I was reminded of the power of mindfulness recently while visiting my sick grandfather in the hospital.

As we talked, a nurse walked into his room and began to remove a breathing tube taped behind his ears.

“What are you doing?” he yelled. “You’re hurting me. Idiot!”

My grandfather is the quintessential angry old man, quiet, cynical, and mean. These days, we have a term for that behavior: toxic masculinity.

But I’d never seen him take it out on someone outside of the family. The nurse, a young woman of color, was being gentle, yet confident. I wanted so bad to tell him to shut the hell up.

I decided to let the situation play out, see what happens. I began to watch what thoughts and emotions were coming up inside of me. I felt anger — a sharp burn in the center of my chest — but I also realized how lonely and afraid he must feel, having been plugged into machines for days.

I also began to admire the nurse. She stayed calm through what must’ve been a two or even three-minute temper tantrum. I pulled her aside as she left the room to apologize for his behavior.

“No problem,” she said, with a smile on her face. “I’m used to it.”

We think of mindfulness as the ability to pay attention and stay present, but it’s also the ability to let go, over and over again.

Before we can bring our mind back to what’s happening right here, right now, we have to let go of what we were distracted by.

This letting go is so powerful and potentially life-changing because the mind tends to do the opposite: hold on, cling, grasp.

Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chödrön calls this tendency, “being hooked.” She writes, “It’s an everyday experience. Even a spot on your new sweater can take you there. At the subtlest level, we feel a tightening, a tensing, a sense of closing down.”

As my grandfather had gotten more and more angry, I had begun to tense up with anger. Then, my mind tried to put out the fire by flooding with judgments: why can’t he just calm down? He’s such a dick. I’m weak for not defending the nurse.

“That tight feeling has the power to hook us into self-denigration, blame, anger, jealousy, and other emotions,” writes Chödrön, “which lead to words and actions that end up poisoning us.”

Poison is right. Telling my grandfather to shut up would’ve just added more fuel to the fire. We might’ve gotten in an argument. I might’ve left the hospital feeling horrible for yelling at an old, feeble man. The nurse might’ve felt that I was questioning her professional ability.

Instead, I chose not to bite the hook. I let the judgments and emotions pass, which allowed deeper, more skillful thoughts and emotions to come up, thoughts and emotions more aligned with who I really want to be.

It sounds counterintuitive, but meditation strengthens our muscle for letting go.

It’s a workout for the mind. We see our mind grab on to passing thoughts by remembering something that’s related, and then something else that’s related, and then… We notice when we get swept away into the past or future, missing much of what’s happening in the moment. We watch our mind cling on to things by judging in a split second — I’m not a good meditator.

Then we let go, over and over again.

After 5, 10, 20 minutes of watching and letting go, we’re all of a sudden more mindful. We sense a gap between what’s happening and how our mind responds to it. We have space to respond rather than react.

This gap, this space, is the starting point for deeper work. It’s the first step towards changing our long-term patterns and habits.

Once we have a strong letting-go muscle, we can apply other skills to the thoughts and emotions that come up.

We can go to therapy to learn where our particular judgments and patterns came from, and then how to heal the trauma that caused them.

We can learn about injustice in society to better understand why the conditions around us cause so much pain.

We can learn about how we’ve internalized these conditions through behaviors like toxic masculinity.

We can get involved in politics, join a union, protest, etc., to change those conditions.

Letting go, over and over again, can help us do all of this with a little more choice and from our deepest intentions.

Ajahn Sumedho, one of the first Americans to become a Buddhist monk, writes:

“For minds obsessed by compulsive thinking and grasping, you simplify your meditation practices to just two words — ‘let go’ — rather than try to develop this practice, and then develop that, achieve this, and go into that. Instead of becoming the world’s expert on Buddhism and being invited to great international conferences, why not just ‘let go, let go, let go?’ For years I did nothing but this in my practice. Every time I tried to understand or figure things out, I’d say ‘let go, let go, let go’ until my desire would fade out. So, I’m making it very simple for you, to save you from getting caught in an incredible amount of suffering. There’s nothing more sorrowful than having to attend international Buddhist conferences.”

