I am delighted to report that my experience with mindfulness is yielding excellent results, and I recommend the discipline to everyone.
Mindfulness, as an increasing number of Americans know, is a Buddhist practice in which the subject focuses awareness on the present moment and, in so doing, comes to understand the true nature of the self, and its relationship to emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. With this insight—as I can attest–comes a deep sense of peace, of emotionally “centered” clarity, and calm.
I have been in desperate need of these benefits for some time. Our national political reality, and its cultural repercussions, have been, for me, a source of anguish, fury, and not a little fear. I know, of course, that I am not alone in this. But such knowledge has brought scant comfort, and done little to mitigate what had become daily bouts of anger, outrage, and anxiety. That is why I took up mindfulness, and why I have been so pleased with its profoundly beneficial results.
Mind you, implementing its methods is a formidable task. Our consciousness is, after all, beset by an unending storm of perceptions, emotions, and thoughts, all of which compete for, and often hijack, our attention, drawing it away from the here and now. Adepts refer to this everyday consciousness as “the monkey mind,” with its constant (if fragmentary) interior monologue, its relentless and shifting stream of emotions, its continual input of impressions from our five senses, its ceaseless rage at Trump, its eternal disgust with every single one of the Republican cocksuckers who enable him, and so on.
This cognitive and affective content has its source in atavistic centers of the brain that, while they may have served our archaic human ancestors well, are of only limited utility in the modern world, where fleeing predators or identifying fellow tribal members are skills of secondary importance, compared to those required to not spend half the morning in a simmering rage on Twitter, detesting Trump’s loathsome children (especially that awful Ivanka and her smug stupid husband), his cabinet, his spelling, his fucking ties, and his spineless and/or corrupt defenders.
And so I cultivate mindfulness. I use it to attain a pure engagement with “the now,” and direct my attention away from all that other fucking shit.
How does one attain mindfulness? Through meditation: sitting on a mat, legs crossed, torso upright, and focusing awareness on one’s breathing. Could anything be more fundamental? And yet, it is harder than it sounds. Almost immediately one’s attention is commandeered by perceptions (“My knees hurt”), emotions (“Fuck Trump”), and thoughts (“No, seriously: Fuck Trump. I’m sitting here with my knees hurting, because of him. Let him have a heart attack already. And then fuck Pence”).
At such times we are instructed simply to note the sensation, feeling, or thought, and “let it go.” The point is not to try harder, not to pointedly ignore anything, not to berate oneself or feel frustrated or disappointed or guilty. Any or all of these feelings, and indeed any feeling whatsoever, is simply to be acknowledged and allowed to pass, if you fucking can.
It can be difficult not to be consumed by negative feelings. As a beginner at meditation, I was naturally inclined to blame them (my anger, my contempt, my fear and disgust and despair), and my inability to ignore them, on that fucking asshole Trump. But, while there is some justification for this impulse (many, many bad things can certainly be ascribed to that giant orange douchebag), Buddhist masters point out that blaming itself is a product of the monkey mind, and that allowing Trump a role or a presence in one’s meditative process would be to grant that shithead an even greater ability to pollute and degrade and fuck up everything than he has already.
Of course, it is one thing to know this cognitively, and quite another to reap the rewards of that knowledge by manifesting it in behavior, just as it is one thing to cognitively think that Trump should go fuck himself and quite another to reap the rewards of his having done so. And I am the first to admit that what moments of calm and repose I have experienced via mindfulness have been random, uncontrollable, and fleeting.
They have, nonetheless, been real, and I doubt I need to elaborate on the appeal of obtaining even a moment’s respite from the daily round of despising that most vexing fuckhead. And so I look forward to future meditation retreats, future pauses in the work day for intervals of calm, and future transports—however brief—of mindful release. Because I fully trust that they will be forthcoming.
At least I fucking hope so. Because, I mean, Jesus Christ.
