Meditation

Recommitment

Meditation

Lately I’ve been disliking meditation intensely. I’ve been doing it anyway, but I’ve developed a feeling that there is no point to it. No endgame. I’ve been putting off doing it in the morning, trying to squeeze it in later in the day. Come evening, a glass of wine has been far more alluring than sitting down communing with the universal consciousness. A couple of years ago, when I’d been meditating for a few months, this is how it stopped for me. I’d push it back, then skip one, then one day I wouldn’t do it at all, then a week would pass and I’d realise I hadn’t done it at all; then the habit would be gone.

The problem with meditation is that it doesn’t fundamentally change your nature. It’s not going to change you from a pessimistic type to an optimistic Annie, it’s not going to make you one of those enviable extroverts who can chat to all and sundry about anything from cockatoo politicians to the intricacies of your auntie’s bunion operation if you are an introvert who prefers to scurry around the edges rather than trumpet on the stage. It won’t make you one of those calm, velvet-toned sensible people who never raise their voice, if you are by nature volatile and grew up in a shouty family to boot; it won’t make you all scientific and retrain as a (oh Jesus I can’t even think of one scientific job, apart from ‘science teacher’ or ‘brain surgeon’. It’s concerning)… if your jam is looser than that, less pinpointed on reality and more on the nebulous nuances of skipping and soaring words or hazy, haunting pictures.

I have to remind myself sometimes: what does it do? I’ll speak from my experience, not from what teachers have told me it would do for me. It has made me appreciate every small part of life, really note it and appreciate it. Often, that gratitude is there humming in the background even when I am in the midst of a mood or a bad temper or clouty bout of grumpiness. It has made me get out of those moods much quicker, in a matter of minutes sometimes, whereas before I would have chewed on the stinks of life for hours, days, weeks even. In tandem, it has made me pull way back from those same small parts of life to see them from a wider perspective, which makes me feel calmer about what on earth it is I’m doing with my life – fumbling around, hoping for the best it seems, mostly. It has made me much more accepting of myself – specifically, of my ‘bad’ attributes, shitty things I’ve done, appalling things I sometimes think. That means it has helped me to accept the darker sides of my soul and recognise that they are intrinsically human. It is made me write more because I give that ‘You are shit’ voice short shrift now. It has made me see (super corny alert coming up but sorry folks, this is what meditation does for you) that everyone else around me is my brother and sister, walking alongside me, forging their journey however they can, hoping for the same things that I hope for. Love. Acceptance. Security inside their souls. A role in the world, a meaningful purpose for their existence. A sense that their life, in its entirety, is not only a gift to themselves, but a gift to all around them too.

So I guess I will keep meditating. For now, anyway.

And the years go by (if you are lucky)

Meditation

It’s my last day of being 42 today. I had a friend who died at this age, of a brain haemorrhage. He was on holiday with his beloved wife and their three small children. They went to bed, and only his wife woke up in the morning.

Why does it take horrific happenings like these to remind us to live our lives? We think, when we hear about such tragedy, that it will always happen to someone else. Never to us. We take so much for granted. When my sons piled into my bed this morning, tumbling and hugging each other and trying to hug me too, I hauled them off each other, and off me, because I think I have all the time in the world for wild morning hugs like these. Of course, I don’t. I feel the years passing now at warp speed, and I have three rapidly changing little boys to demonstrate the voracious velocity of the years.

Sometimes it makes me panic, sometimes it makes me feel wistful, sometimes it sends me off into long meanderings in my head about how I really need to start taking care of myself so that I don’t succumb to one of the terrifying lifestyle diseases that so many of us end up getting. Rarely does it make me stop and exist only in the moment. You hear it all the time in relation to meditation and particularly mindfulness – living in the moment, being present. Now is all you have. We all know that intellectually but it can be hard to do if you spend a lot of time living up in your crazy-maze brain as opposed to in your body – feeling, sensing, smelling, loving. And crying, I guess. If living in the present is the ideal, then it’s necessary to live the crappy moments too. They often feel never-ending, but of course they do end. Everything ends. Everything begins.

So tomorrow, a new year begins for me. I want to live in it, and not in the years before, and not in the years after. But look at me now; writing this. Thinking about how I’m going to live next year – and not today. See how easy it is to forget?

