TRANSCRIPT
I: I was recently asked if I could make a video on the subject of meditation. If I thought meditation could be useful in healing childhood trauma or any trauma at all, and maybe if there are any downsides to meditating. I’m going to give it my best shot.
What I have learned from my own life is that sometimes meditation has been very valuable to me. To meditate for me, how do I meditate? For starters, I’ve had a lot of people ask me that over time, and for me, it’s actually been pretty simple. I don’t follow any school of thought. Instead, I sit. Sometimes I do walking meditation, but usually it’s when I’m sitting, sometimes even lying down. I close my eyes, let’s go into myself, breathe, and just listen. Often, first to the outside world, and then just go within. Listen to whatever is inside me, whatever is coming up, whatever thoughts I have. Don’t fight them, just cherish them, honor them. Let my mind go wherever it goes.
In a strange sort of way, doing these videos is a sort of meditation for me. I’m listening from within, just listening, and it’s almost like I’m just verbalizing from the teleprompter of what is coming up inside of me. Not following any external notes, but just all following it from within.
But when I’m doing healing meditation, it’s just about getting centered and not even saying anything. I don’t do any chanting or anything like that. No pressure on myself, just sitting and listening. Often what I find is there’s an external voice that comes up from within me. I’ve heard it called a still small voice, but sometimes it’s not very still, and sometimes it’s not very small. Sometimes it’s pretty loud. Often it says things like, “I love you, I love you, I’m here for you, you’re going to be okay.” I think a lot of times that’s my worry. That’s what drives me to meditate.
Sometimes I’m uncentered, I’m lost in externals, I’m scared, I’m frightened, I’m anxious, I’m even obsessive sometimes. Oh, all these bad things are going to happen to me, especially from being so public with my private life, being public about my family history, being public about the flaws of my parents. So coming back to myself, just coming back to loving myself, not being so concerned with the external world. It’s love, it’s judgment, it’s lack of judgment, it’s lack of love, it’s criticisms, it’s noise. All the horrors that are going on in the environment and politics and this and that, and my fears, and how long am I going to live, and am I going to die, and what’s going to happen to me, and am I ill, and physical problems, and oh my shoulder, no, blah blah blah.
It’s like, let’s go within, be within. Sometimes not for very long, even sometimes just for a couple of minutes. Sometimes even for a minute is enough to really change my outlook, calm me down, bring my voice down to a lower register, bring me to a more self-loving, less obsessive, less anxious place. Probably my heart rate even goes down if they were monitoring it.
I’ve been doing this for a long, long time. I remember actually I first meditated, I believe, when I was four years old. I had an uncle who was into Transcendental Meditation from the Maharaja Maharishi, maharaji, yogesh, or whatever. I forget his name, but he had studied that type of TM, and he gave me a mantra, a child’s mantra. It was “Ing,” and I would just say it inside myself. I didn’t even know what TM was, but all I know is I kind of liked it when I was a little kid, and it helped me. I sometimes did it all throughout my childhood.
Now it’s like a transcendental meditation. I know some people who are really into it. I’ve heard certainly some criticisms of it. It’s not my style of meditating. I don’t know anything more about it than probably the 20-minute explanation my uncle gave to me once upon a time, a long, long time ago. I don’t use a mantra anymore. Now it’s like really I just do it my way, and I’ve done it a lot. Sometimes not for a month, two months, three months, sometimes every day, four or five times a day as needed. It’s just one of the tools in my arsenal.
However, I do want to share one thing though about meditating, about the subject of meditating that has troubled me over time. I’ve had quite a few people ask me, “Oh, do you meditate? What school of meditation do you follow?” And I always say I don’t follow a school of meditation. They said, “Well, how do you meditate?” And I think they’re asking an open-ended question. I think they’re, I thought they’re asking because it’s happened to me many times. They’re asking just because they’re curious, so I share what I just shared. I share maybe some condensed version, and then they said, “No, no, that’s not the right way to meditate.” And then they proceed to try to convert me to their school of meditation, their religion perhaps, even that meditates in this certain way, even pulling me into a cult sometimes.
