Ideas on Meditation, Part 3

My favourite source of intellectual popcorn fodder is science's exploration of the brain.  We've learned so much.  Just to think that only 50 years ago a surgical lobotomy, where doctors essentially inserted an ice-pick though a patient's eye socket into the pre-frontal cortex of the brain itself, and just wiggled the icepick around in the hope of doing something useful, that this was an accepted medical practice, is astonishing. And disgusting. Now, with advancements like fMRI, we can tell which part of the brain is doing what, where and when, and deduce why.

Combine this building body of research with some of the insights shared by meditation experts for the last 3,000 years and you have a recipe for the best playground 'told you so' taunt in human history. In this blog, I'm going to just share a few examples and links of how science is proving what meditators have known for a long time.

For centuries, science regarded the brain as being fairly fixed and unregenerative, having a linear development, that thinks clearly and consistently, with the odd exception of some hormone-induced flows which might, through the necessity of some 'fight or flight' stimuli, provide useful emotional reactions to encourage certain behaviours, but that overall provided an accurate depiction to the world. In just one little decade, all that has proven to be false.

It's so cool.

Let's start at the beginning. The first idea was that the brain's abilities were, barring injury, fixed - home base for those misleading IQ tests. Then we began to map the brain, labelling one area for language, another for motor skills, a further for memory, and so on. 

Norman Doidge has written two fantastic books which enlighten some of these ideas, The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain's Way of Healing.  In a nutshell, the areas of the brain are not fixed, regenerate constantly and develop continually. His books detail how they figured this stuff out.

Back in the 50s, Dr. Edward Taub was working as a PhD student and, as part of his research, had to deaffernate, or cut the nerve cords to, the arms of monkeys (the 'why' is a long story that isn't germane here, but yes, sounds crap for the monkeys).  In order to give his PhD a unique flavour, he restricted the good arm of the monkeys post operatively - to prove the deaffernation had rendered that appendage useless.  The deaffernatiion was old science, but restricting the good arm afterward was a new twist.  Nobody had done that.  To his shock, the monkeys gradually started using the arm he'd deaffernated.  Nobody understood how this was possible.  He'd cut the nerve cords.  But after a while, they began using that arm.  Many questioned him, his techniques, and his science, it took decades to unfold and it makes a good read in Mr Doidge's book. 

The upshot is that this one little experiment obliterated decades of scientific research and theory.

Fast forward, and we now know that because the good arm was restricted, the monkey's nervous system reorganised itself to have another part of the nervous system, a non-arm part, take over the deaffernated arm's nerve cells.  Like an anatomical pirate, the monkey's system re-wired itself to surf other nerve endings.  It was willing to do this because it couldn't use the good arm.  It had been restricted in a sling.  Since the monkey desperately needed an arm, the nervous system re-wired itself to solve the problem.

The ramifications of this experiment were massive.  If the nervous system could rewire itself, could the brain?  Taub decided to find out with stroke patients.  We know a stroke injury is in the brain, not in the nervous system, and stroke patients want all the help they can get. What he found was yes, in many cases, the brain can be taught to completely re-wire itself to overcome some pretty massive difficulties.  

How do we know this, for sure?

We'll use the example of someone who lost the use of their right arm due to a stroke. By restricting their left arm, so the person had no option but to use their immobile right arm, the brain would re-wire itself, it would comandeer a part of the brain officially designated for something else - the face, for instance.  And they know this because we can see it on an fMRI. We can see the stroke-damaged brain. We can see zero blood flow where the right arm movement should be. We can see a patient, after several weeks of recovery and therapy, move their right arm.  And we can see the blood flow through the 'face part' of the brain. It's amazing. 

I love this for two reasons. First, this random chance experiment goes wrong, and it ends up positively changing the lives of stroke victims, among others, all over the world - treatment and recovery are vastly improved.  And this random experiment opens up a whole new branch of science, Neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is the study of the brain's ability to reorganise itself, to even fundamentally restructure itself. It turns our that our brains change all the time. Every millisecond of every day.  We think we're a constant, we perceive it that way, but we just aren't. And science is deducing so much cool stuff about this.

Among other things, Neuroplasticity is suggesting that age-related decline parallels the slump many people experience in learning.  Because the brain likes growing neural connections, because it wants to learn, if we get stuck in a rut for too long, when we stop learning, the brain starts to atrophy.  There's good evidence that getting older is precisely the time for old dogs to learn new tricks. Our brains want us to learn an instrument or a language, we're dying for it.  

Back to the connection with meditation.  One of the next areas that PhDs in Neuroplasticity began researching were psychological functions. If the brain could be re-wired to heal motor function issues, could it be re-wired to deal with anxiety, depression and OCD?

Dr Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA decided to investigate, and guess what he used as his foundation? That's right - meditation. He taught some deeply disturbed patients to 'observe' their feelings, their compulsions, and try to avoid getting tied up in the story behind those feelings.  Instead, he asked them to notice, 'what else?' was going on in their experience. Not to deny their anxiety, or to label it as bad, but just to notice, 'what else?' was happening right now, just as true as those thoughts.  He asked them to focus on the sound of the rain, or the feeling of the wind on their skin, or any other part of the actual experience they were also having - many of the sensory ideas we shared in Part 2.

