Meditation

It occurred to me recently that my two favorite plays by Shakespeare, Macbethand King Lear, share the same spine: The protagonists lives fall apart after giving in to their powerful egos. Are there literally thousands of examples of this throughout literary history? Yes. But Macbeth and Lear have a purity that has made them resonate with audiences for over 400 years.

Here’s how it plays out in Macbeth. Returning from a heroic turn on the battlefield fighting for King Duncan, Macbeth comes upon three witches in a heath:

MACBETH: Speak, if you can; what are you?

WITCH 1: All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glanis!

WITCH 2: All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!

WITCH 3: All hail, Macbeth; that shalt be king hereafter!

Thus begins Macbeth’s inexorable slide into the abyss. He was already Thane of Glanis, but the witches foretold that he would become Thane of Cawdor (a promotion in the aristocratic hierarchy) and eventually king of Scotland.

When he sees him, Duncan tells Macbeth the good news that he is making him Thane of Cawdor. This gets Macbeth’s wheels turning. If the witches were correct in their prognostication about Cawdor, it would seem that their prediction of him becoming king would also be true.

Next thing he knows, the king has invited himself to Macbeth’s castle for a visit that night. With some necessary and sinister prodding from Lady Macbeth, his wife, Macbeth’s ego turns murderous as he stabs Duncan to death while he sleeps.

Macbeth, the homicidal maniac

After being named King of Scotland, Macbeth unravels even further, slaughtering others who could contest his legitimacy as king. Not surprisingly, Macbeth is stabbed to death in the end by his rival, Macduff.

Before hearing the witches’ prophecy, Macbeth was by all accounts an honorable man, a talented and loyal general. But hearing that he could, and would, become king ignited and infected his ego so strongly that he completely lost his way. The result was a total life catastrophe.

Lear, getting off on being groveled to

King Lear traveled a different path to ruin, but as with Macbeth, capitulating to his ego was central to his downfall. Lear, the aging, narcissistic king of ancient Britain, decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. To determine who gets the best slices of the kingdom, Lear asks each of his daughters to tell him how much they love him. Goneril and Regan lay it on thick.

Here’s part of Goneril’s epic suck-up:

“As much as child e’er lov’d, or father found; A love that makes breath poor and speech unable; Beyond all manner of so much I love you.”

When Lear asks the same of his youngest and favorite daughter, Cordelia, she has none of it. Incapable of insincere fawning, she says:

“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth: I love your majesty according to my bond; nor more nor less.”

Lear prods Cordelia for more, but she refuses to take the bait. He then melts down and disowns Cordelia, opting to split the kingdom between Regan and Goneril.

To make a long story short (literally), Regan and Goneril go on to abuse their aging, ex-king father, to the point that he goes insane, wandering naked on a heath during a violent thunderstorm. Lear, completely broken, utters one of the greatest lines in all of Shakespeare:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

Then, in one of the least happy endings in all of storytelling, Lear holds in his arms the recently hanged body of his beloved Cordelia, so despondent that he collapses and dies of a broken heart.

Pretty uplifting, eh? But at least Shakespeare’s message is clear (as it is with the plays of the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides): Given the right circumstances, succumbing to the powerful ego leads to ruin.

The takeaway

So what does this all add up to? Mostly, it’s a cautionary article about two cautionary plays. All sorts of situations arise in our lives where we’re tempted to leave our seat of self and surrender to the voracious appetites of our ego. It rarely ends well. Be on the lookout.

It’s also a not-so-gentle reminder that letting go of our egos is advisable. Let’s face it: Macbeth and Lear would never have done what they did had they been meditating fifteen minutes a day and practicing mindfulness.

Adyashanti, formerly known as Stephen Gray, is one of the foremost spiritual teachers alive today. He lives near San Francisco and draws on a potpourri of traditions, chiefly Buddhism, but also Hinduism and Christianity, for his teachings.

I specifically like his approach toward meditation. He emphasizes relaxing into the natural state of awareness that is always present in us, but is obscured most of the time by our chattering minds.

Adya’s mind-blowing meditation talk

One of my favorite ideas from Adya, as he’s known, came from a teaching I listened to a few years ago. It was an overview of the meditation process. It’s fantastic and I highly recommend listening to it. Here’s the link.

In the beginning he talked about the education process for learning meditation. He said it’s the exact opposite of traditional education. Here’s what he said:

“In meditation the rudimentary stuff is the advanced stuff. It isn’t like learning something in school where you work yourself up to the PhD program. It’s the opposite. You’re trying to work yourself backwards, down to kindergarten. Down into simplicity, not into complexity.”