Good morning

Creativity

This morning, as I stretched out, a small boy lying fidgeting either side of me, I let out one of those grunting, half-yawning questions. Out it popped. I must have been having a heavy dream or something. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ Jesus. What a thing to slip out of your mouth at 6.30am. I don’t know where it came from. Am I really so concerned about the purpose of existence that it was the first thing my brain threw at me in the early light?

My two sleepy boys looked at me, blinking. We are in Wexford for the holidays. It is sunny, it is outdoorsy, it is full of resplendent flowers – maybe it is the meaning to life. I don’t know. I haven’t been writing this blog for the last four or five days because I took my sneaky writing hour to write a longer essay. It was a big long stinker about my 15-year dance with depression and my hope – my belief – that I have finally found a reliable route out of it by practicing meditation every day (among other things, of course. Nothing is a panacea). It was painful to write and my husband got the brunt of my crappy mood. Actually the boys didn’t fair well either. I was snappy and I lost my temper with one of them (the middle one.) It made me think: Sheesh. This writing lark – it can be joyous, yes, but it can also be an excruciating pain in the bum. It was as if, by writing this much longer piece, I took a huge greasy spoon, clunked it in down into the depths of my brain and gave everything a vigorous stir around. Flotsam was flying around in there for a few days. I was unsettled and disconcerted. Anyway; it’s written now and submitted to a magazine and I feel better that it’s done. Better out than in, as one of my meditation teachers taught me. (Perhaps the world might disagree with that if they read it).

So back to lying in bed this morning, snuggled up with my two boys, as the fragrant day lay ahead, out here in the country with the smell of the sea and sweet roses in the air. I don’t know why I needed to ask, the answer was clearly there in front of me. I didn’t expect a reply from either of them, but as they both lept up out of bed, the older one grabbed my arm then kissed me on the nose and said: ‘The meaning of life… is you.’

Fist fight

Meditation, Mental health

I had a not-so-lovely dance with rage this morning. It doesn’t really matter what set me off, I’m telling you about it because each time it happens, I am freshly shocked as to where the anger comes from and how it can be so powerful as an emotion.

It’s horrible. It is absolute monkey brain in action. Now that I meditate regularly I notice that the anger usually rises and falls quickly. It doesn’t stay, because I can feel it in my body, I can pinpoint it almost as a separate thing to me. I’m not blindly angry about things anymore. I think meditation has made me take a huge step back from it. It makes me want to examine it. There are distinct levels of being you discover when you meditate every day and there is always, always a very distant layer at the top – one that observes. It looks at what you are doing and it doesn’t say, holy hell that is terrible, or well done chump you’ve lost it again. It’s just sort of sitting there, holding you. I suppose if it could speak it would be calm and neutral. Oh I don’t know what it would say! Anger is such a destructive emotion but I absolutely believe that it is better out than in.

You obviously can’t keep directing it at other people, but you can’t suppress it either. Someone did say to me years ago that my torpor of a depression was anger turned inwards. I thought it was a pretty lazy thing to say, like, how handy for you that you’ve compressed my decades-long depression into one sentence. But now, after some years of looking within myself in order to try to correct my less useful tendencies, I see that they were right.

Anger is not really going to go anywhere, I guess, once you have those tendencies. I think this is brilliant from Maria Popova’s website Brain Pickings. She draws the reader’s attention to the poet May Sarton, who says: ‘Sometimes I think the fits of anger are like a huge creative urge gone into reverse, something dammed up that spills over…’ The creative urge gone into reverse is a great way to put it – it’s some kind of life force; tangible, gone in to reverse, yes. It is something dammed up, for sure. It works with triggers, of course it does – the thing that you are getting angry about now might be small, but it is certainly triggered from something that happened to you in your past.

If you want to grow, really grow as a human being, and become the best one you can be, then you have to spend some time figuring out what these triggers are, and then you have to disable them. They must be unpicked, taken apart and made harmless in their dissection – that’s if you want to stop suffering. And don’t we all?

Irritating, resplendent truth

Meditation

One of my favourite blogs to read is Cup Of Jo; Joanna Goddard is a champion of womanhood and love, and I basically want to be her best friend. I came across a piece on it last night, What If You Can’t Have a Baby?, featuring Mara Kofoed talking about her journey from trying desperately hard to have a baby – she did everything she possibly could for ten years – to deciding to stop trying, and instead focus on building a flourishing, happy life without children.

