On Meditation and Mortality

Back in 2020, when I was suffering from chronic illness, I felt hopeless, lost, and very alone. I had gone back to work after a one-year medical leave of absence, but after only six months at work, I found myself unable to function. I tried cutting back my hours, but I soon realized this wasn’t enough, and my health was rapidly declining to a point of complete dysfunction. I couldn’t sleep, was engulfed in pain at night, and plagued with relentless, frightening brain fog in the morning. At that time, I turned to meditation and Buddhism, hoping it might anchor me and keep me from slipping further into this health catastrophe, hoping to avoid the inevitable accompanying depression.

I wasn’t raised with any real religion, and though I identified as an agnostic, my father was a strong atheist. My mother, with her gentle determinism, joined a Unitarian church, but kept it mostly to herself. Spirituality of any sort felt like a foreign language to me.

In 2011, I remember attending a meditation session with a bunch of mostly female faculty from Alfred University, where I taught. I didn’t know anything about meditation then, and I tried dutifully to sit and follow the instructions, trying to thwart the multitude of thoughts that flooded my mind, very unsuccessfully. I left that session convinced that I was a terrible meditator, and that my type-A brain was incapable of this practice. Many times, afterwards, when people asked me if I meditated, I said matter of factly, “I can’t. My brain can’t do it!” It wasn’t until much later that I realized that every beginner has this problem, and the goal of meditation is not to have an empty mind, but just to notice when your mind is thinking thoughts.

When I was in my 20’s, my mother gave me the book The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff, which I loved. So during my first big health crisis in 2020 (unfortunately, more health crises would follow) I remembered that book and started to wonder about Buddhism, because there appeared to be a similarity between that and Taoism. I’m not sure why, but I had an intuition that Buddhism and the practice of meditation could help me to heal.

And so, more out of despair than any spiritual seeking, I downloaded the Ten Percent Happier app on my phone. I began each day with Dan Harris’ short videos (ABC’s news anchor, author and the founder of Ten Percent Happier app and podcast) which gave me bite-sized doses of Buddhist teachings and guided meditation practices. This worked well for me, since I could follow a predetermined program easier than making up my own. It introduced me to new teachers and methods and slowly increased my tolerance for longer meditation sessions.

After a few months of this, I became interested in certain Buddhist teachers I’d been exposed to, looked them up, and started listening to their talks on long walks. I was sleeping a tiny bit better, and though I still had raging symptoms, I felt a little less anxious and exhausted by them. And, I felt less depressed, and a little more at peace. Through Ten Percent Happier, I found my two favorite teachers to this day: Joseph Goldstein of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA, and Anushka Fernandopulle from San Francisco.

While both teach a vipassana style of meditation, they are very different. Joseph is an older white gentleman, serious but not without a sense of humor, who (for me) tends to interpret the teachings a little more academically. Anushka is a gay, younger Sri Lankan woman who makes the teachings very accessible, often tying them to pop-culture in talks with titles such as “The Dharma of Shopping in Big Box Stores” or “The Dharma of Harry Potter”. Both have very calming voices, and both simply exude kindness, generosity and balance.

Since my intro and first years of meditation, my practice has waxed and waned. I don’t stress about it, and sometimes I just feel too busy to do it. But I often return to it when going through something difficult, and this is one of those times. My health has taken a nosedive after being diagnosed with Lyme, and I’m struggling to clamber out of this flare. My inflammatory markers are higher than they've ever been. There are times I do feel very hopeless… but there are also days when I feel more hopeful. But definitely, I’ve been needing an anchor again— badly. So thanks to a friend who recently gave me a nudge, I have recommitted to my meditation practice.

Everyone has their own way of meditating, but you might be wondering, what does this look like for me? Well, since the only time that Leo is reliably asleep and calm is in the early morning (before 5), and since I’ve been waking up in pain starting at 2:30 am, I usually meditate around 4 or 5 am, for 15-20 minutes. I rarely do guided meditations anymore, but I use an app called Insight Timer (it’s free) and I can set bells that notify me when I’m halfway done, for example. I sit up in bed, propped by pillows, in the dark, close my eyes, focus on my breath… and just start watching my mind.

The concept of the mind watching the mind is pretty funny. In one of Anushka’s talks, she exclaims “The mind is shameless! It will think anything!” which elicits laughter from the audience, because we all can relate! There are certainly times when I’m shocked at where my thoughts go. Often I want to scold myself for falling into the same mental traps or patterns that I know, rationally, are totally unhelpful. I also notice that my inflamed brain (when I’m having a flare) is much, much more dysregulated, and barely able to notice itself thinking at all. Like a “good Buddhist” (an oxymoron), I try not to judge it, just to notice the storm of thoughts. Inflamed brain is this way, rested brain is another way. Nothing more to it than that.

My inflamed brain reminds me of my puppy, in the evenings, when he’s over stimulated, tired, and clearly dysregulated. He bites me more, is unable to listen to commands, and unable to control his emotions. He gets overzealous playing, jumps on the counters, or the cat, often spastically knocking over his water bowl. Then he usually gets the “zoomies” right before he crashes and falls asleep. He zooms all around the house at break-neck speed like a maniac, growling and barking at an invisible playmate, or even me. It’s really kind of annoying, AND very funny! Especially if I imagine my own inflamed mind like an uncontrollable puppy. It gives me a greater degree of acceptance of my own shortcomings in general.

Recently, I was listening to a talk by Anushka called 3 Instructions for Life, which she gave in 2015 at the end of a retreat (I was not in attendance). I’ve listened to this many times over the years, but each time, I pick out something new that resonates. It would take too much time to summarize, but I tried to transcribe a few salient sections.