This gets it exactly. The problem many people have when learning meditation is that they get bogged down with a bunch of details. They make it too complex.

Why do most people do this? Because our brains thrive on complexity and doing and figuring things out. How could anything be profoundly helpful that is so simple, seems to be the thought process involved.

Meditation is about keeping it simple

The fact is that meditation is simple. It’s about placing attention on something happening in the present moment. Then, when our attention wanders into thinking, which it inevitably does, we simply notice that and bring attention back to our present moment awareness.

So the work involved seems counterintuitive to most of us mere mortals: It centers on being vigilant about bringing everything back to the simple. Consistently. Just coming back to the breath or whatever it is you’re placing attention on.

The words I hold onto from Adya’s teaching are kindergarten and Phd. I just love that. I visualize a 26 year old in the bowels of some university library racking their brains analyzing some esoteric poem by Chaucer for their dissertation. This intense use of the brain has its place, but is the antithesis of meditation.

The simple movements of a beetle

Then I imagine a kindergartener on the playground spending a few minutes enthralled with the movements of a beetle. Just curious about it. Not analyzing a thing. Just there. Watching the beetle. Totally present.

That’s the approach we want to bring to meditation and, frankly, mindfulness and most areas in life. Simplicity. Innocence. Curiosity. The Zen people call this beginner’s mind.

The takeaway

The key is realizing that attaining beginner’s/kindergartener’s mind is NOT easy. Many unwittingly assume that staying with the simple should be simple. Unfortunately, it’s not, for the reason I already mentioned: Our brains drift toward complexity.

Also, our society values putting our noses to the grindstone and doing, doing, doing, going, going, going. This leads to a prejudice toward the Phd grind and away from kindergartener simplicity.

So the central work is being vigilant about coming back to the simple. Doing so will take us a long way in our meditation practices and in all facets of our work on the spiritual path.

I know tons of people who get into the spiritual stuff and then early on throw up their hands, saying it’s too hard. That they just “don’t have it” in this area. So they blow it off.

If you’re one of those people who has blown off spiritual work or is struggling mightily and considering casting it aside, this article is for you. Here’s why.

At the heart of most people’s struggle in this arena is a misconception about the work itself. They get into it, inevitably encounter obstacles, then quit.

But consider what my favorite spiritual teacher, Mickey Singer, says about this. He asks people to consider all kinds of things we endeavor to learn.

Trigonometry was hard at first, too

For example, consider when you took trigonometry in high school. You’re in there for a week or two and the teacher is talking about secants, cosecants, tangents, cotangents, etc. And this stuff may as well be a foreign language. You really have no clue what it’s all about. Did you go up to the teacher early on and say, “I’m really sorry, Mr. Johnson, but I just don’t understand trigonometry. It’s too hard. I’m not cut out for it. So I’m going to drop the class.”

No, you didn’t. Why? Because you just started the class. Of course you don’t understand trigonometry. You need to learn it.

Same with the piano. After a week of lessons you can’t play Beethoven. You need to learn the notes of the white keys and black keys and learn scales, etc.

Practice is required to get good at anything

It’s the same with tennis, golf, French, 17th century Dutch painting, welding and every other subject under the sun. We commit some level of effort to practicing and studying these things and then we get better.

In fact, I defy anybody to challenge me on this point: If on day one you commit to practicing any of the above, you will be more proficient at it on day 365. And I don’t even mean giving your whole life to it. Giving some modest level of effort to anything will result in you getting better at anything.

It is the exact same way with spiritual work.

How practice works with the spiritual path

To illustrate why, let’s dive in by identifying three discrete areas of spiritual work — meditation, mindfulness and letting go — and see how this plays out.

Meditation: This is the most glaring example of people giving up early because they think they’re just not cut out for it. They get started and the thoughts swirl around like leaves in a Kansas tornado.

If this frustration happened to a budding piano player, they’d be told to stay with the basics — just be patient and keep learning your notes.

With meditation, it’s the same thing. Stick with the basics, which would be simply following something like breathing or a guided body scan meditation and when that tornado of thoughts invades, just do your best to notice them, nonjudgmentally, and return attention to the present moment.

AND BE PATIENT.

Patience is the key to learning anything, isn’t it? It’s being okay with NOT being proficient at whatever your pursuing. But staying with it and trusting in the learning process. So it is with meditation.

Mindfulness: You’re trying to be more present throughout your days, but keep finding that you get lost in your head all the time. You drive home from a tough day at work and realize you were so stuck in your mind that you can’t remember anything from your thirty minute drive.

