Why meditate?

‘In times of crisis, we summon up our stength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.’ Muriel Rukeyser

Mindfulness is the practice of returning our attention, again and again, to what is being experienced in the present moment, internally and externally, with an attitude of kindness and openness. Saying yes to and including what is enjoyable and comfortable, and what we’d really rather not feel or think or be. Making space for all of it.

My capacity to use this practice as a practical tool in my daily life was sorely tested one summer morning fifteen years ago, and this experience continues to resonate in my life and work.

I received the kind of phone call every parent hopes will never come. My sixteen year old son had slept-walked out a third floor window in the night. He had fallen and broken his neck and pelvis and damaged his spleen and was in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Berlin. I was in northern Scotland. The news came in the form of a voice message. There was a phone number in Berlin to ring for more information. I’d experienced sudden shocks before. My son’s Dad had died of a sudden heart attack ten years before. My own Dad died of a sudden heart attack when I was eleven. I knew bad news can come, life-changing events can occur, death can arrive, and it’s just like this. I recognized the impact of shock in my body and mind: a slowing down, heat and vibration in my chest and limbs, a voice saying ‘this can’t be real, this can’t be real’. But to my astonishment I also recognized the presence of an inner guide, a part of me that had been cultivated through a mindfulness practice. This inner guide had experienced many hours on meditation cushions, hours in which it seemed that all that was being achieved was getting to know just how out of control my mind can be, how absent I often am, how disconnected I can be from my body, how my habitual reactivity can make bad things worse. I had been practicing for a moment like this. Over the next eight hours, as I made my way from Scotland to Berlin, that inner guide directed my attention and took profoundly loving care of me.

Standing in a parking lot, waiting for someone to collect my passport and bring it to me, I sensed the full height of my body, my own intact spine stretching upwards, my uprightness and stillness. I felt tightness in my neck, a clenching of the stomach, and a squeezing sensation in my lungs. I remembered I could consciously breath slower and deeper, that that might help. It was only possible to focus on my breathing for 2 or 3 breaths in a row. My mind was racing. But every time I remembered that breathing slower might help I returned my attention to that. I consciously dropped my shoulders, loosened my jaw, softened my knees. I became aware of bird song and the warmth of the sun, happening at the same time as the squeezing of my lungs. The worst thing imaginable might be happening, but I’m somehow still receiving the sun, still aware of receiving the sun, aware of the pleasure of its warmth on my bare arms. I’m somehow ok.

In a car to the airport catastrophic images came and went. In between the images was the sensation of breath moving in my belly, and an awareness of the vast space around me, the sky of clouds outside the car. One thought repeated in a loop: ‘This is unexpected.’ ‘This is unexpected’.

Then I was on a plane, tracking the vibration in my body, the heat of it, especially in my chest and arms, the arms that wanted to reach out and grab hold of my son. But now the vibration changed, lightened, became waves moving vertically up and down inside my skin but also flowing outwards, into and through the plane seat. I had a sense of being strongly held by the seat, and by the space around the seat. My mind was busy trying to imagine what I would find in Berlin, what would happen. I noticed these thoughts, but it was clear that there was absolutely nothing for me to do in this moment except be present, in this plane seat, unexpectedly on my way to Berlin to my boy. There was nothing to plan, nothing to organize, nothing to work out. I felt surprisingly safe. This was time for me. Time to prepare for what is to come, not with elaborate plans, but with giving attention to what I feel in my body, to the fear and terror, to the shock, to the reality that I have no control over anything except what I choose to do with my attention when I am aware of having a choice. At one point my face was wet with tears. A flight attendant asked if I was ok. I told her my teenage son had just slept-walked out a window and broken his neck and I was on my way to him. Her blue eyes flew open in shock. She reached out a hand. It fluttered in the air between us butterfly-like, then landed on my arm. The kindness transmitted to me through those eyes and that hand, her capacity to simply be present with me in that moment, felt hugely supportive. Tears ran down my face, and her eyes filled with tears also. She lingered for another moment, then withdrew. As I walked off the plane she said “Good luck to you, and your son. What a strong woman you are.” I knew this was true, I could feel strength coursing through me, the strength gifted to me by my practice.