It worked.  Or to be more precise, over time, even deeply disturbed patients began to feel significant relief from a combination of meditation and drugs that exceeded the effects that drugs alone had. The cool part for us science geeks is how.

Neuroplasticity has two founding axioms - neurons that 'fire together wire together', and neurons that 'fire apart wire apart'. It's the Pavlovian response at the level of thought. The wire together thing is why people can get so phenomenal at chess or skateboarding or just anything, and the wire apart thing is why people, usually, think they can not do something that, if they tried hard enough, they probably could.

If we take these ideas into the universe of the mentally ill, Dr Schwartz explains that each time a patient stays with a thought, any thought, the thought wires together. The more we think that thing, the more deeply it gets wired. Mentally ill patients have wired a lot of neurons together in destructive paths. Unfortunately, well-meaning therapies such as psychotherapy and Cognitive Therapy have one thing in common - they ask an afflicted patient to continue to analyse their afflictions, to discuss them, to come up with strategies to overcome them, to be sure, but ultimately to wire together those neurons even deeper, to have them continue to fire together, each time they 'deal' with them.  Dr Schwartz believes this strategy just isn't effective very often or very quickly.

When we meditate, something else is happening.  We are wiring neurons to experience all our senses again, as we talked about in Part 1.  Ever notice that experienced meditators often have the joyful look of children in their eyes?  That's because experiencing all our senses is natural to us - we did it as children.  But we forget.  As we age we start to become reliant on the brain and ego.  We become less sensitive to touch, to taste, to smell, to everything other than the importance and validity of our own thoughts.

We've stopped firing the neurons of these sensations. So they're less sensitive.  

Part of what meditation is doing is firing them again, becoming more sensitive to our sense of touch, for instance, when we focus on the breath.  But the brain/ego wants to take over, to keep us from ignoring it.  Within moments, we find ourselves thinking about the breath instead of just feeling the breath itself, thinking about the activity, whether we should be doing it, what we had for lunch, what we need from the shops, and like that the brain is off solving the world again.

So we focus on the breath because it's here and now.  The focus on the breath is the first step to keeping ourselves in this moment, experiencing right now.  Remember - thoughts aren't bad.  They're part of it, too, we're just learning to make them a part of our world, instead of running our world.

This focus on the our senses builds new neural networks, like in the monkey's arm.  Literally.  Via the axioms of neuroplasticity, we are building up the brain's awareness of touch to start, but over time, we learn to do this with all of our senses. These sensory networks becomes vastly more intertwined, as can be seen on fMRI scans of people meditating (we're getting to this part, below).  

This is where the concerns about meditation are missing the point so badly.  

We try to focus on the breath. Really, we do. But we think we're avoiding 'dealing' with our problems. We think meditation is meant to provide some nice peace and quiet to allow us to see our problems clearly, make some resolutions, and fix whatever our ails happen to be.  We go along with the 'breathing thing' at the start, assuming this is the warm up, but what we really wonder is when the problem solving part starts.   

That's missing the point.  Meditation expands our awareness of reality so we see our troubles in a broader context.  We still have troubles.  We still have to do something about them, outside of meditation.  But when it's time to work on our troubles, meditation has set us up to be more capable at handling them in a balanced, peaceful way.  We can be more effective, because we see the situation more clearly.

Consider the science.  Below is an image of two brains under an fMRI scan.  The one on the left is just a normal, healthy person's brain. The one on the right is an experienced meditator and has increased activity, increased sensitivity, except in the areas of anxiety and panic, which is decreased.  This is what greater awareness looks like.

Healthy Brain                                       Meditator's Brain

Greater awareness isn't some hippy clop-trop cliche.  It means literally becoming more aware of our reality.  Using more of our brain, but not to think. When we meditate, we're kicking up our neural activity.  We're teaching our brains to have more connections, to be closer to our universe.  When people say things like, 'meditation allows us to connect with our deeper, truer selves', it is scientifically defensible. 

Now let's look at the scan of a normal person compared to a depressed person. During my bouts of depression, my thoughts felt big and heavy, like they were filling my head, and going round and round 1000 times a second, on this horrible theme park ride.   It felt overwhelmingly busy. 

It's an irony that the heavy feeling of depression is correlated to using less of our minds.  We're less aware.  We see this with all sort of mental illnesses.

These are different types of scans, but they show one thing.  Using less of our mind is correlated with mental illness, and using more is correlated with meditation. And we can deduce that the opposite of mental illness can be mental health.

There's several other ways science has backed up the benefits of meditation, but this blog is already longer than expected.  Enough for now.  Still, science has made a good contribution today. Thanks, science!

The bad news is science doesn't help us one tiny bit.  It's meaningless. We can only learn science at the level of thought, and we have to experience a deeper connection with our senses, if we're going to enjoy the benefits of meditation.  It's not enough to know it, it's not enough to believe it, we have to experience it if its going to help us.

This is why I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat last Easter.  It was pretty intense.  We were allowed no phones, no technology, no books, no pen/paper, not even music.  Nothing but meditation for 12 hours a day, for 10 days.  