That’s okay! You just stay patient and keep practicing. With mindfulness that mostly means being as vigilant as we can with becoming aware as quickly as possible when we’re drifting off into thought. And then bringing our attention back to the car, our work desk or the conversation we’re having with our five year old daughter.

Letting go: I’ve written extensively about the importance of letting go of our egoic selves when our buttons get pushed. And especially when we’re just starting out on this, it is incredibly difficult. Why? Because our buttons have been pushed every single day, for decades for most of us, and we have reacted by diving in and fighting, arguing, retaliating, stewing, etc.

In other words, reacting that way is so normal that it’s hard to even become aware that we’re doing it. So what does it take to get better at it?

PRACTICE.

Just like the piano, tennis and French, the more we practice, the better we’ll get at letting go.

As with mindfulness, the key lies in using our will to become aware when our buttons have been pushed. Because we can’t let go of something if we aren’t conscious that it has arisen.

Commitment is the indispensable piece

Finally, for spiritual work, and every other endeavor, there is one underlying necessity for success: Commitment. If you want to become a great piano player it’s going to require that you commit to practicing a lot.

Making progress on the spiritual path is no different. It takes commitment.

The only thing that differentiates spiritual work from piano, tennis and all the others is that spiritual work is more valuable than any of the others. And it’s not even close.

Spiritual work makes us better at everything

Why? Because the benefits of this work, in the form of greater inner peace, more compassion for others and accessing the power and genius inside all of us that makes us better tennis players, piano players and everything else, make us better human beings in every way.

So pursue your spiritual work as you would anything else: commit to it, practice and be patient. You, your family and everybody in your life will be better for it.

I think you know what I mean by the ‘blahs.’ That sustained feeling of low energy and general malaise.

I’m not talking about full-blown depression. I’ve been there and done that and that has a whole different set of characteristics and treatments. No, this is about that multi-day period when you just feel flat.

And I just weathered one. It lasted about a week. Again, the best word to describe it was feeling flat.

Sometimes there are definite culprits that cause these periods and sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on the ‘why’ of it all. Could be your biorhythms are off, hormones are raging, coming down with a cold, a change in weather…all kinds of things happen that can throw us off for days at a time. It’s part of life.

Five trips, one exhausted guy

In my case, I think it was taking five trips in two months — from August through early October. One to Florida and two each to Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.

And in case you haven’t done it yet, traveling during COVID is not fun. I personally hate wearing a mask for hours on end. It induces a certain kind of exhaustion and fatigue.

Also contributing was the psycho-spiritual stress and strain of playing two tennis tournaments, something I wrote about in a recent article (here’s the link).

A low energy week

How did the blahs specifically manifest in my particular situation? First was the general lack of energy. I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. Working out was a chore.

And doing what I’m doing now, writing, was brutal. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block as much as it was just not having any gas in the tank energy-wise. I barely got one article written.

And then it passed. This article is about what I did to get it to pass.

And the answer might seem strange: I didn’t do anything. Which is the point.

What did I not do? I didn’t sit around and analyze every possible angle of what might be going on. I didn’t break out a yellow legal pad and try to decipher everything I was feeling…or not feeling.

Don’t fight your feelings

Most important, I didn’t fight with how I was feeling. I didn’t complain incessantly, “Boy, I feel lousy. Ughh. I hate this. I wish it would just go away.” In other words, I didn’t engage with those feelings of malaise.

I did actually do one thing: I leaned away and watched those feelings. That’s it. I watched. And inherent in watching is doing so nonjudgmentally. You just watch and say to yourself, “Okay. I’m feeling lackluster. And that’s it. End of story.”

The Buddha is said to have called this dynamic first dart, second dart. The pain caused by the first dart, in my case just feeling flat, happens in life. In all kinds of ways. Breakups, firings, the blahs and on and on.

But what most humans do is add on the pain of a second dart, usually in the form of creating some egoic, dramatic story about the first dart pain. That pain is wholly self-inflicted, causes massive amounts of suffering and is totally unnecessary. That’s the bad news.

Keeping the second darts at bay

The good news is that we have the capability of stopping second dart pain in its tracks. Which is exactly what I did this past week. I didn’t create any stories about feeling lackluster. I just watched it. And it passed, a lot faster and with less pain than if I had breathed life into it by complaining about it and feeling sorry for myself, etc.

It needs to be said that one thing all of this requires is patience. Our egoic minds would love to chime in and say, “Alright, we’ve done this watch thing for two days and I still feel like crap. That’s enough. Time to dive in and solve this sucker!” Don’t succumb.

