For a long time, I thought the wandering was the part I was supposed to get rid of. I thought a good meditation was one in which I stayed with my breath, and a bad one was one in which I spent fifteen minutes mentally reorganizing cupboards, replaying conversations, and wondering what I might eat later. Then I began to understand that the wandering wasn't interrupting the practice.
The returning was the practice.
The moment you realize you have disappeared into a thought, you are already here again. No commentary. No little internal sigh about how bad you are at this. No dragging yourself back by the collar. Come on. Let's come back to the body. You're not trying to stop the wandering. You're practicing the coming back.
It took me a while to see that this was never only about meditation. Life takes us away from ourselves too. Into a person. A fear. A need to be chosen. A phone screen. An argument we continue having three hours after the other person has left the room. Into proving, fixing, pleasing, managing. Perhaps the important thing was never learning how not to leave. Perhaps it was learning the way home.
The body became an easier place for me to return to than the mind. The mind likes evidence. Explanations. Conclusions. It wants to know why something hurts, where it started, whether the interpretation is correct and, ideally, what should be done about it. The body is often less ambitious. A tight jaw. Warmth beneath the ribs. A hollow feeling in the stomach. A heaviness behind the eyes. Hands that suddenly feel very alive. You can notice these things without deciding what they mean. You can locate before you can name.
I had spent a great deal of my life trying to understand myself. I thought understanding would eventually deliver me somewhere. That if I found the correct explanation, the feeling would loosen its grip. Sometimes understanding helps. But there are things that do not need another explanation from us. They need our company.
So I began asking myself a very small question: How am I feeling? Not How am I feeling, and what should I do about it? Just the first part. Then I waited. Sometimes there was a word. Sometimes a place in the body. Sometimes nothing at all. Something happened. I felt it. I didn't know what it was.
Not knowing is a place you can stand.
Grief could arrive without bringing a story. A memory could appear without explaining why it had come. Something in me could feel suddenly very young although nothing in the room had changed. My old instinct was to follow immediately. Why this? Why now? What does it mean? Where did it begin?
Sometimes those questions opened something useful. Sometimes they pulled me out of the feeling and back into the familiar safety of thinking. So I learned, slowly, to wait. To let sadness be heaviness behind my eyes before making it a biography. To let fear be pressure in my chest before turning it into prediction. To let warmth be warmth. Feeling doesn't require a filing system.
There is a particular temptation once meditation begins to feel meaningful. I started looking for the meaningful bit. Yesterday something opened, so today I would sit down hoping it might happen again. Perhaps there had been tears. A rush of warmth. An extraordinary quiet. I had felt completely inside myself for ten minutes, and now I would rather like ten more.
But the moment I began trying to repeat an experience, I was no longer in the one I was having. The next morning could be dull. My mind could spend the whole time composing a shopping list. Nothing could happen. Slowly, I stopped needing meditation to prove that meditation was working.
The sitting became less of a place where I went looking for myself and more of a place where I noticed who had arrived. Some mornings she was peaceful. Some mornings irritated. Some mornings she did not want to be there at all. I began to let that count too. There were mornings I left after a minute. There were mornings I never sat down. There was nothing to make up. There was no streak to protect.
I wanted a relationship with myself that did not disappear the moment I stopped performing it perfectly.
You came back. That counts.
Eventually meditation started appearing outside meditation. Not as serenity. Unfortunately. More often as one second: the second before I reached for my phone, the tightening in my body before I answered someone, the tiny collapse after a particular kind of silence, the moment I realized I was rehearsing an argument with someone who wasn't there.
Nothing dramatic changed in that second. I simply noticed that I was there. The sitting was practice, but it was also training. Slowly, the noticing began to follow me into the ordinary day.
Going inward can be beautiful. I also noticed how easily I could turn it into another kind of search. One more insight. One more buried thing. One more explanation for why I was the way I was. For a while, even healing became somewhere else I thought I needed to arrive.
I began to see that there was no end to the search if I kept believing the answer lived one layer deeper than wherever I currently was. Witness. Don't summon. If something came, I let it come. If something beautiful happened, I let it be beautiful. If grief appeared, I tried to sit beside it. If nothing came, I tried not to disturb the nothing. There is no prize for intensity.
And there are things that are too large to sit beside alone. There is a difference between something moving through you and something swallowing the room. If I came away feeling less here, less able to be in my life, or more frightened each time I approached something, I learned to come outward. Feet on the floor. Food. Daylight. A walk. Another person. Ordinary life.
Going in is brave.
Going in alone isn't braver.
Being accompanied is allowed.
I used to think the point of all this was peace. I'm not sure I do anymore. A mind can still wander after years of meditation. An old wound can still ache. Some mornings are beautiful. Some mornings you sit for three minutes and spend two and a half of them thinking about breakfast. None of that cancels what has been built.
Because somewhere along the way, something quieter begins to happen. Sitting with yourself stops feeling quite so much like a practice you decided to take up. The silence becomes familiar. You know the way in. You know the way back when you disappear. And perhaps there is someone in there you have begun to like being with.
Not because she is always peaceful. Not because she has finally worked everything out. Just because you have spent enough time beside her that she is no longer a stranger.
Not stillness. Not peace, exactly.
Just a relationship with myself that feels a little more like home.
With love,
Esmeralda