In the next blog, I'm going to share what I experienced.

Ideas on Meditation, Part 2

In the last blog, I shared some ideas which helped me realise I'd misunderstood meditation my whole life.  Essentially, my 'why to' start doing it.  In this one, I'm going to share more of an introductory 'how to' guide (experienced meditators may want to skip this post).

These ideas are an amalgamation of those gleaned from the books listed at the bottom of this blog. I'm not claiming any of it as original, although I can't remember what I got from which source.

So we sit to meditate, and we're meant to 'calm' our thoughts. But what the heck does that mean, and how do we do it? 

The idea that first helped me was to reconsider the role thinking plays in our lives. Most of us consider our thoughts as our real 'selves', and our five senses as the subordinate antennae of that thinking self. If only as a game, let's juggle this up. Consider our thinking self to be just one of our six senses. So we'd have thinking, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching and hearing as our senses. Consider each as equally important. Each has its own unique connection to the universe, and reflects reality in a different way. Meditation, this idea goes, is our daily opportunity to experience the world differently by allowing another sense to dominate our focus. We just focus on what that sense is revealing, without using the mind to interpret whatever it is the sense reveals (which is the hard part).

Many meditation techniques focus on the sense of touch because its the easiest to disassociate from our mental interpretations. For instance. If we meditate and focus on our hearing, that's fine. We try to listen to the sound without naming the sound, or what the sound means to us. If we hear a police siren, for instance, we listen to the pitch and tone of it, without speculating anything else about the police, or remembering previous adventures with police or speculating about current ones. As I live in a city full of sirens, and have had a few adventures with police, this one is off the table for me.

So let's say we're focusing on the sense of touch. This focus may be on our breath, the inhale and exhale within our lungs, or the feel of our skin, and its contact with the air, our clothes or the ground. For this blog, let's focus on the breath example. This is reportedly what the Dalai Lama does every morning, and is universally regarded in mindfulness and meditation circles as base camp. 

So just to be super clear, the foundational technique of meditation involves just sitting still, and focusing on the sensation of one's breath. That's it. 

When we really try this, pretty soon, two things are going to happen. First of all, we're going to think WTF?  I'm supposed to sleep better, have better relationships, find peace and harmony, and reach spiritual enlightenment; all by focusing on my breath?!?  The second thing, is that we're going to realise we're not focusing on our breath any longer, and that we only managed to stay focused on our breath for about 10 seconds before worrying we were being bamboozled in some sort of massive cultural prank, and that any moment random people might jump out of a corner, laughing at us for falling for this meditation malarkey.

When this happens, as it will, the instruction here is simple. With a smile, we laugh at ourselves for not lasting longer than 10 seconds at such a simple task, say silently the word 'thinking' to ourselves, and re-focus on the breath. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. For the next few minutes (or hours) of meditation we will then wonder how we lasted 10 whole seconds, as we continually get distracted by thought after thought after thought, often in less than 10 seconds of focus on the breath. 

It feels like an exercise in futility.

But this is good news. It's working. Two things are happening. First, we've realised how little control we have over our own minds. This is key. We tend to think of our thoughts as less random and moody than they are. Becoming more deeply aware of this is different for anyone, but revealing for everyone. This helps us start to expand the perception of, and relationship to, our thoughts. More on this later.

Second, we've just spent all that time teaching our brain that our thoughts are not sacrosanct. Each time we halt our mental flow, we are noticing how our minds work. The idea goes that if we want to create peaceful harmony in our lives, we have to learn to stop the mental train of anxiety, judgement or resentment, etc, BEFORE they build up steam. We need to interrupt ourselves. Those imposters, triumph and disaster, are truly all in our minds. We must teach ourselves, coach ourselves, that all our trails of thoughts are not inviolate treasures to be trusted. They are sometimes helpful, sure, but before we do or say things we wish we hadn't, we have to think them. 

We know this. We've all thought things which have been crazy or stupid or angry when not appropriate. Later, we think to ourselves, how could I think that!? But in the moment, when we're having those thoughts, it's hard to stop having them. In the moment, they feel like the right thoughts to have.

Each time our thoughts run away from a focus on the breath, we're doing what happens every day all the time. And each time we smile, silently whisper 'thinking' to ourselves, and come back to the breath, we're teaching ourselves its ok to derail ourselves, to observe our thoughts, to build a little awareness of a part of ourselves that is not always very reliable.

The fact our thinking is so capricious isn't a bad thing. It just is. Let's return to the randomness of our thoughts, and the mental exercise of our six senses. We don’t blame our nose when there is a bad smell, we don’t blame our tastebuds when there’s a bad taste, and we can learn not to blame ourselves when we have moaning or hurtful or selfish thoughts. They happen. But we do tend to judge ourselves for our thoughts. Instead, we can learn to contextualise their surface nature, laugh at their absurdity, accept they happen, to everyone, accept that all they reveal is that we're human, not some hidden meaning that Freud would have us explore endlessly, and move on to the next moment.

Meditation shows us just how inconsistent our thinking is. When we observe ourselves, we find ourselves having diametrically opposed views quite often, sometimes within the same minute! This is the ugly underbelly of thinking that we worry is unique to us individually, but isn't.

