Grind Well

You wouldn’t get that sense looking at this blog, but my practice has been really solid for the past month or so. I’ve even been writing about it! I just haven’t wanted to do it in little bite-sized chunks every day and put them on the internet. I think, for the moment, the feedback loops of blogging are actually inhibiting my writing.

I was onto something with my last entry, which was over a month ago, but I don’t think I took it far enough. What’s distracting me from productive work is the very idea of the internet out there, listening, hungry for more Content™.

I’m chewing on some big ideas right now. It’s producing notes and scraps that I just want to keep collecting and working on and mulling over. I don’t want to be beholden to anyone — even imaginary people — to do anything in particular with them. I want to spend all the time and energy I have for writing working on this. So I’m putting the blog on pause again for a while. As usual, I may surprise myself and pop in from time to time.

Thanks as always for reading. Stay tuned for the results of this process… sometime.

— Jon

It’s time to get real. I’m wasting too much time every day on pointless stuff online, and I’m not even enjoying it.

This is hardly some novel realization; I’ve been off most social media for over a year now. But I’m still finding ways to waste my life in an endless series of apps I’m “just checking” for some new hit.

Sometime this weekend, I just got fed up. It can’t be that hard to just… stop doing this. Can it?

I mean, I understand that it’s very easy to succumb to digital distraction. I understand that this software is designed to exploit deeply compulsive loops in our brains. But isn’t that a textbook mindfulness problem? This is what I’ve been training for all this time!

The basic task is clear: to slow down my decision-making and mindfully decide whether everything I do during “productive time” is the right thing to do. Rather than go up against diabolical tech empty-handed, though, I have a secret weapon. I’m calling it a “Day Log.”

I’m putting a notebook and pen on my desk right next to my computer, and when my mind reaches for a distraction, I will reach out and grab the notebook instead. I’ll make a log entry about what I was doing, what needs to be done, and how I’m feeling, and I’ll use this to figure out what to do next.

It’s not just about the stopping and thinking; the physical, analog object is part of the solution. It’ll be the anchor in the present and the physical body, like the breath during meditation. If writing longhand is to screwing around online as just breathing is to monkey mind, this should do the trick.

Practically all my meditation training has been in disciplines of opening the attention to admit all available phenomena, in order to learn to be present with them. But as someone easily irritated by sensation, it’s incredibly therapeutic to me to close my attention to outside phenomena, especially if I’m trying to concentrate.

Even though it’s the opposite of my meditation instructions, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still practicing when I’m doing this.

Often I can’t achieve this state of closed concentration without a pair of noise-canceling headphones and a good myNoise setting. But once I’ve got the world well and truly blocked out, deeply interesting things begin to arise.

For one thing, my mind quiets itself. I get a clear sense that the thinking part of my mind is like the surface of a pond, and the world is chucking rocks into it all the time, creating unending turbulence. When I artificially put a force field around the pond, it quickly goes still. Only slight perturbations from below the surface ripple out, and they dissipate without a trace.

An emotion of relief arises, too, and that quickly gives way to compassion. All beings are having rocks tossed into their ponds, and even the best force fields are impermanent. My gratitude for a brief respite is powerful enough to reorient me towards the outside with an attitude of leaving no trace, tossing no rocks, even a desire to protect others from disturbance.

Doesn’t that sound super Buddhist? Yet no Buddhist-trained person has ever told me to block out sensations. Maybe I just haven’t asked the right question yet.

Sometimes my desire to meditate is about achieving something. Sometimes I desire a peaceful mental state I know is temporary. Other times I desire a deeper, more permanent peace that I imagine is compounding over my lifetime of meditation.

Sometimes my desire to meditate is about taking care of something. I feel scattered or stressed or upset, and I want to work through those feelings, whether for my own benefit or to protect the people around me.

Sometimes my desire to meditate is about belonging to something. I want to be a meditator, to be one of the people who advocates for meditation in the world… which of course can only be done in good faith by someone who meditates. Lots of problems in this category.

Sometimes, though, my desire to meditate is just a desire to be alone for a while. This is actually the most interesting category to me.

