Should You Meditate, and Also, What Is Even Meditation

By turning perception on itself—say, by becoming aware that the sensations associated with your identity are merely transient phenomena, hovering in some more fundamental awareness—your mind glimpses the “stitches” in its construction of reality, goes haywire, and pops out of the usual way, into The Other Way. (Thank you to River Kenna for giving me this vocabulary, in this excellent tweet.)

Hence, my favorite meditation instruction ever, from Loch Kelly: “what is here when there is no problem to solve?”

Mostly, seek relief: look for an approach that allows you to gently address your suffering in the moment. >But occasionally, if you are avoiding a bunch of pain, staring that pain directly in the face is the way to continue.

**>**Being in a tranquil natural setting for some period of time can be intensely productive. I credit a lot of my progress to the fact that I lived in Joshua Tree for four months. It’s a setting where contemplative activity is essentially the default, where looking at the milky way and thinking about your place in the universe in absolute silence is just another evening.

Some people will tell you to avoid including sexuality in the meditation process. This is bad advice from renunciative traditions. Sexuality ought to be included in the embrace of life, whether it’s sexual thoughts, or the nature of your sexuality, or the feeling of your gender. (I suspect that part of what causes guru sex scandals is sexuality being thrust into the shadows, and then sneaking back in.) As well, trying to fully, openly experience sexual energy, while alone or with a partner, is a powerful practice.

Deconstructive meditation, specifically, makes you realize that your mind is fundamentally changeable, composed of transient phenomena. All mental states are just assemblages of whirling particles, pixels briefly flickering on a screen. Nothing is “at the heart of it,” no one sensation is crucial. Your opinions, your beliefs, narratives about your identity—all furniture. Once you really see this on a deep level, like install it as a fundamental axiom, I think you hold everything more lightly.

But then, I remembered that when I was 25, the slightest criticism of my writing afflicted me with horrible psychic wounds. Surely, my work was the essence of me, and therefore, a rejection of it was a rejection of my core being! Now I see that there’s no way for someone to reject my core being, because there’s not really such a thing. I’m a fluid, and occasionally, my sloshing is objected to by another fluid. I can take it.