Meditation Runs Through It

My close friend Theo said a magic word. Meditation.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "Magical."

He wanted to know where it fit into my practice now, and whether it went back to my years studying in the Ridhwan school. I felt a whole stack of answers arrive at once, and I want to walk through them in the order they came, because forty minutes later the two of us landed on a phrase I never expected to be writing down: sacred space invaders.

Five Years on the Cushion

I used to think meditation was one specific act that produced one specific state. In the Ridhwan school, we sat every morning, twenty minutes, no exceptions if you were a serious member of the school. I made myself do it. I watched my thoughts. And for five years, that's as far as it went.

Then one morning, sitting, something opened. A space appeared that was a lot bigger than my thoughts. My body relaxed. My mind widened. I remember thinking, oh, now I get it, this is what they were talking about.

After that I got to go on nine-day retreats led by Hameed (the spiritual leader of The Ridhwan School), where we'd meditate for hours at a stretch, and my mind and body got used to it. I kept some version of the practice going for years, tracking meditative states as they showed up with clients too. Then I had a child, and twenty minutes every morning stopped being possible.

Then I Had a Kid, and a Radio Interview

About ten years ago I was listening to NPR, an interview with a well-known meditator whose name has slipped my mind. He said something like: some people need more stimulation when they meditate; there are many ways in. That one sentence cracked something open for me, right when I most needed it, with a small child and no spare twenty minutes in my day.

I started noticing that when I move my body, I land in the same place I used to reach on the cushion. Swimming especially. Also walking, being in nature, dancing, anything that gets my heart rate up and my breath moving. The immersion in water, the rhythm, even getting out of breath. It's the same calm nervous system, the same brain state, arrived at by an entirely different road.

What Couples Counseling Taught Me

Later I studied couples counseling with David Mars, who works closely with the body, the brain, and the nervous system. What I learned from him is that when two people are together, dropped into their bodies, actually receiving each other rather than talking from inside their heads and their constructs, a meditative state can arise out of the contact itself.

That reframed something for me about my own work. A fifty-minute session is an immersion in that same state, eyes open, words moving back and forth, and then we work with whatever relationship the client has to what shows up inside that state. In meditation you're taught to be with what arises, to notice it without grabbing it. It's the same in the room with a client. If what arises is an emotion, we're with that. If it's a memory, a problem, something worth celebrating, we're with that. Theo asked if this was the same as witnessing. I hadn't used that word out loud, but yes, that's exactly what it is.

Two Nervous Systems, One Calm

I've spent a lot of years reading the research on attachment: Bowlby and Ainsworth on mothers and children, and later Sue Johnson's work on attachment in adults. What the research keeps finding is that connection with a few safe, reliable people calms the nervous system generally, and that in the specific moment of connecting with another safe person, the same thing happens acutely. You could call that a meditative state, not metaphorically, but in terms of what's actually happening in the brain and the body.

Theo pushed on this a little, wanting to know if it required two people, or whether more could get there together. It can. A room full of people can drop into it at once, which is where this conversation went next.

Concerts, Dancing, and Everything Else

Theo has been nominating this idea for one of my books since roughly the moment it came out of my mouth, and I think he's right that it deserves more room than a conversation. He brought up rock concerts, specifically the Grateful Dead, as a kind of benchmark experience for this. I'd add any small venue, any live music, that particular dissolving that happens in a crowd that's actually paying attention to the same sound at the same time.

I work with the Arts in my practice, and the same state shows up there. Someone drawing, someone following an image that's arriving in their mind without needing it to become a finished product, someone in the flow of imagining something. Dancing does it for me too, hip hop especially, though it doesn't need to be any particular style. Sex is another place people find their way into a meditative state. None of these look like sitting on a cushion, and all of them are doing the same thing to the nervous system.

Meditation Runs Through It

I'll tell on myself here. I'm a Three on the Enneagram, and I've always had a lot of interests going at once. Younger, people called that being a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I'm sixty-two now, and I've stayed with all of these interests long enough that I'm starting to think the old label was only half right. What this conversation with Theo helped me see is the thread running underneath the whole collection of my interests: swimming, dancing, couples work, sitting practice, session work with clients. The common denominator, the fabric underneath all of it, is the meditative state.

It connects to the inner critic work too. Getting some distance from your inner critic doesn't automatically drop you into a meditative state, but it gets you a lot closer, and that's precisely why it's the first thing I ask people to work on. You can't settle into that wider, calmer place while something inside you is still working the room.

The Vandals in the Temple

As Theo put it, if the vandals are invading your sacred temple constantly, how are you going to relax? Your body is the temple, the sacred space that holds you, and you're responsible for protecting it from any invader, whether it comes from within or without. He drew the comparison to the oath to protect the constitution from all enemies, foreign or domestic, and asked what my constitution is. My consciousness, I told him. A relationship can become a sacred space too, one that needs protecting from the inner vandals each person brings into it. No sacred space invaders allowed.

A Question to Sit With

If you want to try this yourself, notice where in your life your nervous system already knows how to settle, even if it doesn't look anything like sitting still. It might be a pool, a dance floor, a long walk, a particular person you can be honest with. Ask yourself what's happening in your body in that moment, and whether you could let yourself trust it as a real practice, not a lesser substitute for the cushion. And then ask: what would it take to protect that space, the way you'd protect anything sacred, from whatever tends to invade it?