People often say that the hardest part of meditation for them is being alone with their thoughts. It’s also common to generalize this sentiment and say that meditation is uniquely difficult for “Westerners” because of this. I guess “Westerners” are supposed to be outgoing, gregarious extroverts who need constant human interaction. And the flip side of this is supposedly that “Westerners” all have monstrous, domineering egos that cry out in agony under the barest scrutiny of meditation. That’s so alien to me it actually makes me sad.

Why exactly is it that meditation is so ascendant in this “Western” culture that is also constantly pressing everyone ever closer together, with denser cities, a so-called “service economy,” and media that encourage every person on the planet to yell at the top of their lungs about themselves? Could it be because we’re losing our minds in this sea of others?

I’ve decided to open up the structure of Grind Well a little bit, to make it possible to post more often without always writing a complete mini-essay and recording it to boot. I’m going to start doing link posts, entering the venerable tradition of blogging by sharing, with a brief comment, rather than always by writing new thoughts.

The titles of link posts will be prefixed with this character: ⤳. The Unicode table calls that a “Wave Arrow Pointing Directly Right.” Isn’t that nice?

Importantly, link posts will not have an audio component! So if you want to receive the link posts, you’ll need to be subscribed by RSS, Facebook, Twitter, or Micro.blog, instead of (or in addition to) your podcast player.

I certainly intend to be doing full posts with audio more frequently than I am right now, but link posts will be a nice way to keep things going in between them. It will also expand the palette of my thinking-out-loud about meditation to include other people’s voices, which seems like a good idea.

Hope you enjoy it,

— Jon

It’s been six and a half weeks since my daughter was born. This morning, for the first time, I managed to wake myself at 6 a.m. to sit for 30 minutes before she and her mother woke up.

As good as I’ve been about taking this new experience of parenthood one breath at a time, I am starting to feel the fault lines in my mental state. The spaces between perceptions and reactions are narrowing. I’m noticing more often that I’m in the middle of a sentence already. My number of apologies per day has definitely increased in the past week or so.

Some of this can be written off to exhaustion, but that’s still not an excuse. Reactivity and lack of mindfulness with my newly expanded family is not acceptable. It’s my responsibility to remember I have a practice to work on those things. I have to consider the correlation between the decline in my practice and my decline in mindfulness.

This morning’s sit reminded me how much the practice is about making space. This is why it isn’t counterintuitive that we sit doing nothing to practice right action in the world.

Right action requires sensing the open space of the moment, deciding to step into that space, and then doing so freely. Sitting still for many minutes between actions is an expanded, scaled up version of that same free decision, letting us see it in exquisite detail and understand what it takes.

Right action requires a good night’s sleep, too — don’t get me wrong — but this is worth waking up for. Making space before a day of actions is an integral part of making space before each action.

The practice really does work one breath at a time. This is something I doubted before having a baby and getting my meditation routine utterly annihilated. I haven’t sat for more than five minutes straight since she was born over a month ago — and certainly not in any pattern for two days in a row — but my practice feels weirdly intact.

What am I doing right?

Certainly, I’m bringing mindfulness to all my interactions with her, especially when she needs something. I find it pretty much impossible to think about something else while changing a diaper, and that’s great for meditation.

But I’m also taking a minute here, a minute there, just to come back to the breath like every meditation teacher I’ve ever had has suggested. Funnily enough, I think I might skip over that part of the practice when I have a dedicated daily time for sitting. I think I might tell myself I’ve already meditated today, so I don’t need to do it again.

Clearly, that’s the wrong call, even if I’m only making it subconsciously. Now that I’m giving myself that gift of mindful breathing throughout the day (and in the middle of the night), I’m starting to think this might be the most fundamental part of meditation practice.

In seated meditation, we gradually learn that it’s fine for the mind to wander off occasionally. That’s just what minds do. The practice — the part that trains our strength as meditators — is the repeated effort of guiding our attention back. Coming back to the breath in moments of pause has exactly the same effect.