Another way of looking at this is through Eckhart Tolle’s beautiful quote:

“You are the sky. The clouds are what happens, what comes and goes.”

When we go through one of these blah periods, it’s incredibly helpful to just visualize any troubling feelings as clouds passing below you, the sky. Don’t engage with or fight with those clouds. Just let them pass through. Because if you simply watch those clouds, they will pass.

In this day and age where everything has to have a solution, this concept of ‘just watch and let the clouds pass’ may seem counterintuitive. But it’s not.

Why this works

It works. Why? Because when we simply watch, we allow forces far more powerful than our egoic minds to do the work. What it comes down to is getting ourselves out of the way.

Some people would say that ‘getting ourselves out of the way’ is the path to living in accord with the Tao. Or living with the flow of life. Or living according to God’s will.

For our purposes, I’m not concerned with how it is characterized. I just know that it works, which is why I share it with you.

I hope you’ll give this attention. It is so worth working on.

Rumi is one of those handful of people throughout human history who was both deeply wise AND remarkably eloquent in expressing that wisdom in his writings. A 13th century Persian poet who lived most of his life in what is now modern day Turkey, Rumi was a Muslim but his works had, and have, universal appeal and were celebrated by Muslims, Christians, Jews and those of virtually all spiritual traditions.

The following snippets from his writings reveal Rumi’s rare combination of wisdom and facility with language. We can all use these gems to advance us on the spiritual path.

1. “Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”So beautiful. This one strikes at the heart of spirituality. That we find our answers in the mystery of silence. It reminds me of Emerson’s assertion that he preferred the silence of the church BEFORE the preacher started preaching.

So many search for meaning and answers in the opposite of silence — words, language, thinking — all of which are products of our inherently fallible minds. Rumi hits the nail squarely on the head by saying that what flows from our minds is a poor translation of the language of God.

It’s also why meditation and yes prayer are so indispensable for those traveling the path for they help us quiet the mind, which improves our ability to communicate in that silent language with God, the Divine, the Universe…

2. “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others.Unfold your own myth.”

I take Rumi’s words here as an exhortation to all of us to blaze our own trails and, specifically, to explore our creative sides. The Universe wants that from us — to create things that only we, with our wholly unique set of characteristics, can create.

Some of that will come in the form of traditional creativity — writing articles, books, songs; singing, acting, painting, sculpting, etc. But don’t think that if you have no interest or talent in the above that you can’t exercise your creativity.

You can be creative in generating cool ideas for how to improve something at work. A better way of selling cars or ads. Or if you’re an assistant to somebody, figuring out a more efficient system for your boss. That’s creativity, too.

I like to think of creativity, which for me has come mostly in the form of writing, as “If I didn’t write this or do that, it never would have happened.” You literally create something where nothing existed before. An idea, an article, a painting. Doesn’t matter. I continually find it thoroughly invigorating to create something out of nothing.

As one of the most gifted creators who ever breathed, Rumi knew this as well as anyone.

3.“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.”

Yes! Sing to your heart’s content, whether you’re alone or in a group of acquaintances…or strangers. Who cares? Same with dancing. Let it fly.

Why? Because when we’re in that zone when we’re singing, dancing or whatever type of performing it may be, God/the Universe/the Divine Creator/Allah/Yahweh, (or whatever your belief system) is expressing itself through us. That’s why it feels so good. We’re literally in sync with the Universe when we let it fly and ‘sing like the birds sing.’

4.“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

This expresses beautifully the spiritual concept that the path to contentment in all matters of life, including love, lies within us. We don’t ‘seek for love,’ or anything else, by looking out to the world.

The barriers within ourselves that Rumi references are literally synonymous with the egoic baggage I’ve written about so often. He urges us not to look for that perfect mate ‘out there,’ but rather to let go of those samskaras we have held onto that prevent us from finding the right person. The fact that he wrote this over 700 years ago shows that Rumi truly was a genius who was light years ahead of his time.

The takeaway

Rumi was as wise as anybody. Ever. So if you’re serious about your trek on the spiritual path, it would be well worth your time to read his works. They are insightful, powerful and beautiful.

A fantastic starter book on Rumi is The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. Here is the Amazon link.

There are two basic ways that people can lead their lives, one of which almost everybody does and another that very few do. The former leads to a life of frustration while the latter offers the only path to a life of peace and contentment.

Bold assertions? Absolutely. An accurate assessment? Yes. Let’s get this party started.

Looking outside for happiness

Life path number one involves looking out to the world to do and get things we think will make us feel happy inside. Let’s call this the external world strategy.