No, you have to say this number of words in this order, in this language that probably they don’t even speak. Maybe nobody speaks anymore, some ancient language or some modern language that they’re associated with somehow. And this is the right way to do it. You have to sit like this, and you have to do this, and you have to do this rituals and XYZ. And it’s like, that’s a real turn off for me. I felt very judged many times by people who are really into meditation by telling me that their way is right and my way is wrong.
Which leads me to wonder, now that I reflect on it at this time, how effective is their school of meditation if they are so uncentered as to be judging something that I have found very helpful? Judging it by telling me it’s wrong. And what I also realized is they weren’t asking an open-ended question. They were asking a question that they didn’t tell me. It was a setup question. It was a gotcha question. A question that to them there was only one right answer, and if I didn’t give them that right answer, they weren’t even going to listen to it. They actually weren’t curious at all, and they were just using it as a setup to instruct me about how wrong I am.
And earlier in my life, when I was more open and perhaps even more curious, because I really didn’t know the answer, sometimes I even tried what they said. I would go back to their little center or sit with them and let them teach me. Maybe I said, you know, because, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s actually something scientific about me, something actually genuinely curious and open to learn. Often back then, I did feel judged. I did feel stung. But what I thought to myself was, well, I know what works for me, but maybe they know something better. So I tried it many times actually. I tried this one and that one. I don’t feel like specifically calling out different schools of meditation, different philosophies of it, but I never found one that worked better for me.
A few of them was like they kind of worked, but I remember some of them actually I found distasteful. There were some, from what I remember, this is going back 20 years or so, that told me I had to clear my mind, and I never found that just clearing my mind was something that worked. They would tell me, “Oh, I could sit.” They said I can just sit for two hours and have a totally clear mind. That’s the goal, and it’s so refreshing. I never had that clear mind. It just never, ever. Maybe bits and pieces sometimes I had more clarity in my mind sometimes, but the idea of just a blank mind, it was like they made it sound like they had this incredible level of self-control that they could just blank out everything. I never could do that.
And then when I thought more about those people, when I watched them even back then, I thought, I think they’re just dissociated. I think they’re meditating to get away from everything on the inside. What do they call it nowadays? I heard this term spiritual bypassing. They’re just totally like zoning out on their inner connection with their spirit. Are they spiritual? They call this spiritual, but I think they’re actually disconnecting from their spirit.
What’s left is nothing. Nothingness. And it didn’t appeal to me, and I couldn’t even do it. It’s like all I was ever left to feel was that I must be somehow deficient. I just can’t do what they’re saying until I eventually realized I think I can’t do it because I don’t really want to do it. This isn’t working for me.
Also, I had seen some of these people over time. Some of these big, big meditating people who meditate a lot, who can brag about how successful they are at being so internal, and they can numb everything out and blank everything out and be so centered. But sometimes they’ve crashed and burned. Actually, probably to be more psychologically accurate in what I’m describing, what I’ve seen is the stuff that they were splitting off, dissociating from, pushing down, blanking away from, just finally fought back and came out like a tidal wave. I’ve seen some of these people have literal psychotic breakdowns at certain points, end up in mental hospitals when all their blanking zoning out meditation didn’t work for them at all, when it failed them. That never happened to me.
Is there a right way to meditate? Therefore, about that, I personally think I would never want to tell anyone how to meditate. I remember once I heard it said just to meditate is to listen within, listen to one’s own inner self. And how can you tell someone how to do that? How can you tell someone how to listen? I mean, maybe there are techniques that are nice, maybe like closing your eyes is better. But sometimes, like I said, I do walking meditation. I like that idea. Just walk. Just walk and walk and walk and get into a rhythm of walking. Maybe listen to my breathing as I walk. Just smell, breathe in and out, and smell, breathe through my mouth, breathe through my nose, whatever. Just look at the scenery, look at the ocean, look at the trees. Maybe not, probably look so much at other people. Look within as I’m looking outside and just let my mind roam. But just listen. Listen to what comes up within me.
So that’s with my eyes open today. This is very different from sitting and just going within, you know? Totally different from that. So it’s like why would I tell someone the right way to meditate when I meditate sometimes in totally different ways?