I’m sleep-deprived, I’m disoriented, I’m not taking the best care of my body right now. You know, baby stuff. Yet I’ve never been more sure that meditation is helping me get along.

I’m rocking in a rocking chair facing the window. The sun is streaming in. My wife is propped up on the couch with her laptop, notebook sprawled out beside her, taking a take-home test in her final year of rabbinical school. She’s streaming ambient piano music from the TV speakers, filling the room. The TV is covered with a red and orange tapestry. My feet are bare, and the cold air on them feels refreshing. It’s Sunday morning. I’ve had my coffee, done my reading, and now I’m writing on the tablet on my lap. Between my arms, held fast by a length of stretchy, gray fabric wrapped around my body, my daughter is asleep on my chest.

She’s been here less than three weeks. It’s been so amazing — so unprecedented — that I can’t believe I was able to anticipate anything about it, but I was right about what it meant for my practice. Caring for a newborn baby is not easy, but doing it makes spiritual practice the easiest thing in the world.

My daughter has become the avatar for holiness. She has annihilated any question of priority. The practice in its guise as seated meditation for 30 minutes did not always make clear to me that it was the highest priority in my life. The practice in its guise as caring for my luminous newborn daughter is my only priority. In each moment, I have a choice: Say no and be in hell, or say yes and be in heaven. Saying yes is doing the practice. Doing the practice is changing the diaper, washing the hair, putting on the onesie, giving her a fingertip to comfort herself while her mother is in the bath. I can’t even remember what the unmindful mind is like.

It’s time to put Grind Well on pause again for the moment, and it’s for the best possible reason. My wife and I are expecting our first child any moment now. When she is ready to come out into the world, we’re going to close up our world around her for a while and make our home into a quiet little nest. We’re both blessed with the freedom to do this for a few weeks. In California, paid parental leave is almost up to scratch with the civilized world! I’m putting most projects on hold for that time so I can be fully present in the baby zone.

Just like in the last pause, I’m not sure I won’t publish anything, but it certainly won’t be daily-ish for a short while. Given how profound things are about to get, if any of it can be put into words, I probably will, but maybe not for public consumption. Still, I think our daughter — Wow! Our daughter!! — is going to be the greatest spiritual teacher of our lives, and I look forward eagerly to the new lessons about life and the practice that she’s going to teach me. You’ll hear about it here, as soon as it’s time.

In the meantime, thanks for reading, listening, or both. It’s been a joy to hear from some of you and know you’re finding the site helpful. Feel free to keep getting in touch via any of the means on the About page. I’ll write back while the baby’s sleeping.

Talk to you on the other side,

— Jon

Sometimes “mindfulness” and “productivity” seem like twin memes. The best illustration of this is that it’s equally natural to pair another meme, “Zen,” with either one. The demands of the high-tech Western world have colonized its spirituality so thoroughly that a desk or an email inbox can produce “Zen” feelings, while sitting and doing nothing can produce terrible suffering.

Much has been made of the way “mindfulness” as a meme, particularly on the West Coast of America, has really arisen as a form of compliant concentration to increase productivity. All the best-selling apps and competitive health-tracking metrics for meditation and yoga certainly contribute to that appearance. All the giant, profit-driven corporations providing mindfulness time for their employees must at least hope it will increase returns for shareholders.

It makes some sense, actually. It could be argued that the fundamental benefit of mindfulness is to integrate into the world as it is. One practices mindfulness because one believes there’s less suffering in facing reality than in struggling pointlessly against it. If your reality is relentless productivity, why not incorporate mindfulness into that reality? In the best case, you can hope for everyone’s gradual awakening to the fact that, hey, we might be more productive in the long run if we chilled out a little bit.

But this productivity mentality goes down to a very personal, moment-by-moment level. I spent most of my sit this morning resisting meditation because it felt spiritually healthier to get up and start planning my work day. The sense of getting things done has become emotionally important to me, and it does feel like part of my mindfulness practice. Honestly, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. But I do know that any strength built in meditation comes from not giving up, and that strength of will benefits both “mindfulness” and “productivity.” So even though productivity seemed like a good reason to get up, I sat with it anyway.