How this strategy operates will sound familiar because most people live this way. In order to make ourselves feel good inside we:

-Go out for a great meal, smoke a Cuban cigar, drink a fancy bottle of wine, etc…

-Search for the perfect boyfriend/girlfriend.

-Word hard in order to make enough money to buy a beautiful house, a fancy car and go on exotic vacations.

The examples are endless, but you get the drift. It’s all about looking outside yourself to make your insides feel good. The problem? It doesn’t work.

The dream boyfriend turns into a nightmare

It can for a while. You finally get that boyfriend and you’re hitting on all cylinders for a while…Then he starts putting you down or pressing some other of your inner buttons and eventually it’s, “Jeez, my life was way better when I was single.”

Or you get all excited about that new car that smells great and has a bunch of cool features…Then a few weeks later you notice that you drove around town doing errands for a few hours and didn’t even think once about how cool your car is.

The goal is good

The goal with this strategy is a good one: We want to feel good inside. But it’s thoroughly ineffective. We all know this. How many people do you know who are constantly in search of the next cool thing, the next great relationship, etc., that experience sustained peace and fulfillment in their lives?

So what does work?

Fine, so if this ‘looking out to the world to make us happy’ strategy doesn’t work, what does?

I’ll answer that question by asking another: If the goal is to feel good inside, why not just go directly to working on our insides? Why bother dealing with the uncertain, frustrating nature of the external world when we can just bypass that and go straight to working on our insides?

So there’s the answer. The only life strategy that works is one that focuses our energies on getting our inner houses in order. Because as Ralph Waldo Emerson so eloquently wrote:

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

And as I’ve written many times, most of that inner work centers on letting go of our egoic selves, aka the baggage we’ve accumulated and held onto since we were kids and into adulthood.

How to do this? When one of our egoic buttons is pushed we: 1. Notice the feeling; 2. immediately relax inside; 3. Lean away and just watch the feeling. We don’t engage with it or tangle with it or resist it. We just watch it…and then let it go.

What else can we do to aid in this process of letting go? Therapy helps us to better understand the nature and origin of our egoic baggage. Meditating regularly and practicing mindfulness will also enhance the letting go process.

If you’re good inside you don’t need the outside

The long and the short of this is that when we do that inner work, which is the work of a lifetime, we ultimately end up at a place where we don’t need the external world to make us happy. We don’t need the mansion, the marriage, the high-profile job…Not that we won’t get those things. We just won’t need them to feel good inside.

Because when we clear away the baggage, the energy that was trapped releases so that it can flow up. The result is that we feel really good for no reason other than we’re able to be present in our moments enjoying, as Joseph Campbell called it, the experience of being alive.

The takeaway

Fine, so most people look out to the world for their happiness and it doesn’t work. What can we do about that?

I have two things I would love anybody reading this to do.

First, ask yourself two questions:

Question 1: Do you mostly look to the outside world to make yourself happy inside?

Question 2: If you answered ‘yes,’ is this approach working for you in your quest for peace and happiness?

Second, if you answered ‘yes’ to question 1 and ‘no’ to question 2, then at least consider making the paradigm shift from looking outside for your answers to looking within. How would one go about effectuating that shift? As I said earlier, there’s therapy, meditation, mindfulness and a whole host of other techniques and practices out there for diving inside and letting go of our baggage.

The bottom line on all of this? If looking out to the world for your happiness isn’t working, why not try something else? Common sense dictates giving the inside out strategy a concerted effort.

I’ll leave you with this: Imagine a life where your happiness didn’t depend on what the outside world was or wasn’t giving you.

Let that sink in…

I wrote recently about a hunk of egoic baggage I need to let go of — that being the need to satisfy my childhood need to be viewed as a winner. These days it rears its ugly head mainly in the area of winning senior tennis tournament matches.

I know. It’s ridiculous. But it’s real so I need to deal with it. And I have been.

I played in two tournaments in the past month. In both, the same old “stuff” came up in the form of free-floating anxiety in the weeks, days and mornings before my matches.

Notice, relax, watch, let go

How did I deal with this? By using the Mickey Singer technique for letting go of our egoic baggage. When the queasy, nervous feeling arose, I noticed it, immediately relaxed and then just watched it. I didn’t engage with it or tangle with it or resist it. I just watched it…and then let it go.

This piece is about the results of doing this. Last weekend I played the finals of my club championship in Chevy Chase, Maryland. After lots of noticing and letting go in the previous weeks, I found that I wasn’t excessively nervous the morning of the match.