Early in the talk, Anushka reflects on the mind’s ability to both expand and contract time, depending on our thoughts. “Life passes fast in some ways, even though there are periods that seem slow. For example," she says, “when you’re sick, a thought might arise… ohhh, I’ll be sick forever… but then notice when it (the sickness) ends. Or when you’re starting a retreat, it might seem like an impossibly long period of time to be silent, but then it ends. Noticing this tendency and the reality is good to do.”

She then talks about the inherent quickness of our life span. “It’s not just winter that ends,” she says, “or sickness…it’s our very life itself.”

Quoting the 7th Dalai Lama, she reads: “After our birth we have no freedom to remain, even for a minute. We head towards the embrace of the lord of death like an athlete running. We may think that we are among the living, but our life is the very highway of death.”

“So as we start in life,” she says, “we’re off and running, boom, like that…running towards death.” She quotes author Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (from his book The Joyful Path of Good Fortune):

“From the moment of our conception, we head inexorably towards death, just like a racehorse galloping towards its finishing post. But even racehorses slow their pace, yet we in our race towards death never stop. While we’re sleeping, and while we’re awake, our life slips away. Every vehicle will stop along its journey sometime, but in our lifespan, we never stop running.”

Anushka continues, “so every moment, it’s here, it’s gone, it’s here, it’s gone, it’s here, it’s gone. And this is true for all of us. The lifespan of a living being passes like lightening in the sky, it passes as quickly as water falling from a high mountain.”

“So connecting with this is connecting with a truth, a basic truth of our existence, a basic truth of the way things are. And the implications of that, if we really take that in, are to help us see clearly: what are we doing, how are we spending our time, and is this the way that we want to be spending it? What are we focusing on, what are we thinking about, how are we treating each other?”…

…“So what is it in summary that we should be doing, given that our life is short, given that only our death is certain— our time of death is uncertain, and our method of death is uncertain?” The summary of the teachings, she says, is to avoid doing what is harmful or unwholesome, to cultivate a wealth of virtue, and then to train the mind… to purify the mind. These are her three instructions for life, learned through the teachings of the Buddha.

She says, “if death is rolling in on me, what do I want to have printed on my gravestone? What would you like to have as your last act on earth? If you’re thinking about doing something slightly shady, it’ s good to reflect…do I want this to be remembered, do I want this to be my last act?”

The other side of this avoidance of unwholesome acts is doing good things. The translation is to cultivate a wealth of virtue (not money) referring to cause and effect. Through doing kind things for others, that makes us wealthy in some way.

And finally, there is the training of the mind. “How do I get out of this suffering?” she says, “from sitting here for a long time, having the mind go through its courses… it can be very tiring after a while…you get to see the craziness of the mind and all of its manifestations, a lot of thoughts and obsessions dragged around from the past and future, the relentlessness of the thoughts… on and on, and on. How do I stop this, how do I suffer less?”

“The answer,” she says, “is don’t think about yourself so much. The amount of time that we spend thinking about ourselves… like this is me, this is my story, these are my problems, this is what I want, this is what I used to want, this is what I will want, this is who I was, this is who I will become, this is who I think I am, this is who other people think I am, this is who I want other people to think I am…”

“So one way to put it down,” she says, “is to actually do something good for someone else: through acts of generosity, acts of kindness—it instantly takes us out of our story.” She says “so then immediately might start up another story… ‘I’m so good, I do generous things’… (laughter) so then you can catch that, do the best you can with that.”

And this really strikes a chord with me (Lise speaking now ;) today, because when I am sick, it’s hard to get out of my own perseverating, unrestrained mind that is absorbed by bodily distress, and to refocus outside of myself. I urgently want, and need, a break from my own mental suffering, and the way to do that is to be kind to someone else. Indirectly, the kindness returns to me.

Anushka often repeats that the Dharma is the truth of the way things are. I know this reciprocity to be the dharma because I experience it each time. Just last week, I reconnected with an old friend who lost his wife recently. Witnessing his grief was my act of generosity… I know first-hand what he’s going through, and I could offer my empathy. This act of kindness also relieved me, even if temporarily, of my own suffering.

Scientific studies have shown meditation’s benefits against an array of conditions both physical and mental, including irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. One study recently pointed to the fact that meditation can change gene expression! For me, meditation helps me to be at peace with my illness, and my life, reacting less to the inherent friction of living. I think we all can benefit from less friction, with all that’s going on in the world, and within our own minds.

Below is a poem I wrote this week about meditation, having recently listened to Anushka’s “3 Instructions for Life”.

May you be healthy and strong, may you be peaceful and happy, may you be safe from harm, may you live your life with ease. Namaste. 🙏

Mortality

As I sit in bed, in the darkness of pre-dawn

meditating, training my mind to watch itself,

I’m quickly flooded by my own fragility:

one small, solitary woman sitting in silence

as her body races toward death. As the wise

Dalai Lama once said, every second, each

heartbeat is one step closer to my ending.

I don’t think this way, as I go about my day.

I don’t count the Thanksgivings I have left,

the remaining birthdays I’ll celebrate with my kids,

Twenty, or so, if I live an average lifespan?

A stunning, slap-in-the-face number,

causing a surge of adrenalin to rise to my cheeks,

and a wave of nausea to follow close behind.

I don’t fear death so much as I fear the end of life.

Despite the smallness of my singular existence

(about which I often complain), the quotidian

symptoms of chronic illness, the insomnia,

the supplements and the protocols… I still relish

each morning, staring up at the stars, and the antics

of the puppy who craves my attention, the first

sip of coffee, the sounds of my children’s voices

on the other end of the phone—they won’t know

the aching love I feel in my heart— or will they?

If it’s true that we’re all in a race towards death,

It must be possible to slow-down time, to observe

life, one sitting at a time, one breath at a time, holding

such tragic truth and divine delight in both hands.