This is the third time I’ve tried to reach enlightenment. The first must’ve been at some point when I was carving a space for myself in the Bay. I had just returned from college, and was reacquainting myself to that elevated Cali life. I was newly politicized, was decked out in earth tones, and may have event rocked a headwrap. I was frequenting the kinds of dimly-lit spaces where frankincense incense burned slow. I met a girl with thick, rebellious hair, who religiously used Dr. Bronners on everything and who said she could feel my energy. This was a time of lucid dreams, of atoms moving in the kind of visible manner you only really get if you’ve ever attempted astral projection. But then she broke it off, the colors turned to gray and I carried on.
The second time, I mentioned not too long ago. A woman named Sun held my hands and told me to imagine roots coming out of my feet and a beam shooting out of the top of my head. No matter that we were on the 7th floor of a hotel room in Minneapolis, or that I had a flight to catch soon and this was how I decided to try to stay up. I listened to her voice, a voice that spoke of past lives who were conspiring together to lead me through this life. I was living in New York, beginning my first relationship in five years, toiling with all the existential things that some of us describe as Saturn’s return (obvz, you can’t take the Bay out of the boy). I woke up with tears streaming down my cheeks and everything vibrating. I continued this meditation for a solid few months. But then I left New York. I lost my routine in the move.
So now, I feel pretty wack for returning to meditation during the age when #mindfulness is scattered throughout Whole Foods. I came back to meditation via an app, and now I do my 20-30 minutes with a timer on. It’s very pragmatic, logistical, and it works. It’s been almost two years that I’ve been on this path, and although this might be seen as my actual “successful” bout with meditation, when I close my eyes and let my mind go, it often gets rattled with a larger question of why I’m here in the first place. Why is meditation now a treatment instead of a moment? What am I putting pressure on myself to stay grounded in? What am I attempting to rebalance each and every morning? So much of meditation is described as “looking inward,” but I believe what made the past sessions powerful was my ability to transcend my own self, to look outward. Despite my meditation streaks and newfound ability to sit still for half an hour, a big part of me is still longing for the kind of openness and curiosity I approached my meditations with when I was younger, when life was less stable and when my spirit had more at stake. I have so much more privilege in life now than I did 5 or 10 years back, but is privilege a fair trade for soulfulness?