Meditation and the Parade
I find meditating to be very, very helpful. At first, the agony of being still while my thoughts spun and whirred crazily was nearly unbearable. With practice, I managed to slow my thinking down, quieting the squeak of the hamster wheel in my head. Meditation has helped me find a calm, quiet energy and has taught me separation between myself and my thoughts.
That notion, that I am not my thoughts, has been significant for me. As an alcoholic, my thoughts and feelings ran riot, bouncing crazily between extremes. I spent my days reacting to crazy thoughts and ultimately, drinking to finally quiet them down—like a parent giving a child Benadryl before a long flight. Well, quite a bit worse than that, but you get the idea. Meditation doesn’t necessarily stop the crazy march of irrational thoughts in my head, but it does let me sit back and just watch the parade. Meditation teaches me that I don’t have to react, I don’t have to make the parade stop and I don’t have to run away. Most importantly, I don’t have to be in the parade.
I often use guided meditations, but sometimes I like to simply be quiet and see what emerges. Once I’m quiet, usually, within a few moments, an image starts to develop. Sometimes I can only make out a grainy outline, sometimes it’s very detailed and precise. But it starts to appear to me, all while I’m breathing calmly and steadily. A few nights ago, I imagined walking down a country road on a very cold, winter evening. The air is cold and crisp and the sun has just set, leaving a stripe of orange on the horizon. Above the glowing orange stripe, the sky gets progressively darker, at the top it’s the color of the midnight blue crayon in the 64-pack. The gravel crunches under my feet and I can feel the cold on my face. The air is sharp and cold and clean when I breathe it in and it billows in front of me when I let my breath out. Darkness falls, the sky slowly, slowly stained the blue-black of night.
I’m walking towards a house, it’s still way off in the distance. There are no lights, I can only make out its boxy shape outlined in black against the sky. There is a stand of trees behind the house, only visible as a dark row of silhouettes. There is no wind, no sound but the gravel crunching beneath my feet. There is calm and peace as I walk down the road and feel the cold on my face. There is calm and peace in the quiet and the darkness.
Not all of my meditations are that lovely. But a lot of them are. Enjoy the parade and thanks for letting me share.