It’s really the life that chose her and her partner Danny, but they fell into it and embraced it. She says: ‘Every ounce of myself is done with pursuing, pursuing, pursuing. It’s like someone has died and instead of dedicating a life to changing what is, we are going to move on and try our very, very best to live the best life that we can.’ We all know that we must to do this to have a shot at being happy – accepting what is, stop chasing what is not. Mara and Danny have both done this, and then some, and you can read about it on their blog About Love. Mara speaks so eloquently on finding wholeness within yourself and it really resonated with me. In fact, she realized without having children what I only could after I had them. You can’t be fulfilled by having a child. That’s your job to do for yourself. Mara says: ‘I realized I was putting pressure on this child to fulfill me, when in reality, it’s my job to find fulfillment, not anyone else.’

It was a huge shock to me when I had a baby that I didn’t feel instantly complete and fulfilled. It took me about five years to get pregnant, and all of that time I put my life on hold with a big ol’ bad attitude of ‘I’ll be happy when I have a baby.’ I was convinced I couldn’t be happy until I had a baby. What a shame, I missed out on a lot of living in those years by steadfastly refusing to accept things as they were. And what a wake-up call, after I was insanely lucky enough to have one son, then another, then another – to realise that it is not my child’s responsibility to bestow happiness upon me. That lesson came pretty quickly after the birth of my first son, but it wasn’t until after my second that the message really hit home: Yo, Jacqueline. You’ve got to make yourself happy. No-one else will. So figure out how to do it, stop looking for an external source, and find it within you. It is the only way. There is no other way. Not money, not status, shopping, shiny things, books, stuff, dinners out, wine, pills, love affairs, not travelling to far-flung fabulous places, not the glorious cuteness of babies and children in their spectacular sweet, sweet innocence, nope – it’s you. It’s inside you. You were born with it.

Don’t get all frustrated and read this like: WHAT the fuck? Happiness is inside yourself? I can’t think of anything more irritating than that, where is my credit card/glass of wine/new dress/thrilling love diversion? That’s what I would have done a few years ago. It’s irritating because it is true, you keep hearing it everywhere because it’s true, you might not even finish reading this post because it is true.

Only YOU can make yourself happy. Then the world opens up, and you see that its stunning gifts are right in front of you. They were there all along.

Present to yourself, gift to the world

Meditation, Motherhood

In this podcast, I love what Jillian Lavender says about taking time for yourself, in her case specifically to meditate. She says something like, let’s turn on its head this whole idea of carving out some time for some self-care (yes, self-care, irritating term, but it is self-care nonetheless so let’s go with it) being selfish. It is not selfish, she says, it is the most generous thing you could do for yourself and for your family.

Yes, you are taking yourself away from them for ten minutes, or fifteen, or however long you can stretch to, and it often takes some mathematical maneuvering to find the time, particularly if you have very young children, but things have always changed when you get back. Your perspective has always shifted.

Having small children is stressful, it just is, the end. I’ve got a five year old, three year old and a one year old. The three year old is almost always having tantrums, the five year old isn’t far behind him and the one year old – well the poor soul is suffering so much with cutting teeth, and has been since soon after birth. It means he wakes about five or six times a night, and because he’s breastfed, it’s the only way I can comfort him. Some days, I just find it all really stressful. Let me be clear, the glory hours far outweigh the drudgy ones. Having children is exploding stars and love and joy; but it’s a headwreck too. I’m not sure how other mothers do it, but I find all the constant screaming and shouting really challenging (ahem, to say the least) and the problem with it is, my monkey beast comes out, every time, and I just want to shout and scream back. My son threw an apple at me last night and guess what? I threw it back. I feel terrible about it, it’s not cool behavior for an adult.

So back to what Jillian said, in my case it’s true: I think meditating is the most generous thing I can do for my family and for me, because when I am consistent with doing it, it makes me a better person. It just does. Better, stronger, calmer, less tired, less snappy, less of a dick. It also gives me the extra gift of deeply appreciating the smaller moments, the fleeting pearls of mothering these beautiful tiny children that I know I will wear like a precious, treasured necklace when they are grown.

Good enough

Creativity

I couldn’t find the time yesterday to write a post, not the post that I wanted to write anyway. When I did put one up, I thought: it’s not good enough, but it will have to do.