Part of that letting go seems to have resulted in not caring as much about the result. Apparently, some of that energy that I had kept trapped inside all those years got released.

During the match, I practiced what I wrote about in a recent article, which is focusing solely on staying relaxed. And that worked as I played reasonably well.

The killer fire doused

The problem was that I didn’t have that killer fire inside spurring me on. I had a fascinating duel going on inside me throughout the match. My old, egoic side kept urging me to toughen up and fight harder. But another, now stronger, part of me said no, just play.

It’s hard to describe if you haven’t competed in something like tennis. The bottom line is that my fire to win wasn’t there. And guess what? I liked that. Why? Because I know, on a deep level, that that fire to win doesn’t come from a healthy place. It comes from a place of pure ego.

I lost and was cool with it

By the way, I lost the match in two sets to a very good, young player who I would have a tough time beating under the most optimum of circumstances. And I definitely tried. I ran down every ball and gave it everything I had.

But again, there’s this different gear that is reached when that fire is blazing inside. And I didn’t have that fire and didn’t reach that gear.

And how did I feel afterward? Depressed and bummed out that I lost? No. The most interesting reaction I had the rest of the day and into the next day was this: I asked myself how I would feel if I had won the match. And I can say with the utmost sincerity and honesty that the answer was…I would’ve felt the same. There was no inner “Damn, I wished I won that match. That would’ve been so amazing! Ugh, it’s just so frustrating and awful to lose!”

The whole thing is positive

So where does all this lead? To a hugely positive place. Because I think I made major headway in letting go of this egoic, tennis baggage that has been stuck inside me for several decades.

It feels good to let go of that obsessional drive to win. Why? Because an obsessional drive to win isn’t healthy. We’ll see how all this goes in the weeks and months ahead. Hopefully, in my next tournament I’ll feel even less of those nervous pangs before matches. That will be the proof that I’ve cleared away some of that egoic energy.

The focus from now going forward in tennis and any other endeavor I undertake will be on putting forth my best effort. Getting the most out of me. Period. It’s the way prescribed by the Tao te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita. No obsession with outcomes. Just exerting effort.

The takeaway

What does this mean for you? I hope you’ll look at my tennis example as proof that letting go can work.

And that you’ll then ask yourself what area or areas you may want to work on letting go of. We all have these hunks of egoic baggage that are stuck in our lower selves, waiting to be freed so that energy can flow up.

What are yours? Pick just one and commit to becoming aware when that egoic energy is stirred. Then relax with it…and let it go. Again and again and again. It’s the most important work we can do.

Thich Nhat Hanh (TNH) is a 94 year old Vietnamese Buddhist monk who is one of my all-time favorite human beings. He’s been a top spiritual leader on planet earth for the past fifty years with much of his work centered on practicing mindfulness.

Here’s how long he has been on the spiritual world stage: Martin Luther King nominated him for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize for TNH’s efforts during the Vietnam War.

A half day is doable

In my favorite book of his, The Miracle of Mindfulness, TNH offers a suggestion for how to devote an entire day to mindfulness. I’m actually going to truncate that to a half day because I know many of you don’t have the time or the wherewithal to do a full day. A half day is doable for most. Let’s call it the time from waking up through eating lunch.

First, he recommends doing this on a weekend, so pick a Saturday or Sunday when you have nothing on your schedule the first half of the day. He suggests staying silent as much as possible.

When you wake up on the appointed day, start things off by taking some long, slow, conscious breaths. At least ten of them. One cool thing he adds is to maintain a half-smile through these breaths and in your subsequent activities.

Get up slowly

When you’re ready to get out of bed, TNH says to do so very slowly and deliberately. Try not to jump out of bed and “attack the day” as you may normally do.

Then do your normal morning routine. But as you brush your teeth and wash your face, etc., do so slowly and mindfully. No rushing! If there’s one consistent theme from TNH on your mindful day it is to go slowly and mindfully, without rushing.

Most of you will love this next activity: TNH says to take a half hour bath. Everything slow and mindful. Stay close to your breathing while in the tub.

While doing the dishes, do the dishes

Next is something you may do anyway on a normal weekend morning, which is basic housework. Things like cleaning the dishes, dusting, scrubbing the kitchen floor, tidying up your bathroom and organizing your garage. The difference here is that TNH wants us to do this slowly and mindfully. Again, not doing anything to “get it done,” but rather being present and fully involved in each of those activities.

Then make yourself lunch. Don’t slap something together and wolf it down. Prepare the meal mindfully and then eat it mindfully. Chew slowly. Taste the food. Savor each bite.