This helps us to start appreciating some of the deeper benefits of meditation. If we can have certain sorts of thoughts, and not worry that such thoughts are 'proof' of anything, it's a big step to having compassion for ourselves. And when we can develop this compassion for ourselves, seeing that our thoughts are not who we really are, it becomes easier to have compassion for others, because their thoughts aren't who they really are, either. They're just thoughts. Which are as impermanent as everything else.

In the last blog, I talked about consciousness. The idea was that meditation is meant to help us connect to our deeper consciousness, our deeper connection to each other, and the universe. This focus on the breath, after a while, seems to lull the thinking brain into a bit of a coma or something, like the magical lyre Mercury used to bewitch Apollo. The space created allows the consciousness to expand. It's not something we can force. It's only something we can create the right conditions to allow to unfold. 

Because it's not something you do, but allow the space for, it's a paradox we have trouble embracing. "I'm going to meditate now for... er... no purpose whatsoever..."  It just doesn't roll off the tongue. 

The analogy used is that our consciousness is the sky, and our thoughts are the weather. Regardless of what we do, we will have good and bad weather, but the sky will always be there. When we meditate, we find that the sky reveals itself whenever the weather clears. It also teaches us that when the weather won't clear, observing our thoughts without judgement, and coaching ourselves to be willing to abandon our own lines of thinking, keeps our thinking from leading us down the garden paths of triumph and disaster. It keeps us from clinging to or avoiding the weather.  The weather just is.

So are we.

Just focusing on the breath can feel like a silly exercise. And in this blog, I haven't shared any of the experience one encounters when one is actually able to remain focused on it for more than 10 seconds. That's the point. Even when we think nothing is happening, there's some really cool ground work being laid that helps us experience other things later on. 

In fact, the constant distraction our thinking throws at us, and the continual instruction to say 'thinking' with a smile, and come back to the breath, this continual struggle is what is meant by being a 'Spiritual Warrior'. It often feels like a battle. But this is the battle to fight, moment by moment, so say the experts, to find our way to happiness, joy and contentment. 

A fascinating part of this is how science is now, several thousand years after the invention of meditation, starting to catch up. In the next blog, I'm going to share some insights being developed by one of the newest branches of science: Neuroplasticity. It seems the reason everyone from the US Army to Goldman Sachs now has mindfulness* training as part of their regiment is that science is proving not just that it works, but how. 

Books that influenced this blog.

• Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
• Elkhart Tolle, The Power of Now
• Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart (so amazing, I read it 3x last year..)
• A Path With Heart, Jack Kornfield
• The Headspace meditation app.
• My yoga practice with Sangye Yoga

*for the record, meditation and mindfulness are the same thing, just that some people associate some baggage with the word meditation, and its Buddhist heritage. They needn't. It is just a brain exercise.  Unless their religion is against breathing.

Ideas on Meditation, Part 1

A little over a year ago, I read a book which, I can now say, changed my life.  It was called The Antidote, by Oliver Burkeman, to which he cheerfully added the tagline, 'Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking'.  

It is a funny, thoughtful, and irreverent look at various ways people have tried to be happy through the centuries.  He shares amusing observations on everyone from the stoics in Roman times to the Mexican celebration of the 'Day of the Dead' in our own.  Although it wasn't a book on meditation, what I found captivating, and changed my life, was his description of meditation.

I had tried meditation and couldn't get it. I was too busy. Or, as I’d heard things like washing dishes could be meditative, perhaps I was already doing it. Mr Burkeman helped me to realise I had just fundamentally misunderstood it.

Since reading his book, I've meditated for about 250 hours in the last year and recently completed a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Whilst no expert, I understand it more than I did and, most saliently, I understand it very differently than I did.  In this post, I’m going to share some of the ideas I enjoyed in The Antidote a year ago, which helped me begin this journey.

Firstly, Mr Burkeman invites us to consider that we might have two types of mental energy. There’s a ‘thinking’ layer, used to solve problems, formulate sentences, remember the past and project into the future, and then a deeper layer or what he calls our ‘conscious' layer.  

The thinking layer is usually dominant - it's the voice we hear in our heads - and its constantly trying to ‘fix’ things.  That's its job.  Clearly, this is often good, as many things need fixing, but not everything.  In fact, most things can't be fixed, but that doesn't stop the voice from trying.  Often, it directs us to try to control outcomes, for instance, when none of us can, or makes us into the hero or victim of our past, when neither are true. So this voice, while useful, has limitations. And it's biggest limitation is that because it is an evolutionary problem-solving mechanism, it has to focus on problems. 

This was a massive a-ha moment for me. The very nature of our minds, what makes us homo sapiens, is this problem-solving ability.  It's what's allowed us to rise from apes.  Thinking is problem-solving. The jammy bit is how 'thinking' talks to us.  Our thinking voice presents its solutions as the 'big fix' to our lives.  'As soon as 'x' happens, all will be well', I've heard my mind say this countless times.  By its core purpose, the thinking mind will find problems, invent problems, when none are available - creating drama and sabotaging the harmony already there. So its the constant striving or "clinging to a particular version of a happy life, while fighting to eliminate all possibility of an unhappy one", that is the cause of unhappiness, not its solution.  