If, like me, you tumble and wrestle with the idea of not being good enough then you might notice one of two things happening in your life. 1) You think, it’s not good enough so I’m not going to do it at all or 2) You think, it’s not good enough, it has to be perfect, so I won’t stop until it is perfect. If it’s the latter, you are probably making your own life – and everyone else’s around you – a misery in the relentless pursuit of an impossible ideal. If it’s the former, it’s much more serious. You are rejecting life itself.

Who says it’s not good enough anyway? Cue trumpet sounds: yes, it’s that crotchety old critic in your head, there to cheer you on as usual – not, as Mike Myers would say in Wayne’s World, a highly intellectual film I watched as a teenager. At this stage, I’ve started about twenty novels, I’ve got endless poems scribbled here and there, and bits of random prose scattered across countless notebooks. All seeds that weren’t watered. Nothing has been finished because my ‘you are not good enough’ voice has been deafening these last few decades. I allowed it to paralyze me for years. I’m middle-aged now, and even writing this I’m thinking – no! No you are not! But yes, yes I am, I am middle-aged now and I have left it this long to turn around and fight back with great force against the ‘not good enough’ mantra.

Lately, I’ve understood that there is no such thing as not being good enough. It’s just a ghost, a kind of mental haunting, utter nonsense thrown up from some stuck, dodgy part of your brain. I fell foul of perfectionist problem number one. It was my downfall, in many areas of my life. I’m not good enough, so I’m not going to try. What that really meant was that I was terrified of failing. How brave people are who put their ideas, their creations, out into the world! My perfectionist number one problem was not conscious, but it is now. Perhaps it’s age, or meditation, but it has come sharply into consciousness – so knife-like, in fact, that I can feel the blade of it sliver over me each day.

I have work to do. Creative work, ninja-style. That means I have to kick the butt of that old it’s not good enough pal of mine. It feels urgent because that cranky, toothless critic has kept me in a stupor for almost a quarter of a century. Perfectionism is a kind of evil that can freeze you into a block of ice – and what does it take to make you melt? Honestly, I’m just finding out myself, but it’s happening to me at the moment. I’m melting. I’m dripping. It won’t stop because frankly, telling myself that I’m not good enough is just not fucking good enough anymore.

Quick! Go sit still

Meditation

‘I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one,’ said Gandhi. Great things come out of stillness. Out of the quiet and nourishing womb, comes a newborn. Out of the silent embrace of sleep, comes a fresh perspective on another day. Out of the deep cavern of the earth, roots twist in and then, like a miracle, appears all the glory of plants. The waves that whirl on the surface of the ocean are mere froth masking its vast, calm liquid depths. All things must be still before they explode into life. So must we.

Oh, alright. You get it. But it’s so hard to stop and be still (and I don’t mean sitting numbly watching Netflix). When we do try, we berate ourselves for not being in constant motion, carrying out the urgent mechanics of life – like robots. Right now, it’s a challenge for me to find time to meditate and write, two things I really want to do. I’m busy with the bulbous, boisterous task of raising three small boys. And that’s cool, that is exactly how I wanted it, it is what I’ve chosen for myself. But I know that enriching myself by meditating and writing will absolutely benefit my boys – so I keep trying to snatch slivers of time to stuff full of silence, and then full of words. I stick my neck out a bit to meditate. People in my street probably think I’m odd because I often go and hide in the car to do it when my husband gets home. I’ve done it in the loos at work, and in random hotel loos too. In coffee shops. Libraries. Supermarket car parks. The breastfeeding chair in St Stephen’s Green shopping centre (with the baby). Airport lounge. Bus stop. Dentist waiting room. I’m always scoping places out and thinking: would it be weird if I meditated here? Normally the answer is yes – but I do it anyway, because I can’t be going off to sit on the foothills of the Himalayas to do it. My life is here, not on a fantasy mountain.

I find a way to make it work. At 4.30am (I go back to sleep afterwards, come on!), when the baby naps, when the boys are watching a sneaky episode of PJ Masks, when I’ve nipped out to the supermarket. And particularly in busy times, when there is no time to meditate, I know that for me it is extra important to meditate. That is, to remove my bananas, jumping jack brain out of the melee for a short while so it can soothe itself, even just a little. I don’t see the benefits immediately, they are accumulative; it’s often days, weeks, or even months later that I piece together the puzzle and note that it was the deliberate bouts of silence that made the noise bearable. No: that made the noise beautiful.

