If I’ve learned anything from stillness—that is, learning to meditate, to be still, and to find the stillness inside of myself through the hardest experiences in life—it is this: the world is a mirror. What we see when we look at the world is what we hold inside. And what we hold inside is our choice. When we look out at the world, we look at ourselves.
And no matter what we’re going through, no matter how unbearable or overwhelming something seems, we are always there, in stillness, underneath whatever is going on.
Not that I know how to write well about it, but I’d like to talk about grief, and the many things that walk alongside grief, like depression, like pain, like the numerous stresses and hurts and fears that hold us down and hold us back, making life feel difficult and heavy. I may not have anything to say about it outside of my own experience, but that’s why I’m writing it, after all. And maybe you will find something meaningful, or even just relatable, here.
When it comes to grief…
When we lose someone from our life—and there are so many different ways of losing someone—a part of us goes with them.
This is, I feel, one of the most baffling aspects of grief: that our grieving isn’t merely for their absence from our life, but for who we were because of them. How it felt to be in their eyes. The part of us that awoke in their presence.
In so many ways, the people we care about, the people we live alongside, exist inside of us. We consult them in our minds and our hearts. We hold conversations with them, sometimes we carry them so closely it’s like they are always with us.
And when we lose someone, the part of us that goes with them becomes like a void inside of us. It might be a feeling of confusion, of being lost, of feeling completely and unthinkably alone. They may exist inside of us, but that version of them no longer exists in the real world.
That is one of the fundamental things I’ve learned about grief. I may not know much about grief in the intellectual sense—and I couldn’t recite the stages of grief, having never read about them—but I can speak of it from my experiences with it, in its many forms.
And, in this case, I want to do so from the perspective of mental health, of healing, and of creating art.
Last year, my family lost a beloved family member to cancer. He was my uncle, one of the kindest people I’ve ever known, someone who’d always been there. And it’s such a sad reality that sometimes, it isn’t until faced with the possibility of an ending that we realize: we never imagined what life would be like with them gone; we never imagined the world without them in it.
My experience with this kind of grief hit me in waves. I’d find my mind gravitating back to my uncle frequently, imagining the last time I saw him, remembering so many conversations and encounters and words, and ruminating on things I wish I could’ve said. I also couldn’t stop remembering so many wonderful conversations with him, so many laughs, and these memories were so much stronger than the feelings of what I wish I would’ve said. It’s important to look at what we have, not what we don’t. This is something, in grief, we all need to learn how to navigate on our own. And I’m writing this not as a manual out of these experiences, but simply to write about them, to chronicle my experience. Some moments I would be perfectly okay. Other moments, it would hit me suddenly, and I was overcome with emotion.
Before this, I’d been in the midst of an especially productive few months of writing. But suddenly I couldn’t finish a single sentence, couldn’t bring my mind to engage with any kind of creative project. My emotions swelled, became large and encompassing—often overwhelming—and my thoughts became small. Words became difficult, sometimes impossible. This was true both in writing and in expressing myself to others. I didn’t know how to talk about what I was feeling.
But as a creative person, a writer with an innate compulsion—a literal need—to write, I couldn’t simply stop writing. So I turned to poetry. I’ve never been capable of journaling in the conventional sense, but I dove into my journal and began to turn my emotions into poetry. This is something I practice regularly now, as a means of processing my own emotions and understanding them. And it came more easily than any other words, because poetry doesn’t require many words. Rather—at least in the kind of poetry I write—it constructs words in the simplest possible way in order to magnify the emotions behind them.
And, in truth, this isn’t just about art. I mean to say this about healing in all its messy, nonlinear, uncertain forms. It is important to grieve, to open ourselves to loss. We need to feel it all if we ever expect to be able to face ourselves again and truly heal.
And the ones we lose, they wouldn’t want us to close ourselves off and for our lives to forever be put on hold.
We are so resilient, too. For me, that resilience is most often processed and filtered through my art.
