mess of tangled intersections and trauma with serious ego damage, going straight to “annihilate the ego” as a goal is something you really need to talk to your mental health care provider about. Western problems aren’t what they were using meditation to address 2500 years ago, so your mileage is going to vary greatly if you dive right in on that. I know, because I did at one point and there were side effects.

What I really desperately needed when I first put my butt down to meditate was permission to sit there in my intersection. There is so much decompression that starts to happen when you give yourself permission to be free of the world for 5 minutes. Sometimes the decompression is just allowing yourself to see how you feel about it. If one of the identities/threads in your intersection is “parent,” then the mere act of taking up space on your own can be a disorienting experience, particularly for new parents, and it’s typically harder for mothers because of social expectations. You have to give yourself permission to be with no expectation, and after a while you can benefit from the relief of having no expectations on you for five minutes. That isn’t even going to sound like meditation to some people, which is why I am here telling you that it is. It is a nascent part of the meditation practice. And you can use that fancy word (nascent) with anyone who pushes back.

I needed to hear that part of the experience of early meditation can be the relief of having expectations of yourself. If you are hard on yourself it will be challenging to learn to give yourself a break, even for a small bounded period of time. Conversely, If other people are demanding and you have trouble setting boundaries it will be challenging to learn to keep this time to yourself. But in both cases it will teach you to trust yourself.

I needed to hear that sitting and observing my thoughts would be really difficult. Watching them without judgment means constantly reminding yourself to be neutral about them, over and over. It helped me learn that I am not identical with my thoughts, because I can be neutral toward them. It also showed me that I can hold that same neutrality when other people say things that I wish they had not said, that same space I created by reminding myself not to judge my own thoughts is available when someone I love says something hurtful. Or someone that I am really working on having neutral feelings about says or does something. I can then be calm in my body and deal with the situation in a way that I feel good about.

And I learned these things by meditating in my intersection. Not by following the threads of my identities to a teacher or group that sees students from the two dimensional view of the label on the class. 

I know there are groups out there and teachers out there who do see the whole student. There are also students who thrive in groups built around a shared identity. If that is you, then how wonderful it is that you found the space you needed.

If you haven’t found the space you needed then I will say to you something else I needed to hear. It is not necessarily you. It could be, I don’t know you, maybe you really need to give it a different shot. But also, if you are banging your head against a wall and not making progress, if the teacher's words or methods just hit wrong, or if you feel like you are the only person in class who isn’t getting it, then there could be a very good reason under all that. It's ok to walk away and find something that fits. I am a person who doesn’t fit neatly anywhere. I never have. Trying to fit myself into a meditation style or class had pretty predictable results if you look back along the course of my life.

Meditation is a challenging practice. It is one that should help you prepare for the increasing challenges of it. I am not one to push the idea that it should make you happy, I personally find that it makes my life more meaningful and manageable. And like things that are good for you, that doesn’t always feel good. But it should at least feel helpful. So if you look at Crenshaw’s work and the concept of intersectionality resonates for you, and you reflect on your meditation experience and feel like this approach would be helpful to you then meet yourself where you are, in your own intersection. It might actually help you sort through and decide which identity/threads would be appropriate for you to learn through, in more than the context of meditation, but in your life (big claim, I know). In Buddhist practice, meditation is one of the tools used to help the practitioner understand the source of their own dukkha (discomfort, suffering, irritation, etc). Haven’t you ever done something and been like, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?” That is literally what the Four Noble Truths are trying to help you figure out, that is what meditation is for. Identify the problem so we can compassionately solve it.