Ready to get serious about meditation?

Sign up for my weekly email on how to bring mindfulness to the stuff that matters most — work, relationships, and, especially, politics.

Listen to the podcast version for more

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for the 99 percent. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More

Here’s the secret about meditation no one likes to admit: it just reminds us of something we too easily forget.

Contrary to all the hype about “mindfulness,” you don’t need to buy it, read about it, or go out and get it. (That’s capitalism for you.)

No, you’re already mindful — right now.

Think about the last time you had a deep conversation with a friend. Or explored a new city. Or had great sex. There was nowhere else to be or nothing in particular to do. You were fully, deeply alive.

You were born mindful, shivering in the cold air and bright light. As a baby, you didn’t worry about the hospital bill or where you came from or what other people thought about you. You simple communicated what you felt — you cried, laughed, smiled.

But as our brains develop, we began to make up stories about our feelings. Stories that take us away from the present moment and into the past or future. Stories that make us forget that we’re already mindful.

angel Kyodo williams, the Zen priest, says these stories fill up our mind as if it were “that drawer that collects everything in your house. They’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And, for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them.”

“You say, ‘Oh, but wait a minute, someone lived in this house before me. And some of that stuff is not mine. Actually, this is not mine. That’s my mom’s. This is not mine; that’s the inheritance of white supremacy.’ And we have no real way of being able to discern what is mine, what is yours, what we’re holding collectively, what I have inherited, what I have taken on as a measure of protection, of a way to cope at some point in my life.”

When we feel safe and supported — like hanging with a best friend — we allow ourselves to let the stories go. We don’t fantasize or worry about the past or future. We connect. We taste the complexity of the coffee and smell the incoming snowstorm and feel this person’s love. We remember that we’re already mindful.

Yet, most of the time— most of our lives — we forget. When we’re walking to the store, sending an email, looking at Facebook, we’re off somewhere else.

Instead of opening and connecting, we separate, close off, clench up. Our mind spins stories. We try to appear a certain way or make others feel a certain way about us. Our mind is full of thinking but we’re actually mindless.

That’s what makes meditation so powerful, even if it’s only just a way to remember. You can do it by yourself, pretty much anywhere, for free, to wake yourself back up.

Listen to the podcast version with more content

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for the 99 percent. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was 24 and put down the guitar and fantasies of being a rock star.

Then, I wanted to write philosophy — like the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and the literary critic Frederic Jameson. Now, I just want to make people feel the way I feel when I read Tara Brach, Natalie Goldberg, David Deida, Martin Luther King, Jr. — open, urgently alive, in touch with my deepest intentions.

Figuring out how to do that has become an obsession. I’ve read John McPhee’s Draft №4, a masterclass on structure. I’ve written a blog post every week for over two years now. I’ve started a podcast to sharpen my ideas. I’ve outlined three potential books.

But if I’m honest with myself, I’ve never figured anything out — well, anything that truly matters — by taking in more information or planning the future.

All the big stuff, the tectonic shifts in my life, the changes in course, the revelations, have come from practice. Specifically, meditation practice.

Meditation is the opposite of figuring things out. It’s accepting that we’ll never figure out this mind or this wild, ever-changing experience we call “life.”

There’s really only one thing we can ever figure out: how to relate to our mind and life. In every single moment, we have only two choices: either we react to what’s happening, or we respond.

Reacting is me shooting back a short, passive aggressive email a few days ago in reply to a message from a colleague who questioned my communication style. Responding is me taking a day to ask for advice from friends and get in touch with my true intentions before replying to her understandably angry follow up email.

Like Facebook and Twitter, email sucks us in to being reactive. Luckily, we have meditation, the simple practice of sitting, watching our breath, feeling our body, listening to sounds, and otherwise doing nothing. We get to rest as the fully awake, consciousness that witnesses everything else without having to do anything — without reacting.