And art doesn’t need to be a serious or performative affair. This is a trap I fall into so often. I get into a project—a novel, typically—and push aside other forms of creating in favor of that project. This is because I want to be a professional writer, I want to write with an audience in mind—all that. But that isn’t the purpose of art, it’s more so a happy—hopeful—result. A separate reward from the creation of it, if you will.
In this way, grief taught me the importance of art as simple expression. Lessons can come from anywhere in life. And it’s not like I didn’t know this about art, it’s just that I have a tendency to forget. Art doesn’t need to be anything more than a feeling given shape.
So poetry became—and has become—the art I turn to in experiences such as grief. And, to any artist who might be reading this, if you don’t already do this than I urge you to try it. Especially in these strange times we’re in—this world is so different than it was even a few months ago. Do you feel trapped? Stir crazy? I understand what it’s like to feel tormented by this excess of time, yet struggling with productivity in art. Maybe take a step back from it, learn what pressure you feel in it, and let it flow as pure, unfiltered expression. It has been such an invaluable lesson for me.
Not long ago, I’ve experienced another kind of loss, which I won’t go into.
But much of the process is the same, in its own way, though it can be measured very differently.
I stopped writing on any main project, finding it nearly impossible to focus my mind in that way. And for me, that is especially agonizing because my writing is so often catharsis, and processing, and an outlet—in addition to simply being fun. This may link to what I’ve said about depression, too, and my own experience with depression: how activities, hobbies, even passions, lose their meaning, they lose their taste. But I’ve learned that it is precisely when things feel the most meaningless and flat that it is most important to step back, breathe, and work on yourself, maintain yourself, take care of yourself in every little way. Even if that means just getting out of bed. Even if it means forcing yourself, with every inch of effort, to do just a few of the everyday things that used to come so simply and so easily.
And with the benefit of quarantine (I call it a benefit, when before it felt like a curse) and the rediscovery of meditation, I feel I’ve learned some amazing things about grief, and stillness, and creating.
The ironic thing about meditation in my life is it’s something I tend to put off. To phrase it another way, I don’t make enough time to just sit. Simple, right?
I’ve learned about myself that I can’t simply fill my time. As much as my mind insists on restless productivity of some sort, I end up feeling rushed and bordering on manic when I try to fill my time with activity. It’s important to me, and to the reality of having peace in my mind, to allow empty space in my time. Empty space to be still. To not do anything. That can mean sitting and actually listening to music, without doing anything else. It can mean actually sitting to meditate. It can mean finding a way to just be, to think, to sit, to listen and pay attention. It can mean making not a single plan so that any plan might fill that space. It can even mean going for a drive with no destination.
I don’t want to suggest that meditation is a cure for anything, or even a solution. But at my worst in the movements of grief, or depression, or even just stress and anxiety in everyday life, I’m learning to make myself be still. I will find somewhere to sit, or lay down—let’s get rid of the idea that there is a “right way” to meditate—and I will look around and listen. Thoughts will spin through my mind all the same, and sometimes the mere act of sitting still with intention will actually make those thoughts worse for a few minutes. In the past, I’ve even had a panic attack while meditating, but I made myself stay still even in that—and it became a profound learning experience about myself.
And as I sit, paying attention to what’s around me, all those spinning, churning thoughts gain a slipperiness. They still pass through my mind, but they slip right on through. And it’s such a freeing feeling.
I’m not sure how else to describe it. Like the thoughts become background chatter. And I can focus on how it feels to breathe, how the wind sounds through the trees nearby. And I can then look at myself, at my thoughts, at whatever I’m going through, from the perspective of stillness. To borrow a metaphor from better writers than I, that moment of finding stillness inside oneself—outside of constant thought, anxiety, fear, pain, sadness, grief—that moment is like trying to swim in a storm, and then suddenly you dive under and it is quiet underneath. Under the surface it’s calm, it’s still, while the storm of the mind happens on the surface.