The other layer Mr Burkeman calls our 'consciousness' - the wellspring of our being.  It's the part of ourselves that would be the same even if we'd been raised by apes in the jungle, like Tarzan.  It lacks any of the artifice of our particular culture, language or environment. Its the life force inside of us, beyond our ego, our personalities, and the particular events of our lives. It's hard to define, because it can be a part of any moment of any of our lives, but there are a few times we are more likely to experience it: when we happen along a majestic sunset, when we're running and feel that effortless second wind, or just about any time life surprises us so much we stop thinking about our connection to it and just experience it. This layer is the source of contentment, joy and peaceful harmony with life. 

In short, he explains, if we're going to be happy, we have to work out how to fix stuff AND how to harmonise with life. Both layers are important.  The problem is one can't access the conscious layer by thinking.  In fact, one has to let go of the compulsion to fix stuff to access it.  This make consciousness both paradoxical and non-linear.  Its just different. If you think you've thought about it well enough to understand conciousness intellectually, you haven't got it.  It has to be felt.

The purpose of meditation is to create a gateway for convening with this conscious layer, to introduce us to an intelligence that is more in our bodies than our minds.

The challenge of meditation is that the thinking layer is like a spoilt child. It doesn't want to play along. So when we sit to meditate we soon get frustrated that we can't quiet our thinking. The thinking layer yells, stop this!

A relief is to learn that we are experiencing what every single person who has ever learned to meditate has experienced. And as we'll see in Part 2, the struggle is endemic. For this post, let's just note that finding access to that conscious layer is not a thinking process. Being conscious requires a different approach, which starts with realising that 'thinking' is part of our being, not our being.  We have to get over this hurdle (only, in this case, getting over the hurdle requires us to let go of a need to hurdle).  If we are going to develop the awareness that will bring the joy and harmony to our lives that we crave, we must persist (only, in this case, persisting means stopping our craving to fix our lives and its perceived / manufactured problems).

Yes, it all gets paradoxical, like some sort of ancient riddle, which is why so many people bail at this stage.  But don't stop; we're getting to the good stuff.

Before we do, just two observations by Mr Burkeman on why so many of us actively avoid meditation - these hit the nail on the head for me. 

The first is that we're afraid that if we get good at accepting our world, we won't be able to change (i.e., improve) our world. This doesn't follow, says Mr Burkeman. In fact, the opposite. The more we are connected to both layers, the more we realise which things can not be changed, the less energy we waste attempting to change things we can't. So the energy we spend changing our world is more effective. Even better, as we're not trying to fix as many things, we start to genuinely enjoy things that previously bugged us, because we accept them. More happiness in our lives? Check. Able to change more by trying to change less? Check. By being more conscious, we help the thinking layer do its job better. 

Here we get to add a dash of irony in all of this. Most of us get this argument at an intellectual level, i.e., at the thinking layer. However, as the ego is just problem-solving when considering this dilemma, it can both accept it intellectually, and in the VERY NEXT THOUGHT, observe something it can't fix, come up with a strategy to fix it, and convince us we'll be happy when this is done. We know one thing but do another. The ego is just crap at letting go. It's like asking a pack of hungry lions to choose meat not to eat. This is why the intellect can't solve the 'happy' question.  Fundamentally, its job is to problem solve, and its hard to be happy when we're focused on a problem.

The other concern people have about meditation is this talk of ‘getting rid of their ego’. We fundamentally like who we are, mostly, we like what we like, mostly, and we don't want to become some bland version of ourselves. This is a misunderstanding. Nobody is suggesting this, and for good reason - we can't get rid of the thinking layer of the brain. Its impossible. What we can do, he says, is to become aware of it, to hear its voice, to know when its speaking, and to observe its influence.

Meditation is the practice of listening to the ego, not erasing it, by giving waking dominance to the conscious layer.  Its method is to use a variety of techniques which strengthen certain parts of our mind, so that when we’re not meditating, we don’t react.  We learn to respond.

Finally, we come to the most fascinating part of all this (at least to me). Because while reading this you have to use the thinking part of your brain, neither this blog nor anything else written can ever truly explain meditation. It's a Catch-22. You have to learn enough about it to get motivated to do it, but that knowledge is useless once you start doing it.  Consciousness has to be experienced, like a sunset. It has to be wrangled out of our senses, our experience of the world.  One might say that meditation is the process of training our mind to find a beautiful sunset in the most mundane moments of our lives, and it's that training which keeps us at peace in the volatile, difficult moments of our lives.  

But that's not quite it, either, because being conscious is not always peaceful!

See what I mean?  This is why meditation is so fascinating - it’s impossible to sum up in a sound bite.  And why there’s all these cloud and sky, or pond and ripple analogies. To be conscious, it’s something each person has to experience for themselves. 

Fortunately, there are a few ideas I've learned that are helping me, that I will share in the next post.

For now, let me just share this. I'm sleeping well. I hadn't slept really well in about 15 years. Most people I know would love to sleep better.  For no other reason than this, I wish I'd learned about this stuff sooner.