What do you know?

Meditation, Motherhood

‘My mind is back now,’ said one of my boys last night, bounding up the stairs after a lengthy tantrum because I’d switched the TV off. Interesting, I thought. How the hell did you know that you’d lost your mind when you went to that electric, crimson place of no reason? Then I just said, ‘I’m glad it’s back,’ and I continued feeding my one year old, one eye to my mono-milkable boob with its steadily dropping supply.

So you know that you had lost your mind, here, in the murky, marvellous waters of early childhood? And, of course, you don’t know yet that the ability to cognize such a deep and sensible thing will totally disappear on you, to resurface well into adulthood. If you are lucky.

Wow. How many other things do we ‘know’ at one, two, at three, four, five – then lose completely as we grow, as we learn to cue and curb our behaviours and cater to what we think people want from us? Do we know that we are whole – that we are born this way? It’s plain to see, I’ve seen it in all my babies: they are whole. We were whole, then perhaps our psyches split into hundreds of shards, different personalities we try out, different ways of being. Do we know that we are good? Because there can be no intention to be ‘bad’ when you are so young you remember the sound of your mother’s heart in the womb. Do we know that time is not linear but spherical, always now, never then and never tomorrow?

What do we know about love? Do we know that we are love, until someone unwittingly dismantles that reality, for some children much sooner than others? And do we know about belonging? That every single one of us was born with the same right to be here, with the same potential in our tiny sacred souls and with equal importance to the unfurling of the planet?

We know, we know, we know… in infancy we know so much. Right now I’m thinking it’s absurd that I meditate, that I desperately search for slivers of day so I can be still, because essentially what it is I’m learning is how to be an infant again. To know I’m whole, to know I’m good, to fall into the whirl of time and just be in it – to love – and to belong.

City story

Meditation

I’ve been in London for the last few days. I went to learn more about meditation. I had forgotten about the vast, exciting dusty crazy beauty of the city and all the people who live there.

I learned some cool things, like if you flatten yourself really hard against the teeniest corner of the Tube that can still not be enough for the person standing in front of you with a rucksack on their back, and that if you try to force an automatically sliding cab door shut the driver will lose his shit with you. I saw the Christian Dior exhibition at the V&A, which made me remember that loving clothes isn’t frivolous as they are works of art, ate unidentifiable but divine food at Ottolenghi, drank wine, watched the majestic Emma Thompson and the gorgeous Mindy Kaling in Late Night at an adorably tiny cinema in Crouch End, caught up with my sister (whose ability to make me laugh further revealed the urgency of fixing my postnatal pelvic floor problem) and got the chance to cuddle my sassy little nieces, aged 7 and 4. I was there for just over 24 hours but came back with enough nuggets of newness to make me feel like a plant that’s just been watered.

On the way back to Heathrow, feeling like a Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoon, I watched a stand-off, as a man tried to get on the Tube with a big suitcase. There was another man blocking the door, also with a giant suitcase, and he only had about a centimetre of space in which to move further in to the train. The man trying to get on was like Arnold Shwarzenegger in The Terminator, opting for a monosyllabic and threatening ‘Move’ command. The other man did not move, then Arnie repeated: ‘Move’. This went on for a good two minutes. ‘Move,’ Arnie kept saying and the other man kept not moving. I was sandwiched right there, observing the immovability of each one with wonder and interest. I resisted the urge to step in and negotiate, because my anxious brain is pretty melodramatic and it flash-forwarded to newspaper headlines like ‘Mum stabbed to death on Tube’ or ‘Innocent mum dies in Tube terror stand-off’ and I thought, I’d better not, I’ve got three kids and this Arnie guy seems unhinged.

Arnie was persistent and eventually the whole train carriage rearranged themselves so the man blocking him at the door was able to shift a few centimeters, letting the Terminator and his unwieldy baggage on. Life carried on and I caught the eye of the girl next to me. I made a thumbs down sign and we both started to giggle. God it was hot. The next stop, Arnie was blocking the door while a young woman with absolute comedy luggage tried to get on. Arnie stepped forward and patiently helped her load on suitcase after suitcase, then meekly squeezed himself further in to the weary crowd.

Nobody is a tit all of the time. We are all only tits some of the time. The rest of the time we’re ok. That’s just how it is.