On a deep level, it was probably my messed up Mind-Body-Soul connection that got me back into meditation. In the years after the monastery I’d given up prayer entirely, and overused the typical methods of self-extinction. Full of a largely vain dissatisfaction with the pounds alcohol was packing on, and with the hangovers of middle age getting worse, I’d come to the conclusion that spirituality was something I ignored to my own sad, fat white peril. Furthermore, I had learned a few new things about prayer that gave me the material, if I could use it humbly, to reapproach the zen-style sitting of my monastery days.
Superficially, I’m sure it also had something to do with the death of Adam West.
Around the time the city of Los Angeles lit the Bat Signal in memoriam, I realized that my body is a broken television. That is to say, when it comes to “picking up spiritual signals”—the reason I have a body in the first place—there’s a lifetime of interference to get past. Some days I’m staring at a dark screen, somedays I’m staring at snowlike static. I have rarely felt at home in my own skin.
I explain it with the mechanical efficiency of someone who’s been explaining why he’s different his whole life: I have mild cerebral palsy. It’s a neuromuscular disease that makes my muscles tighten faster than most. It happened because I was born premature. The technology to deal with premature birth wasn’t as advanced in the late seventies. Because my lungs weren’t fully formed, I stopped breathing several times as an infant. Actually, I’m lucky. Most people with cerebral palsy are wheelchair bound. I’m not. Yes, of course I feel blessed.
In elementary school, everyone noticed I was different. It made my psyche an anxious tangle of rejections, and provided psychologists with job security as often as I’ve chosen to go in that direction. At first, I didn't know I'd feel that way. In fact, with the rhetoric of the beatitudes, I imagined my disability rendered me somehow divinely-extra-special. A “Blessed are the awkward, for they shall inherit the dance floor” type of thing.
In my adult life, very few people have noticed I am different. Only members of the disabled community can tell by sight that I’m a card carrying part of their club. My privilege (of being able to pass as able-bodied) when it’s coupled with moderate spiritual proficiency, might have given me the mechanics to bypass my body altogether. Except, that would be a lie. And the contemplative journey, if it’s real, is inherently honest. For better or worse, my own physicality is something I deal with repeatedly, with each time feeling like the first.
There are three kinds of attention in prayer, and I’d learned the first one. For me checking out took the form of compulsive theological thinking. I thought about God to sidestep facing myself. For years I told myself that disability equals specialness, that I ought to be glad about it. The first thing that the contemplative journey did was allow me to call shenanigans on myself, to admit that I didn’t want to be special to God. I wanted to be normal, to disappear, as God does, in the flow of routine. Of course, in truth, I meant “normal in the eyes of society,” something I wasn’t and would never be. And the thing that might come closest to being acceptable to God, personal acceptance of my reality, was a work I hadn’t even begun. To this day, honesty about myself and honesty about God tend to be mutually exclusive. Of course, it’s understandable: a complex of mild OCD and PTSD inspired habits of emotional stuffing stored pain in my body with a consistency and to degrees I was unwilling to face. So thinking about God was my way of checking out, for a while. It still can be, if I’m not watchful.
The second kind of attention in prayer was called Active Volition. In the monastery, this had been my bread and butter for years- at best, active volition was a resort to a higher self: I’d take deep breaths, I clear my mind of anything but my mantra. I’d tell myself that nobody likes a selfish pig. On the surface, for years, I talked myself into being a quite selfless pig. Apologists would have argued that a spiritual self was better than the more base alternatives. Active volition, they’d say, got a lot of good work done. But an enlightened self is still a self. As such, for years, when my good work went unrecognized, I nursed resentments. I wanted all three of my good works and spiritual talents to be things I could stow in a spiritual utility belt. But there was something else. Growing up, given my lack of coordination, I fell more easily than most. For me, it took more attention to do the same physical tasks others took for granted. Over the years I gradually equated attention with force, developed a compulsive tendency to hyper-vigilance that not only failed to keep me safe, it made relaxing impossible. So the force with which I took deep breaths or stuck to a mantra pointed to a real handicap: I couldn’t just let things happen.
So these days when I reproached meditation, letting things happen has to be my focus. This is the third kind of attention in prayer, called “passive volition.” Passive volition is a witnessing presence. Far from simply allowing my mind to play mental ping-pong with my God-concept, in this mode I simply watch it happen. Rather than forcing my breaths to be deep because it’s what meditating people do, I just watch: if my breath is shallow, I feel it and let it be shallow. If my head’s full of noise about God, I notice, and let it be cacophonous. Sometimes, by and by, feeling sensations and noticing noise yields to deep relaxation or quiet.
But of course, those quiet states are not guaranteed. Perhaps it’d be helpful if I wrapped up this post with an example of a recent time that sliding into serenity was, for me, impossible.
Of course, when I sit down to pray, full of self conscious noise that says “I want meditation.” And at first I make efforts to mentally delete the I and the wanting, hoping all that’s left is meditation. No dice. Then I delete the zen from the fact that I am meditating, hoping all I will be in the end is an embodied divine name, I AM without the modifiers. Again, no dice.
I give my attention to my breath. It’s shallow today, and I can’t get underneath it, can’t name what’s panicking me. The more work ‘giving attention to my breath’ is, the more I realize how much the whole thing stinks, both of effort and the ego driving it. I have a problem with equating attention and force, and in one of those potentially meditation-wrecking insights, I realize that the phrasing of that goal is part of the problem.
Most of our lives, we maintain an egotistical and dualistic mindset: I am over here, God—and most of my spiritual goals—are over there. “I give my attention to the breath” is a phrase that reflects that. There’s an actor, an implied goal, and an object. What I realized on that day is that breath is attention: deep and long when I’m totally there, shallow and short when I’m distracted. But breath is attention. The I that imagines itself to be giving something to something else doesn’t exist. It struck me as a true, and totally distracting, insight.
My own panicked breathing continued. Then another lightning flash: the phrase “prophesy to the breath” flashed briefly across the mind-screen. (FYI, this is a quote from Ezekiel 37. God takes Ezekiel to a valley of dry bones, asking him ‘Son of Man, can you make these bones live?’ It’s basically a rhetorical question, followed by God’s command that Ezekiel prophesy, first to the flesh,which enfleshes the bones, then to the breath, which gives them life.) Accompanying this was an ability, which doesn’t always present itself, to speak to my shortness of breath. In ACA terms, to speak to my panicked inner child from the point of view of a healthy adult. So I did, and it was superficially calming.
I generally make distinctions: Reason is the stuff of staying stuck in Ego, and in Realization, a higher power moves me toward liberation. It’s not that simple. That day, I had two whole “realizations,” both of which resulted in no deep ability to chill in my own body. But if passive volition is a mode of “watchfulness,” I can be present without judgement, to whatever arises.
If my body is a broken television, there will be snow or there will be nothing. Sometimes reception will be good, and I’ll dig what I’m watching. Sometimes reception will suck, and all I’ll hear is “Tune in tomorrow. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Station.”
Tomorrow will find me sitting cross-legged in front of the old idiot box. Childlike. Waiting. Watching.
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