Poetry Slam Time.

I recently attended a couple of poetry events in London. I didn't know what to expect, and was thoroughly impressed with the range and talent. This one teenage girl memorised a poem that was as raw, complex and powerful as any I can ever remember; another older man shared pristine verses of carefully chosen lines with the precision of a ballerina. It was an evening of unexpectedly rapturous joy (for my fellow Londoners, it's at http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poetry-cafe/).

So I decided to join the fun. 

The only context one really needs for this poem is that it was written for a room full of 50 other poets, and I was able to read it aloud (which meant I could verbally help along a couple of the rhymes).

Once upon a curious time,

A man sat down to pen a rhyme,

There was no political protest,

Burning deep inside his breast,

No comical commentary,

No axe he longed to bury. 

Nor even an impassioned cause,

No broken heart, no menopause. 

No this chap was simply curious,

Of developments quite spurious. 

For when he first wrote poetry,

He sat down with paper and ink,

Thus many lines would get scratched,

As odd ideas within him hatched,

And if he wanted one that rhymed,

A lyric just perfectly timed,

The whole long day it might require,

To write the thing of his desire,

For finding the words in his brain,

That perfectly fit each refrain,

Was kinda tough, was kinda hard,

(ok maybe not for the Bard)

But for merely mortal beings,

Poems could be challenging things. 

So he came up with strategies,

To help his vocabulary,

Certain rules he learned and knew,

Recipes for his writing stew,

Like which words held no hope for rhymes,

One could rack his brain for all time,

And come up with no solution,

Regardless of his elocution,

For words like fifth, eighth or amongst,

Have no match declared ... some monks (..!..),

Rouged, sculpts, whilst and unbeknownst,

Joined the ranks of ... painful jokes,

(Despite its repute, the word orange

Works with the Welsh hill of Blorenge,

Still it’s pretty hard to work that hill,

Into stories other than Jack and Jill.)

So coming up with ways to expand,

The words his mind could quickly scan,

Became the thinking filter through which,

Each experience must enrich. 

So into this concocting mood,

Did he first write after a brew,

Of beer then wine then whiskey

The rhymes just getting more frisky,

So he would sit in shady places,

Pubs and other drinking spaces,

Find all sorts of inspiration,

From the joys of lubrication. 

The words they came cascading through

On a dancing fairies avenue,

With the perfect-ly metered rhymes,

of a wordsmith, in his prime.

In the teeming years of youth,

he had found the fountain of truth!

(Now perhaps it should be confessed,

the poems nearly all expressed,

That overly eager anxious hue,

Of booty call poetry - so ingenue.  

He also noticed there seemed to be,

A window where the alcohol teased,

A flow of words with melody,

More than one drink, but less than three.

And frankly if we’re getting picky,

some of the rhymes could get sticky,

Unless you are really forgiving,

Shapely doesn’t rhyme with sucking.)

But moving on the point thus far,

drinking expanded his repertoire,

of cleverly coined terms and phrases,

that he had hoped might amaze us.

A score of years has passed since then,

which brings us back to this po-em.

A great crime has befallen poetry,

that should concern this community.

Were Shelley or Blake alive today,

Or Whitman or Frost they'd surely convey.

Their shock / horror, and general dismay,

At this case of lyrical foul play.

The prosecution begins its case,

its first witness, the human race.

All of you here, are now on the stand,

the court must ask you heed its demand,

place your smartphone in your right hand, 

then raise it slowly on this command.

Let the record show that all confessed,

without either shame or distress.

What is the crime, I hear you ask?

Oh, you wear such an innocent mask.

Fellow poets and writers, friends perhaps,

You’ve been found guilty of using apps.

Apps on your phones, that cheat your mind,

and make any word so easy to find,

Thesaurus dot com, is a mafia boss,

leading an underworld of language loss,

And the great serial killing designer,

Murdering our brains is Rhymer.

After the trail of these criminals,

Shakespeare’s work looks... minimal! 

And since poets no longer require,

Alcohol as a word supplier,

This court can think of nothing tougher,
Than sentence you all to writing sober. 

Going to Prison

When I was 19 years old, I experienced one of those mystical situations where the universe seems to conspire, with conflating events, to test who you are.  Three things happened in curious succession.

First, I had this summer job where I'd saved what was a ton of money for a 19 year old in 1990 - $5,000. 

Next, I was dating a gorgeous girl I was crazy about. She'd done pretty well at this summer job, too, so we both had some money.  We impulsively agreed to bunk off college for the semester and spend a few months travelling around Europe together.  With the money we had saved we'd be living large... you know, eating at places called restaurants, that sort of thing. It would be a romantic escapade. We bought the plane tickets and started planning.

Third, I got arrested.

I was driving home after a night out drinking with friends when I realised I wasn't in a fit state to drive. So I pulled over to sleep it off. Unfortunately, when I passed out I left the car running.  A policemen noticed my car, and in America that still counts as a DUI. He takes me to jail and charges me - the crux of this story is the court date.  

If the court date is set for when I'm in Europe, no problem. Just show my plane tickets and I can reschedule when I'm back in the country. If it's before we leave, we have to hope it's at least two weeks before we leave.