However now that I was in Berlin what I had to navigate became more complicated. It had been organized that someone I knew a little, the father of my son’s best friend, would meet me and take me to the hospital. My son was in a hospital that had been on the East German side of the famous dividing wall. Hardly anyone spoke English there and I spoke no German. But I couldn’t find my driver in the place that had been arranged, a train station crowded with commuters. Now that I was on German soil I was seized by a sense of urgency. I couldn’t bear to waste time waiting for my driver, but I wasn’t able to contact him to tell him I was going alone without him. I felt a wave of panic, I couldn’t think or work out what to do. I recognized that confused mind state as shock. I had to get to my boy, but how? I directed my attention towards my feet, in contact with the cement floor. There was solidity there, in the midst of the discombobulating swirl of commuters and mis-communication and waiting and panic. My feet were in touch with solidity and my body was breathing. A little bit of space appeared. I told myself ‘just be here, just breathe for a moment, it’s ok’. My heart was banging in my chest, cold sweat springing from my forehead and armpits, but the sensation of my feet in contact with the ground was comforting. I had the image of myself as an arrow of love flying to its target. Nothing can stop me. And with that the friend’s face appeared out of the crowd. He took me to the hospital, helped find where my son was, walked me to the entrance of the locked Intensive Care ward, waited with me until a nurse came to let me in, and then left me on the threshold saying he’d be waiting in the reception area and to take all the time I needed. I was aware of another thought loop:“People are so kind, people are so kind…”

As I was led down the corridor towards my son’s room I had the sensation of lifting up out of my body. A wave of fear whooshed through me. What was I going to see and meet in that room? It was unfathomable. I vaguely remembered previous times of intense emotion and pressure in which I’d been able to collect and settle myself by doing walking meditation. But it felt impossible to practice walking meditation in that moment moving down the hospital corridor. I remembered it was possible to feel whole, to have mind and body and heart all together, but I couldn’t access it. Everything was splintered and moving too fast.

Walking alone into my son’s room I took in the sight of his long lean body lying in a hospital bed, in a padded neck brace, hooked up to various beeping machines and monitors. His eyes were closed. I sat down in the chair beside his bed and took a couple deep breaths, noticing a thought looping ‘Now what?’ ‘Now what?’ ‘Now what?’. I focused on arriving in that seat as fully as I could. As I’d been on my way to him I’d had moments of trying to imagine the state he would be in, the fear and shock and shame and pain he might be experiencing, and how it would be to try to support him. But it had been impossible to picture it, and my practice had kept bringing me back to what was actually happening in the present moment, what was real.

I reached out to place a hand on his arm. He was warm. That was real. His eyes snapped open. “Mom!” he exclaimed, “I’m alive! I’m so lucky to be alive!” “Yes.” I said. “Holy sh*t. You ARE alive. And so am I!” It struck me like a lightening bolt, the fact of our aliveness, like I’d never really got it before, the extraordinary good fortune of it. “ Isn’t it incredible?!” I exclaimed. Looking into each other’s eyes we both burst into tears. For a timeless moment we were plunged into awe. Grinning and weeping, we wordlessly shared our wonder and amazement. Never in a million years could I have imagined that arriving in his hospital room would look and feel like this. And if I had not spent the time I was on my way to him practicing mindfulness I’m pretty sure I would not have had the capacity to be present for him at that crucial moment, and join him where he was, in unexpected awe.

It was one of the most beautiful, and surprising, moments of my life.

I know this moment would not have been possible if I hadn’t had a meditation practice. For years I’d been practising focusing my attention on a direct and immediate experience of the here and now, including everything, no matter what is going on, and much to my surprise that is what my attention oriented towards under pressure. External circumstances do not have to dictate our state of being or what is possible. There is always a choice how we meet what life is throwing at us, whether that is a pain in the back, a niggling critical thought, or a serious threat to our most beloved somebody. I had the choice to be present with all that was happening, awake and kind in the midst of apparent disaster, open to wonder and goodness, not because I’d read some inspiring theory in a book or told myself I should be able to handle it in a particular way, but because I’d had a lived experience of the principles and tools shared by the Buddha over two and a half thousand years ago. This experience is available to all of us, if we practice.