On Living To Forget
One day I received an email with this very curt question:
“I read your book. Interesting. One question. Why do you talk so much about how hard meditation is?”
Regardless of its curtness, this is a very good question – largely because I’ve been thinking about it myself over recent days.
My reply: I think, when I look back at my life before I began meditating, and distil my underlying life-purpose back then, I can sum it up in one word:
Forgetting.
I lived to forget.
To that end, I was devoted to anything that helped me forget – work, parties, drugs, alcohol, sex – anything, so long as it helped me forget.
Forget what? Well, I suppose I was trying to forget myself.
But perhaps I should qualify that. I wasn’t trying to forget who I was -that was a story I was still busy building, a fiction I carried around in my head.
No, I was trying to forget what I was.
I was trying to forget my doubts; forget my fears; forget the existential discomfort of being in this body, with all its aches, twinges, and appetites. I wanted to forget the memories I didn’t want to have, and forget whether I was winning or losing in this game of life.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Everything I did was devoted to that end – to forgetting the reality of what I was, and what I had become. I lived the entirety of my first thirty years like this – until, at the age of thirty-one, exhausted and ill from my frantic hedonism, I decided to try meditating.
I sat down with myself, closed my eyes, and for the first time in my life I stopped. And suddenly I was face to face with the mind I’d spent a lifetime trying to sidestep, and the physical organism I’d become – both of which I’d been ignoring and hiding from, along with all my fears and anxieties, and all the bodily tensions and accumulated effects of thirty years of abuse.
And it was hell.
The physical and mental space behind my closed eyes felt like a black torture chamber. Yet it was simply what I had always lived with, but been completely distracted from – a mind and body that had spent thirty years patiently waiting for me to stop, face them, listen, and know the truth of how they were.
I could have turned away at that point and gone back to forgetting. But I didn’t. I was determined to form a new relationship with this mind and this organism that I am – because I knew that if I didn’t, the rest of my life would either be a slow slide into illness and decrepitude, or an ignominious death.
So began a new adventure with meditation and mindfulness. And it turned out to be a long and fascinating journey.
And over the following decades, this organism and I slowly learned how to live with one another – and take care of one another. I came to understand my body’s intuitive language of aches, twinges, and tingles. I learned to recognise the subtle signals of what it needed, and understand how it processed my life experience.
Put simply, I stopped forgetting.
Right now, I’m sitting with my laptop in a café. As I look around at the people here, I see the same forgetting everywhere – people assiduously doing anything to avoid the existential discomfort that’s accumulated over years of living.
They eat and drink to forget. They chat to forget. They party to forget.
They wander the streets of this tourist town gawking at things to forget. And when they go home, they might binge-watch Netflix to forget. Or scroll endlessly through social media to forget. Or message friends – to forget.
Anything but simply be with themselves.
And of course, their mind and body try to accommodate this forgetting. Over time, they obediently tuck unresolved experiences – anxieties, fears, slights, frustrations, rage, injuries – into the unconscious, and all throughout the organs and muscles of the body, patiently waiting for the day when that person might finally stop, become still, and begin forming a working relationship with themselves.
Which is what we’re doing when we meditate.
Sitting still, we can no longer avoid ourselves. We’re forced to face the truth of what we’ve become.
At first, depending on the kind of life we’ve led, this can be quite confronting, and meditation may seem impossible. But that’s what the meditation methods are for. They’re designed to help us through the storm of what our mind and body have been trying to tell us for years.
And if we keep practicing, the layers of accumulated mental and physical history are gradually faced and known and begin to evaporate – some quickly, some slowly. And we lose the need for all the things that help us forget.
And life begins to feel lighter.
So here’s a more direct answer to the curt question I was asked.
When I was writing Being Still, and choosing what to include from earlier books and posts, I was adamant not to gild the lily about the difficulties that can happen during meditation – especially as it’s experienced in the beginning. There are already too many teachers and books doing that, selling dreams and spinning seductive keywords like ‘calm’ and ‘bliss’, and‘serenity’.
For sure, these experiences are lovely when they happen, and they do happen. But as I will keep saying throughout this book, they are not the point of meditation, and expecting these things to happen only interferes with meditation, causing all kinds of frustration when they don’t happen.
Which is why I prefer to address the pitfalls and difficulties that can occur, and leave the bliss and tranquillity to happen spontaneously.
Because the difficulties people have with meditation are not the exception – they are the norm.
After all, as I will keep saying, meditation is a skill, just like any other skill, and all skills are difficult at the beginning. Learning a new job, or learning to drive or whatever. Any skill will involve discomfort of some kind in the beginning as we coordinate ourselves with what it takes to do it.
For example, going to the gym. We know it’s going to hurt, and we accept that. We even embrace it. We accept the pain because it’s part of the path we’ve chosen. We take pride in it, and keep showing up until eventually, the pain recedes and the benefits begin to accrue.
Well, meditation is no different.
For me, meditation is a gym for the mind, with the same initial discomfort and challenges as we learn to do it. Which is why I think it’s more useful to address these difficulties in my books, than to rhapsodise about the nice things that can happen.
With practice, the mind and body will gradually work their way through the discomfort, and they will begin to thrive, and meditating and mindfulness will become easier. And as the practice becomes woven into our lives, we no longer need to forget.
We’ve fallen in love with what we are.
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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
AUDIOBOOK (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00
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