Meditation: A Practice of Coming Home to Myself
“Yoga means Union.”
My dad was the first person to teach me about meditation. He had experienced the healing power of yoga after our parent’s divorce and was so moved that he brought the practice home to us, his kids. I was 12, my sister 9, and my brother 13 at the time. In his yoga classes, I learned that meditation was about connecting to a higher source, emptying the mind, and attaining a ‘bliss’ state with practice.
Dad taught us about some of the great yogis and sages through the stories of Buddha and Paramahansa Yogananda, who performed and witnessed miraculous phenomena and higher states of being through meditation. This ‘magic’ dad was sharing was exciting to me. To practice, I would sit or lie down quietly, with a long spine. I didn’t have a busy mind at this age and I remember meditation feeling sort of easy to do.
10 years later, my sister and I spent a summer at a healing center in West Palm Beach, Florida. While sitting in the meditation circle that followed daily Qi Gong classes, our Buddhist teacher explained that meditation was about “nothingness”. I sat and practiced being silent, still, and empty. I had an experience during one of these classes of a powerful internal vibration through my whole body, especially my legs. It was an experience that kept me curious about what meditation could open up in me.
At 26 I trained in Transcendental Meditation and practiced attaining a higher state of consciousness through daily mantra repetition. In the same year, I also completed the first part of my 200-hour yoga teacher training. During the training, we spent the evenings studying yoga philosophy, and we learned techniques for meditation, including mantras (chants or words repeated) and mudras (positioning of the fingers for different energetic effects in meditation).
We were all sitting in meditation one evening. I can't remember the mudra we were holding but I remember the stillness of the room, the stillness of my body, and the stillness inside me. Then I heard the words, clearer than any thought, “You are exactly where you are meant to be” coming from someplace beyond my thinking mind.
I didn’t keep a strict habit of meditation. But I’d had a few remarkable experiences and learned a significant amount for my age and my relatively standard North American upbringing. I was developing the skill of present moment awareness and I was able to listen and trust whatever came in meditation. I didn’t yet understand how invaluable this would be for me in my life.
All the meditation books I read and the teachers I listened to spoke about suffering. It seemed to be a very important thing to overcome. While I had understood meditation as a practice of attaining higher consciousness, I didn’t understand what that had to do with overcoming suffering.
In my late 20’s I met one of my favorite teachers, Rolf Gates, at a yoga intensive he was hosting in upstate New York. Rolf had a way of moving students through a practice that was completely different from classes I’d taken or from how I had learned to teach. The posture hardly mattered. How we were being in the pose is where he guided our focus and attention. The experience for me was a fusion of mind and body awareness that I hadn’t fully felt before.
Having extensive meditation training himself, Rolf found the language to guide students into their bodies using present moment awareness. It was simple and for some, like me, deeply transformative. In his classes, I was able to get present enough to listen to my body speaking and I released suffering I didn’t even know I was holding onto.
I was in a double pigeon pose or 90/90, where you stack your legs one on top of the other with each leg at 90-degree angles from hip to knee to foot. My left hip had been tight since a rugby injury in high school and my body didn’t bend the way the pose wanted it to. I took a deep breath in and out, but my hips didn’t budge. Then I felt the warm hand of one of Rolf’s teaching assistants gently press on my back. Her voice was so calm and clear. She said to me gently, “Let it go”.
I let my awareness drop deep into my hips. I noticed I was holding them in place, almost protecting the old hip injury. I exhaled deeply and to my surprise my hips opened wide. I stayed in the present moment, in my body, with my breath. My knees dropped to the ground and I was able to bow my head forward and rest my body over my folded legs. Warmth rushed through my lower half, flushing up to my face and then tears poured out of me. I stayed folded there, weeping, breathing deeply. I felt my hips, heart and mind ‘let go’ of whatever I had been carrying, all at the same time.
When we are suffering, we are stuck. Stuck in worry and anxiety for the future, or the pain or regret of the past. Sometimes, we aren’t even aware that we are stuck. Meditation and present moment awareness are tools to help us unhinge ourselves from these things we carry. In the release of my own suffering, in choosing to let go, I felt a radical self love that literally and metaphorically unlocked me.
My own way of teaching yoga began incorporating Rolf’s language of present moment awareness. My cues in a Warrior 2 pose became: “What is the rhythm and quality of your breath? When you inhale, feel the heart lift, when you exhale, feel the shoulders soften. Where do you feel extra effort and where can you let go?”.