I know many of you might be saying to yourselves, “Be mindful while scrubbing my kitchen floor? What the hell is that all about?” The answer is that it’s the core of mindfulness, which is about being present for the moments of our lives no matter what we’re doing. Sitting in your car at a red light. Brushing your teeth. Eating lunch. Working out. Everything.

The takeaway

The fact is that most of we mortal humans spend an inordinate chunk of our waking time lost in our thought-factory minds and NOT present for the moments that make up our lives. This half day of mindfulness put forth by Thich Nhat Hanh is a fantastic way of strengthening our ability to be present.

If you’re a single mom with four little kids, I get it, this could be tough to pull off. But maybe you could get your mom to watch the kids for a half day. Or your sister. Or maybe you go for what’s possible, which might just mean getting up early, doing your conscious breaths, brushing teeth, etc. and taking that thirty minute mindful bath.

Whatever you can do will be worth the planning and effort. Because what’s more important than getting better at being present for the moments of our lives?

If I’ve written it once, I’ve written it twenty times: Letting go of our egoic baggage is the linchpin for spiritual growth. We can meditate all day long for years, but if we don’t let go of our stuff, we’ll still live from a place of ego and never feel liberated.

It’s a huge help in letting go to identify what I call the “hunks” of baggage we all carry. In other words, the main areas where we need to focus our “letting go” energy.

Here are my three main hunks. My hope is that detailing mine will help you identify yours.

1. The need to be a “doer”

What do I mean by ‘doer?’ Feeling like I need to produce. The opposite would be lazy.

Not surprisingly, when I was a kid I developed a self-perception that I was lazy. Frankly, I was a pretty normal kid who liked to watch his television shows and play his sports. But my five older siblings were all super-active type A’s and my dad was a type A+ CEO of a Fortune 500 company. So compared to them, I was a lazy sloth.

That kind of thing sticks with people throughout adulthood. In my Washington career it manifested as compensating by trying to be the guy who was “on the ball.” Who always wrote stuff down. Never forgot to carry through on what I said I’d do. In my Hollywood writing career it was always hustling to come up with story ideas for the shows I worked on.

The lazy kid who loved TV

Now that I’m writing these articles it’s about doing my all to write at least eight articles a month, through good times and bad. That manifests in feeling something tugging at me most mornings, urging me to produce. To ‘do.’ To not be that lazy kid who loved nothing more than watching Bonanza reruns every day after school.

And in fact, I’m battling this right now as I write this. How? I have a three hour layover in Minneapolis on my way from Wisconsin to California. So in furtherance of my ‘doer’ pathology, I figured I’d use my long layover to write an article. So here I am, banging away on my computer in the food court among a sea of masked travelers.

I need to let that go. It’s just a bunch of energy stuck in my lower self (I literally feel it in my lower stomach area) that needs to be freed so it can go where it wants to go — which is up.

I’ve been working to become aware of this each morning, then relax and let it go. It’s a tricky balance I’m trying to achieve because I don’t want to not write. I just want to get to the point of writing in a more relaxed, healthy and unpressurized way. Any of you writers out there will understand how hard this can be.

2. The need to be viewed as a ‘winner,’ especially in tennis

I was a good athlete growing up. I was always “one of the best” in tennis, basketball, volleyball, track and even badminton (which I loved — what a fun sport). And it was a heck of a lot of fun.

The downside is that this became embedded inside me as a self-worth, ego thing. I’m a “winner” if I win, and a “loser” if I lose. Perfectly normal, but baggage is baggage. And I have a lot of it in this area.

Dealing with tennis butterflies

These days it comes out almost exclusively in the area of tennis where I still play in senior and club tournaments. It manifests in a feeling of nervousness in the weeks, days, hours and minutes before my matches. It’s that queasy, uneasy feeling of free-floating butterflies that fly in and out of my stomach as they please.

A big part of me gets mad at myself that this happens. I’m 57 and still sweating out playing competitive tennis matches? Objectively speaking, it’s absurd.

Except that it makes absolute sense that I get nervous. Why? Because all of that egoic junk that I stored in the sports area as a kid is still there.

Let it go or it ain’t going anywhere

In fact, this one example is a valuable data point for proving what spiritual teachers like Mickey Singer propound: That we store all kinds of egoic baggage (samskaras in Sanskrit) inside us from our earliest days and unless we consciously let go of them they will remain there until the day we die.

What to do? I’ve worked hard lately on letting go of this tennis/winner baggage. I did a reasonably good job of it in a tournament recently (you can read about that experience here).

