Meditations on Meditation, Part 1

The only reason I got into meditation was because I couldn't sleep. I ended up sitting in the middle of my shitty apartment, naked, cross legged with my eyes closed. All I could hear besides the noise of the building or the guy next door trying to keep his ex-wife out of his apartment was the raging furor of my mind. All I could be then was neutral or angry. Sometimes I just sat in my chair, my only piece of furniture, for hours and shivered. Some nights I would work out two or three times and paint minis until I had only three hours to sleep and then pass out. It was pretty weird. Some of the articles I have read at work indicate that I may have been a tad traumatized by the experiences of the previous summer (that is for another entry) but I think that, like so many major catastrophes in history, it was a confluence of events. All the shit that leftover in my head from high school and my family collided with the remains of my psyche from the beating it took all summer and I just imploded. There was so much going in my head that I could only deal with it in the dark. Walking to my various jobs, I would practice holding my breath and a kind of non-thought. I would walk a mile or three and not have a single higher thought. I lived only for my body while the sun was up. Once I got home and was trying to sleep, all the little cracks in my mind would leak a steady flow into my conscious and I had to face everything. The shivering came from trying not to cry. It took me an entire year, all of 1999, to move into a state of wholeness about my being. The parts of my previous life that I needed or wanted were kept and the others were either combined into usable features or, for the most part, discarded as harmful. I can't say that I am a finished person, because I never really finish anything, but there are some things that just don't end. My being isn't a process that has stages, it just is what it is. Lately, it has been feeling out of frame, somehow, and I think I should meditate on this development.