Here's why. The penalty for DUI is either a $5000 fine or 14 days in prison. If I pay the $5k, I have no travel money. If I accepted the prison time, and the court date is less than two weeks, then I could still be in prison when the flight departs. 

Of course, fate intervenes and the court date is set for just 10 days before the flight is scheduled to depart. What to do.

There was only one hope. The prosecutor tells me if I plead guilty, and go to prison, I'd usually serve less than half the sentence for good behaviour.  So I could, in theory, just plead guilty, go to prison voluntarily, even though I had the exact amount of money in the bank needed to pay the fine.

As it's my only chance of making it to Europe with this girl, I say yes.  Send me to prison.

At the time I agreed it, I hadn't given one thought to the prison itself - Atlanta Fulton County Penitentiary. It is located in the centre of Atlanta, which has its fair share of rough criminals. But I didn't think about that. I just thought about being good, doing my time and getting to Europe with my girl. Besides, they're not gonna but some college kid on a DUI charge in prison with hardened criminals, are they?

Then I arrived at Atlanta Fulton County Penitentiary. Remember those amazing, beautiful shots of Shawshank prison, the textured stone, the grand architecture? AFCP is nothing like that. It's a huge geometric lump of cheap, dirty cement, with almost no windows - just an angular entrance which has a dark door at the heart of the angle, like you walk in its backside.

I start wondering, what have I done. They take your stuff, hose you down, strip search you, and give you a prison outfit.  

I stopped thinking about my girlfriend.

They took me to cell block H which was triangular, with 30 cells over two floors for 60 men, smaller than I expected.  Two sides of the triangle housed the cells.  The third was a large wall which would have had windows had the architect not been Franz Kafka.

Looking around the room, I see 58 African-American men staring at me, and a cold chill comes over for me. For this first time, I'm scared. I'd be lying if I didn't admit the racial card was part of that fear, but only part. These guys looked rough, and they're all just watching me walk into the room. Time slows down. I'm 19 and it was an intimidating situation.

So I walk over to the one other white guy in the room. Both then and now, I thought it was weak of me; why was I so magnetically drawn to this one other white guy, what made me think he would be any more supportive than any other man there. But I was just afraid, looking for something familiar.

The other familiar thing I saw, in a stack of other board games, was a chess board. Lamely, I ask the white dude if he plays chess. He doesn't. However, another man chirps out, helpfully, "hey man, ole LeRoy is the chess master in H Block..."

So before I could say a word, I'm sitting across LeRoy who is 5'10 and 300 pounds, with a chess board between us.

There's no game on the television, nothing else to do. And so it begins: all the other 58 inmates surround us in circular fashion, and start murmuring between themselves. A sense of suspense begins to build.

LeRoy grabs a black and white pawn, holds one in each hand, and asks me to choose.  I choose white. For the chess geeks out there, I start with e4, and he responds c5 - a Sicilian Defence. Interesting. Over the next few moves I realise LeRoy can play.

But he and I are the only people who can. They knew nothing about chess, but they knew who they supported. When each of us moved, everyone reacted loudly with enthusiastic cheer's or damning boo's. Just imagine. I move, and nearly sixty men "Booooo" in unison.  LeRoy moves, and they celebrate wildly. Repeat. No matter how good or bad the move, the same reaction. 

My heart is still beating through my skin. But I look at LeRoy, and LeRoy can tell I'm not giving him the game. I'm playing to win. His eyes, just slightly, smile at me. Leroy and I share some sort of bond, a mutual respect, and the situation becomes a surreal manifestation of transcendent beauty. I'm playing this really good chess match, in prison, in front of a screaming audience. Completely surreal experience.

My fear subsides. Looking at LeRoy I realise I'm more than safe, I've entertained them. I'm Golden. They all continue to hoot and holler, and it become a bit of a fun game, with everyone laughing. In the end, I won that first match. LeRoy shook my hand, and the crowd faded away.  We played another match, and another, and LeRoy won both. In truth, he was a better chess player than me.

When it came to meal time, that fabled crucible where the new inmate has to find a table to eat, LeRoy called me over. The boys on H block had reserved a spot for me. They were awesome.  They looked after me over the next few days, LeRoy and I played several more games of chess (he won slightly more than me, but I won a few more times).  As weird as it sounds, I had a great time in prison.  

LeRoy taught me a lot over those few days. He was quiet and intelligent. Mostly, he taught me to back myself, to have courage, and let the chips fall where they may.

As it turns out, they released me after about 5 days for good behaviour, and I had a great time travelling around Europe.

A Meeting In Harare, 1999.

By November 1999, Robert Mugabe had ruled Zimbabwe since the early 70s .  He was a leader of the native African power grab as the colonial powers departed the continent.  Despite all the talk of democracy and fairness for the people, we now know these leaders just enriched themselves.

By the time I was travelling through Zimbabwe, these tactics had transformed themselves into 'land reform'.  In real terms, this translated to Mugabe arming gangs to intimidate white farmers, in some cases murdering them, until they agreed to leave their farms, or sell them at a fraction of their worth.  (The politics are more complicated than that, but I'm simplifying it as the politics aren't germane to this story).  The point is, there were active communities of gangs acting in anarchic ways all over the county.