I have continued to cultivate this habit of self-awareness on and off my mat. When I walk, talk, think, wait in line, or drive my car, I notice my breath, I notice my posture, and I try to let go of extra effort. Each challenge I come up against becomes an opportunity to practice tuning into myself, coming home to myself, and letting go.
I’d like to say that I am able to use this skill when life throws uncomfortable, painful, or distressing experiences my way, but the reality is, it’s not easy to put a practice like meditation into action in real time. This is maybe where the work truly is.
Life, has at times, seemed insurmountable to me, and particularly in the last few years. One thing seemed to pile onto the next and with each of the challenges that came, my mind only seemed to perpetuate the suffering I felt.
In 2018, after an 8 month separation and 6 month attempt at reconciliation, my marriage to my partner since high school ended. We sold our house and just like that, I was living on my own and sharing custody of our son. In the same week my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I navigated co-parenting, trips to see mom and 2 full-time businesses with my sister. When the world turned on its head and the fear and uncertainty of a pandemic forced everything to stop, mom’s cancer rapidly took hold. My sister, brother and I shared in caring for mom from the moment of her diagnosis until the fall of 2020. As I marked the first year of mom’s passing, I also let go of someone deeply meaningful to me. And then, a few months later my 9-year-old was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.
In order to keep going, I was holding on to everything, my hands gripping tightly to the bars of this roller coaster ride. My ‘home within’, the place I had created through yoga and meditation, was lost. I knew I needed help, but going inside wasn’t possible for me, not alone anyway. I turned to books, therapy, and friends and I leaned heavily on my yoga practice to keep me from falling apart.
It’s really hard to still the mind when it's in distress. That’s why meditation isn’t the first tool for me when life gets really hard. It’s usually the last. I wish it could be my first tool, because as cliché as it may be, the answers are within. But sometimes, and so far every time for me, when I’m in real distress I need help from outside of me first to bring my nervous system back into balance.
When I’m in need of answers, I’ll gorge on 2 - 3 books a week, listen to podcasts, and follow an author to the ends of the earth on YouTube until I glean some nugget of wisdom. I schedule regular therapy sessions. Having someone to talk to with the tools and training to help me safely navigate life's challenges is like a fast-track to healing. Friends and people I trust are invaluable during times of distress. ‘Fact-checking’ is a term a friend recently shared with me to describe what we do when we share our problems with those trusted ears and voices in our lives, to make sure what we are thinking is really true. I share with my sister often and with other friends and family, I trust.
I was doing all of these things. And they were helping me. I learned so much more about myself, about being human, being a daughter, a sister, a mother, a lover, and a woman in the world. But in every therapy session, every book, every youtube rabbit hole, and check-in with my trusted people, the answers to my suffering still seemed out of reach. They weren’t out there. And relentlessly searching for a solution out there was just another distraction from what I was feeling inside.
I missed the past. I missed the people I once loved, the lives I once lived. I missed my mom. I was angry that my son had to do all this growing and changing overnight as we navigated his diagnosis. Grief for all of it felt heavy in my heart.
One evening, not too long ago, I sat down to meditate. I had learned this practice of tuning into my wise self from my therapist. This is the voice that speaks with compassion, understanding, and reason, with the widest lens on life. “What do I do?” I asked myself. I took some slow breaths, cleared my mind, and sat in stillness. I listened for the voice of my Wise Self. Feelings came up and I let them go. Thoughts came in and I let them go. And then one simple word repeated in my head:
“Patience.”
As the word repeated in my head, and I let the meaning really sink in, I felt time slow down, I felt space in my body to breathe deeply, I let go of the urgency I felt to fix myself or fix anything. The word patience made room in my heart and mind to trust life, trust myself and let whatever I was experiencing be there.
Now, I practice patience everyday. Along with patience, I show compassion to myself, my present day self and my past self. And slowly, I am letting go, I am healing, unlocking my grip on life.
The urgency to be free from pain, grief, fear or doubt is not unique to me. If we are sad, we want to find happiness. If we are grieving, we want to feel light again. If we are lost, we are desperate for a way forward, or a way out. For me, impatience became my suffering, no matter where the suffering started. My desire to fix the problem became the problem.
This journey of meditation has taught me so much and I am so grateful for it. It is a practice, a habit, and a skill to be developed and nurtured so we can meet life as it comes. Present moment awareness is the skill of listening to life, to our Wise Self and overriding our desire to ‘power through’ life. Patience is a mantra, a word we can repeat to help us let go of the the desire to fix things so urgently, making room for love and trust and life. Meditation, for me, continues to be the practice of coming home to myself.