This process, you don’t even have to call it meditation. You might describe it as being still and learning to look at yourself properly, as Alan Watts says. Learning not to identify with your mind. Learning to not only understand, but also to feel your connection to the world around you, and how you are your attention. In times when I’ve felt most alone, this stillness has brought my attention acutely into the tiny happenings all around me, and it’s helped me realize: I am never truly alone. None of us is. I’m not even sure I know how to write about it very well, and suddenly find myself wondering why I’m even writing this blog post.
But by learning to be still, even in the worst of times, I’ve learned some incredible things in my own life.
First, that you can always find yourself underneath it all, no matter what you’re going through. When you’re in some kind of pain, when you’re grieving, or depressed—anything—it is so hard to feel anything else. It is so hard to remember what it’s like not to be feeling like that. The pain of it is difficult enough on its own, with the addition that you feel you are the pain, you are the stress, you are what you are feeling. And if you have an especially overthinking mind, maybe part of your mind will try to convince you that this is what there is to life.
But if you are still, if you learn to sit or kneel—or pray, if you’re religious—and to listen, to quietly pay attention to the world and to yourself, you will find yourself underneath all of that. Under the pain, under the story of your own life, under the grief—all of it—you are there. You are always there. And most important, you are okay. All those things you are feeling, they can’t fundamentally do anything to you. And the stillness, that place inside that is always there—it is untouchable. Nothing will ever change it. Nothing could ever make it go away. All it is is awareness. You, fundamentally.
The last time I meditated—just the other day—it was raining. I sat under the cover of my back patio and listened to the rain. I let myself feel what I was feeling, let myself think what I was thinking. And slowly my attention moved to the rain. Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “to be aware of being aware.” It can be like that, in stillness. To become aware of your own awareness, and aware of how that’s what you really are, underneath all the thoughts and feelings in your mind and body: you are your awareness. You are your attention.
And this is what I mean, too, when I say the world is a mirror. This isn’t something I came up with, rather it’s something I’ve read much about. It’s something found in teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism. But it’s also something I’ve realized to be true, in my own life.
When I am still, and a wind blows through the trees, I will perceive in that wind what I am looking for. What I feel and hold inside, I will witness in the world and in other people. And by perceiving that—because I was looking for it—it becomes true for me.
And in stillness, it’s easier to understand that it’s a choice, what you hold inside. For me, it is a constant choice to be open. To be able to let go and feel gratitude for what comes and what goes. As a result, when I look out into the world, often that is what I feel reflecting back at me: an invitation to let go of whatever I’m holding onto. An invitation to be astonished. An invitation to dance, because life—as Alan Watts says—is a musical thing, and music is meant to be danced to.
And as for grief, and the people we lose in our life. They may not be here anymore, not in the way they used to be, but you will find them in the wind through the trees, or in the sound and splash of the rain, or in the sunlight bouncing off the clouds, if you are looking. Stillness has taught me that there is a part of us—a fundamental part of us—that is timeless. Unchanging, as some spiritual teachers say. You can always find that place. You can always find yourself there. And what you’ve lost, especially if it is a person, you will find them there, too, because they are part of you. Even if it’s the past, it is something to honor, to feel gratitude for, and ultimately to let go of.
Letting go—even that is an act of love and gratitude, and it is how we move forward.
If the world is a mirror, you may want to stand in front of that mirror with as much openness and receptiveness as possible. If you are holding on to too much inside, there won’t be room for anything else. And all you will see in that mirror is all that you are holding onto.
So letting go is an act of love and gratitude—toward yourself, and subsequently toward others, and toward the world. The kinder you are to yourself, the kinder you will be to others. The more gratitude you feel toward yourself, the more you will reflect that back to others. And the myriad stresses and problems in life will be like the surface of the water, and you will be calm and still underneath. Inviting with open arms what comes. Graciously letting go of what leaves.
In art, it means not to dwell on your work, but to create it, nurture it, and ultimately let it go. How else could it take on its own life to reach others?
In life, it is the same. Love the dance while it is happening—love, too, those who danced with you, no matter how long or short the dance. And when the music stops, bow. Smile. Feel the deep joy that is gratitude for having been able to dance at all.