Living in London, I'd seen articles in newspapers about Mugabe, and the unrest in Zimbabwe. I knew there was turmoil.  I'd scanned across photos, full of civic mayhem. But I hadn't read the articles - I was on my way to the sports page.

So when I decided to hike about 5 miles into Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, from the Backpackers Lodge on Kilwinning Road, I was relatively ignorant, or näive. I assumed it all happened elsewhere.

At that point, I'd been travelling through Africa for about two months, and travelling with Anniken, who I would later marry and have three children, for about a month.  African towns were often heart-wrenching visits, full of children begging for anything.  Mostly, these kids were full of life and humour, and nothing like the pathetic images the charities use to raise money. The kids were fun!  But behind the curtains, one could find the horror stories.  I didn't blame Anniken for not wanting to go into town, and was glad she hadn't later that day. So I went alone.

The route into Harare along Airport Road is pretty flat - it's a divided highway, fairly straight, with some neighbourhoods on one side and large fields on the other. It was a typical day in Africa, sunny and a bit humid. I set off early, maybe 9am.

I don't remember much about the journey into Harare. I did a little shopping. And as I departed, I held a plastic bag. I remember it dangling by my side. I know it was before lunch, as I was hoping to get back to the Lodge before the heat of the day. I wore cargo shorts, a t-shirt, and pair of flip-flops, for which I would soon be grateful.

I was probably about half-way back when I noticed, across the divided highway, a group of about 30 young African men who all looked pretty fit, like in their late teens or early 20s, turn from a neighbourhood side street onto the opposite side of the highway I was walking. The divide on this highway was pretty wide, and they were ahead of me, maybe 100 yards away.

A tingle chilled my spine. Like some sort of primal warning system, something about this group of young men felt menacing. I'd been travelling around Africa for weeks, through Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Even hitchhiking occasionally. I'd seen plenty of groups of young men. I'd never felt anything like this. I made an effort to neither quicken nor slow my pace. I was walking my direction, opposite side of the highway, and they were...

Just like that, running directly toward me.  Surely not, I thought, and looked behind me to hopefully find something else. Nothing but fields. They were definitely sprinting towards me.  I don't remember hearing them shout or holler anything; it's all very silent in my memory.  

Time slowed. They crossed the opposite side of the highway, and were racing across the grass median. Right at me. I dropped my bag. I looked along the highway for hope of rescue. No cars coming. They were closer now... what was happening? Getting nearer. I looked down at my feet, and realised that a) I've never been a sprinter, in the best of conditions I wasn't going to outrun these guys, and b) running makes you look like prey, and predators love a chase; even still, I needed the third fact, c), that I was wearing flip-flops, and running through the thicket would hurt like hell, to realise running was futile. 

In that moment, my heart seemed to stop racing, a calm came over me, and I made the decision that I believe saved me from... something.  

I walked toward them. Smiling. With my hand extended, to shake theirs.

By this time, they were nearly on me, and as I walked toward them, closing the distance, we met in the middle of my side of the divided highway, where about 30 men encircled me.  I'd been right - they were all pretty young and fit. One guy, about 6'4" and 250 lbs, with an Aaron Neville birthmark, looked and screamed at me in Shona, the local language. I couldn't understand what he said, but I tried to shake his hand. He wouldn't take mine, but the guy to his right would. I smiled. He didn't smile, but he took my hand. I then turned to the next guy, who also had an angry expression, but I flashed my gormless grin... and he accepted my hand, and even shook it, too. I smiled even bigger. I kept finding a hand to shake, avoiding the big guy, and smiling, as if I were a politician on some sort of tour, welcoming them to this side of the highway. You'll love it here boys, it's sunny!!

As I was looking for another hand to shake, a little guy broke through my extended arm, and pushed the big guy with the Aaron Neville birthmark - hard!  Started really yelling at him, and getting in his face like the piercing approach of a small dog you can't ignore - it has teeth, after all.

Even now, I don't know who was more shocked, me or the big guy, but I remember looking in his eyes and feeling a bit of relief.  For whatever their reasoning, his aggression was more in keeping with the situation than the little guy's protection, who was was clearly berating the big guy. Even if he spoke in Shona, so I will never know for sure, I believe he said, "Can't you tell this guy's retarded! Look at his stupid smile! He's not a farmer, and he's too stupid to know when to run. Now, come on you big oaf, let's go smoke a cigarette." 

Then, as quickly as it began, they dispersed. Melted away. I stood there for a moment, somehow vacantly calm. I'm glad Anniken wasn't there - who knows how I would have reacted if I'd felt the need to protect someone (although they may not have bum-rushed me had she been there). And I'm glad I wore flip-flops.

Mostly, though, what I learned on the side of that highway in Zimbabwe in November 1999 was this: even when there are genuine reasons to be afraid, acting through fear is the wrong thing to do; and if, when you are afraid, you can look down, gather your nerve, and then raise your hand with a smile to greet the world, you'll be surprised by the sort of situations that will actually work.  

Thank you, crazy gang in Harare.