I know a lot of times when I travel, if I’m riding on an airplane for 12 hours and I’m in a tiny little seat and I’m a very tall guy, my knees are practically bumping or sometimes are bumping right up in the seat in front of me. Just sitting, just closing my eyes and being within, sometimes for hours, letting myself relax, doing whatever works. And I think that’s part of the beauty of meditation is, yeah, letting people figure it out for themselves, not pressuring them to do it with certain fancy words, fancy techniques, and in a circle with a lot of other people and feeling pressure to perform.
I think realistically, if someone has a lot of pain inside, a lot of upwelling pain and upwelling feelings and upwelling memories, there’s really no reason to think that meditation should be a wonderful and calming thing. Sometimes it could be pretty anxiety provoking to look inside. So why would I want to pressure someone to do it for, well, you have to meditate for a minimum of 20 minutes, otherwise it doesn’t count? I’ve heard people say things like that. You have to do it for this period of time. Well, no, maybe just to look within for 30 seconds or for a minute and then to let go of that. Sometimes looking within can be pretty painful.
So I think this can be the downside for some people in meditating. It can be too overwhelming, especially if they’re feeling pressured to live up to a certain external expectation that someone else or some group or some book is putting on them. Or there’s an ideal of someone who can sit and meditate without eating, drinking, or going to the bathroom or opening their eyes for 15 hours and things like this. And then there’s the weird things that I’ve heard. Oh yes, someone is such a brilliant meditator that they can levitate. I remember my uncle, when I later talked to him about meditation, he said that some of the gurus in TM, Transcendental Meditation, could actually levitate and jump over things. I said, have you seen that yourself? He said, well no, but I know people who do it and I know people who have seen it.
I remember early on when I was a kid hearing that. It was like that made me just feel insecure because it was like, first of all, it went against every bit of reality I’d ever seen, and also it went against anything that I’d personally been able to do in my life and made me feel very deficient. And doesn’t everyone, when they’re hurt as a child, somehow get left feeling deficient? So why participate in a school of meditation that right away sets us up to feel less than?
My experience is that meditation makes me feel more than. More than what I was feeling. More centered, more self-loving, more self-caring. And that’s all I would ever wish on someone, that someone could learn to love themselves more, know themselves better. Yes, it might be very painful, but if it’s too painful, if it’s overwhelming, if it’s like, oh my God, looking within is too much, I would say maybe just go slow. Maybe just relax a little bit. Don’t push yourself. You don’t have to live up to any external person’s ideals of what healing is. You don’t have to be anybody’s guru. You don’t have to compare yourself to any guru.
More often than not, what I’ve seen, the gurus are pretty fake. The gurus are pretty screwed up. Often, mostly, probably the gurus themselves are pretty dissociated. Guru, doesn’t that mean teacher? I forget Sanskrit, Hindi, teacher. Well, what better teacher in the world is there than the voice within us if we can connect with it, even if only for a second? If we can look within. When I look within, when I hear, “Daniel, you’re going to be okay,” often, often that’s the voice that I hear. That’s my teacher. That’s my guru. Is that even me? Perhaps it’s just truth. Perhaps it’s just reality.
The voice in me that says all your anxieties, what’s gonna really come of them? We all know what’s going to happen in the end. We’re all going to live lives as long as we’re going to live them. We’re all going to pass away. We’re all going to die. We’re all going to let go of all of our possessions eventually. We’re all gonna not be the last one to live on earth. Other people will outlive us. So shouldn’t we share? Shouldn’t we practice this in our lives? These are the things that I hear. Shouldn’t I care about myself more? These are the things I hear. This is the teacher within me.
I know at different points in my life I’ve heard different messages, like “Daniel, now’s the time to get up and fight for yourself. Now’s the time to be strong. Now’s the time to have boundaries.” I’ve gotten all these things from meditation. But I know, yes, I want to end with this too. For a long time, I rarely used the word meditation publicly or in conversation, mostly because I’d been so burned by so many people telling me that’s not meditation. But it was. It was meditation, and it helped me a lot when I use it, when I have used it, when I’ve needed to use it, when I’ve leaned on it. So in that way, I would recommend it. I would recommend trying it like one of many, many different tools one can use for healing.
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