I’m at the tail end (under sixty days left) of the year-long meditation course over on Headspace. It has taken me over a year for various reasons. One of the things we’ve been discussing is sitting with whatever comes up. The idea is to treat discomforts, desires, and thoughts in the same way: to note them and then let them go. The goal is the same reaction to good and bad things that come up.
During the course, we discussed being ok with “bad” thoughts. I understand many people find this hard, and I get why. I used to find it hard, too. But after years of reading, therapy, writing, and allowing myself to think all the thoughts (and put some of them in stories), I guess I’m a little desensitised to it. I would still marvel at a particularly bizarre thought when it comes up, but usually, very little can shock me within my own mind. I’ve seen all the thoughts: wanting to jump off high places or step in front of a truck, wanting to run away, wanting to break things, wanting to hurt people (those are still difficult, I won’t lie). I usually manage to treat them like I treat the “good” thoughts: I note them and let them go.
What I find more challenging than sitting with whatever comes up are times when nothing comes up. When I was little, my parents had a group of friends who all had kids roughly the same age. The parents had all been at a Kibbutz together, and the firstborns were all in the “children's house” together. After we moved away from the Kibbutz, this gang would meet up on school holidays. We’d go camping, or everyone would come to our house (which was in the desert, so it was kind of like camping), and all the kids would sleep on mattresses on the floor. I remember these gatherings fondly. We’d put on shows for the grownups or create a newspaper that included interviews with the grownups about what’s for dinner. We’d build forts and have elaborate pretend games where we would compel the little ones to be the underdogs while we were pirates or cowboys or whatever we’d read about that year.
Anyway, one of my parents’ friends had a saying that he’d tell us every time we’d exhaust our reservoir of ideas. The saying, roughly translated, went: “Only boring people get bored”. Now, I totally get why he’d pull that out. There are few things that parents want less than to deal with their children’s boredom. It reminds us of our own.
All this to say that I find it difficult to sit with an empty mind. Yes, the whole point of meditating is to have an empty mind or, at least, a quieter mind. That’s the idea. But I realised recently that one of my biggest fears is to try to think and come up with nothing. I know many writers have a similar fear: that they would run out of ideas. I actually don’t worry about that so much because I always read, and so I always have new ideas. Good ideas are an entirely different kettle of fish and probably a different post. But ideas? I have tonnes.
When we have “bad” thoughts, it doesn’t mean we are “bad” people. The fact that I have a random, unkind thought about someone doesn’t make me unkind unless I act on the thought. So, for now, I try to convince myself that if I have no thoughts, that doesn’t mean I’m a boring person. And I try to note it, sit with it, and watch it go.
Emptiness, that's really. So now you need to hold it. Or at least that's what the Tibetan will say.