The only response is to accept whatever happens. Accept the sounds of the room. Accept the slight pain in our back. Accept the emotions swirling in our chest.

Most importantly, we accept, rather than believe, our thoughts. We get to see them as they really are: temporary distractions from the fullness of living in our senses. Sometimes useful — I need to be there at 3:00pm; I should brush my teeth — but mostly useless.

Most thinking is replaying the past or worrying about the future. All thinking narrows our experience and takes us out of the present moment.

But we need thoughts to write — what else would we put down?

The truth is, we never stop thinking. Meditation isn’t about “clearing the mind” and “blissing out.” It’s about getting to know the mind by finally just watching it rather than believing or trying to control it.

The mind, according to Zen meditation teacher and writer Natalie Goldberg, is the “writer’s landscape.”

She writes: “Imagine that a painter has that wild animal to capture on canvas: arresting its fangs, the raging color of its eyes, the blue of its hump, the flash of its hoofs, the rugged shadow that it casts. We writers have that beast inside us: how we feel, think, hope, dream, perceive.”

We have to get to know that beast, its patterns, tendencies, voices, personalities. Only then can we channel it on to the page in words that approach communicating the energy and aliveness of life itself — words and sentences and paragraphs that other people actually want to read.

This morning, the connection between meditation and writing slapped me in the face once again. I pulled from my shelf Zen meditation teacher and writer Natalie Goldberg’s Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Path.

I’ve read all of her books, and Thunder and Lightning two times already. But somewhere during all the blog posts and articles and opinion pieces I had forgotten the connection between this practice that I love and this occupation, writing, that pays the bills.

Her message is simple: if you want to be a writer, then write. But she also teaches a way to do it, a practice that frees us up from making decisions so we can use all of our energy on the writing itself.

Pick a word, phrase, or question. Any word, phrase, or question. Set a timer for ten minutes. Keep your hand moving if you’re using paper or your fingers moving if you’re on a computer. Be specific with details. Don’t cross anything out. Go wherever your mind takes you. Use whatever genre and style. Feel free to write the worst stuff ever — this is a practice.

After reading a bit of Thunder and Lightning, I wrote the word “Retreat” at the top of a fresh page in my notebook and got to writing. I want to write a how-to book about starting a daily meditation practice, and I figured writing about my first meditation retreat could gin up some wisdom.

Here’s what came up, after a bunch of random stuff that I’ll never read again: “My first retreat, with meditation teacher Hugh Byrne, is what allowed the seed I had planted years before to sprout from the ground and begin to be nurtured by the light of practice.”

It’s not literary gold. But it’s getting at something underneath how I think about meditation retreats — that the path I’ve taken to meditating every day has been a journey with help from many others, and I should probably talk about that journey and those people in my book. It also got me thinking about my childhood best friend Matt, who first turned me on to philosophy and thinking deeply.

Goldberg says that while doing this writing practice, we should stay connected to the senses, like in meditation: “The hum of the refrigerator, the aroma of hot toast wafting in from the kitchen … The senses make memory vivid. Often when I write I hear something far off, as if through a fog, and I go after that call in the dark.”

If you’re writing an email, just get to the point, but if you’re writing something you want people to read, sensory details about particular times and places will help you connect with the reader. Not only by including them, but also because, as Goldberg says, they get you to “some emotional truth” you wouldn’t otherwise have located in the process of writing.

So, go, write, now. Do ten minutes. Then do ten minutes tomorrow. Work your way up, all the while digging deeper under surface level thinking to the reveal the stuff that’s truly shaped your life. That’s what people want to read.

---

Ready to get serious about meditation?

Sign up for my weekly email on meditation and bringing mindfulness to the stuff that matters most — work, relationships, and politics.

Listen to the podcast version with more content

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for the 99 percent. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More