Why I started meditating every day
There are tons of reasons to meditate — to decrease stress, pay more attention, be present more often. But the reason I started meditating was because, for the first time, I had found a way to stop being so self-centered — which was a massive relief.
Counterintuitively, my self-absorption came in the form of self-hatred, which by pure luck — and I mean that — wasn’t overly self-destructive.
I spent most of my 20s worrying about myself — what others thought of me, what I needed to do to finally be happy, why I couldn’t quit a career that increasingly didn’t matter to me. I remember an absurd moment when I thought I had finally cracked the code. Driving home from one of the corporate professional jobs I had in those days, I calculated that I had felt content — felt myself — every fourth day in the few weeks prior. Maybe happiness is just a natural rhythm that no diet, exercise, way of thinking — no conditions — can influence, I thought. (This turns out to be sort of true.)
All that worrying about myself was actually self-hatred because I couldn’t see that I was good enough. I was constantly picking on and criticizing myself in the hopes of finally feeling content on the regular.
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What I was doing was trapping myself in a bind: since I rarely gave myself a pass, I became hypersensitive to when others were loving or simply cared about me. This made me dependent on external sources for self-worth — lovers, new friends, job promotions. And this made it difficult to see the world as it was — rather, everything and everyone else was a mirror that I could use to judge myself. How self-centered of me.
Charlotte Joko Beck wrote, “Being self-centered — and therefore opposing ourselves to external things — we are anxious and worried about ourselves. We bristle quickly when the external environment opposes us; we are easily upset.”
When a lover walked away, or I didn’t get a promotion, I would collapse and binge on whatever would numb the anger and pain.
Over the years, meditation practice has slowly dissolved my self-absorption. By putting me in touch with my mind and body — not my “self,” whatever that is — it helps me ride the waves of emotion as I come in contact with all that is outside of my control, which is, of course, almost everything. I’m able to hold and accept more of life as it flows by rather than take a snapshot of it to add to an internal story-line about myself. It even helps me see when someone’s love or anger or distrust isn’t necessarily about me — it’s might be, and often is, about them.
I now see the way that I was as a tragic comedy. I was so hung up on continually checking how I was doing that I couldn’t open to receive what was being offered to me all of the time.
As Björk sings, in my favorite song of hers: “All is full of love. You just ain’t receiving. All is full of love. Your phone is off the hook. All is full of love. Your doors are all shut. All is full of love.”
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