Finding Center

There is an analogy around meditation that has always resonated with me. We tend to put expectations on our meditation practice. That we should be calm, quiet, at peace. We should empty our thoughts and sit in the luminous space of nothingness that practiced discipline offers.

It feels impossible at times and I fall into dualistic thinking around the experience. No thoughts = I’m doing a good job. Lots of thoughts = I’m bad at this.

The buddhists have a different approach to meditation. They equate it to a stick in flowing water. Rather than approaching it as a task to be accomplished (the way I approach most things in my life), they use it as a tool for self reflection. It is like placing a stick in a moving river, an indicator of the movement of inner tides. If you cannot sit still, have racing thoughts, struggle with inner solitude and presence, then you become aware that you are off center. That your inner energy and presence of mind is not at peace. This awareness allows us to separate from the workings of our inner life and become decisionary again rather than reactionary.

I’ve always liked this approach to meditation. Instead of trying for an outcome, it is a welcoming of self. A check in. A tool to gauge the inner tide of energy and see the necessity in returning back to center.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” - Socrates

I have been spending a lot of time on the beach lately, sitting quietly, watching the waves and birds and transforming clouds. I have started reflecting on the journey thus far, the microcosm of interconnected events that have led me to where I am. The person I’ve become, the person I am still becoming.

There have been so many events that have thrown me off center, left me in the wilderness far from home. I have been asking God to help me zoom out. To take my little human self out of these circumstances and start to see this mosaic of chance for the artistry that has paginated it together.

I think there is inherent value in challenges, in the trials that test our character and make us face what we’re really made of. I imagine it as a continuous journey home, like being plucked and placed in a new wilderness far from center. I think of my numerous failures, of the times I have been deeply hurt by the people I love and the times I have in turn hurt the people I devoted myself to. The times that I reacted out of hurt and pain and fear rather than grace and faith and love.

Through the grace of God, I have come to learn who I want to be in the midst of betrayal, how to catch my reflection in turbulence and start to develop into the kind of person who remains at center in ever changing tides.

I used to be an outdoor guide in college. I led people on adventures from the Appalachian Mountains to Joshua Tree. The more you trek the wilderness, the more you develop an internal map of your surroundings. To this day, you could probably drop me in the middle of somewhere in JTree and I would be able to gain some triangulation of my coordinates. The numerous treks and necessary ventures have helped me establish a sense of placement in a vast landscape.

I think the countless trials in my life have done the same. They have made the continuous returning to self necessary. They have refined the grand adventure of pinpointing home, of how to enact free will in a world that constantly tries to define the self for us. It has been painful and at times devastating. It has also been the greatest gift I could ask for. To create an internal map of home and trust that no matter the wilderness, I will return there.

The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. Matthew 7:25