Now I’m dealing with it in a tournament I’m in in Maryland this weekend. It’s the finals match of a club tournament against a guy (kid?) who’s half my age. As my “stuff” has been coming up the past few days, I’ve worked hard to notice it, relax and then let it go.

3. Worrying

I know what you’re thinking. Worrying? Everybody worries. True. But I grew up a massive worrier so it’s a bigger “hunk” for me than most.

I was born a sensitive kid so stuff got to me more than others. One way that sensitivity manifested was worrying about lots of things. Like whether my mom would die in a car accident on her many sojourns up to Los Angeles (fifty miles from our house in Newport Beach) with my dad for business events.

In high school it was worrying about whether I’d get into a “suitable” college, in a family where my older siblings had already gone to the likes of Harvard, Stanford and Wellesley. Or worrying about whether a relationship was going to work out.

In my current life, it comes out in worrying about my kids. I don’t even have much to worry about with them, but I do it nonetheless. So I’m doing my best to notice when I’m worrying about one of them and then asking whether it’s warranted. Usually, it isn’t. I wrote a whole piece about this that you can find here.

The things we carry

As you can see, most of this egoic baggage/hunk stuff comes down to psychotherapy 101. It’s the big things that happened to us while growing up that we haven’t let go of and that, therefore, still adversely affect us in adulthood.

Most of us have one core issue. Mine, because of my family situation, was about doing/succeeding/winning.

What is yours? Weight and body image? Did your dad always tell you that you were dumb so you struggle with feeling inadequate, unintelligent? Maybe you grew up poor so you constantly worry about money?

The takeaway

Whatever it is, give this a shot. Try and identify your core issue (it’s probably obvious). Then maybe two or three more areas where you store egoic baggage. Stick with the main ones.

Then practice becoming aware when those buttons get pushed. And when they do, immediately relax. Then let them go. Take your hands off the rocks in the stream and watch the rocks flow away, as I wrote in this recent article.

It’s about letting go of yourself and thereby cleaning up your inner house. You’re the one who has to live in there. Wouldn’t it be nice to make it as peaceful and comfortable as possible?

My wife and I lived in Paris for two months back in 2006. She had just left a stressful job, and I was writing a screenplay about Teddy Roosevelt so we figured, I can write anywhere so why not Paris?

We lived in a tiny, perfect, one-bedroom apartment in the Latin Quarter, a five minute walk to Notre Dame and about two hundred yards down from the Pantheon where Voltaire, Victor Hugo (Les Miserables), and Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers) are buried, among other French luminaries.

Writing in Paris

We had the time of our lives. I’d get up early, get an exquisite espresso and croissant and then write all morning. My wife would sleep late most mornings, trying to catch up on ten straight years of working her butt off at the White House, on Capitol Hill and for the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers, among other of her employers.

It worked perfectly because once she got up, I’d be finished writing and we’d head off to explore Paris. One day it was the Picasso Museum. The next day the Rodin or the Louvre or Montmartre…We walked everywhere. And of course, interspersed through it all were sublime meals.

And then…We came home. And quickly missed Paris. But in the ensuing years, and two more trips to the City of Lights, we have learned how to bring Paris back with us. Here are three ideas.

1. Dinner at home

FOOD: The best part about living in an apartment was that we didn’t go out for every meal. In fact, our favorite nights were when we shopped for our food at the local outdoor markets and brought it back. Everything we bought and ate is doable in most locales.

What to get? First, of course, is a baguette. If you have a local bakery that makes them fresh, do that. If not, most grocery stores these days have decent baguettes.

Second, buy some good cheese. Don’t skimp here and get Velveeta. We love brie and soft cheeses. But get whatever floats your fromage boat.

Third, buy a dozen oysters.

Fourth, buy some lettuce and fixins and make your favorite salad, with your go-to dressing.

Fifth, dessert! Go to your local bakery or grocery store and see if you can find macarons, chocolate mousse or an éclair. Don’t buy a huge amount. Why? See below.

Finally, get a bottle of wine. Champagne goes great with oysters as does Chardonnay and sauvignon blanc. If you want to really go hard-core authentic, buy a bottle of Sancerre, which is where the premier sauvignon blanc comes from in France. If you don’t drink, maybe just try some Perrier with lime.

The key to this dinner is keeping things light. Notice I don’t have a main course here of fish, meat or pasta. This is what the French often do. It’s also what my wife and I did when we were there. We had plenty to eat, but never felt absolutely stuffed at the end of the night.

MUSIC: This is crucial to bringing Paris home. Listen to some cool French music. My wife and I listened to the soundtrack of the Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton film Something’s Gotta Give all the time during our trip. The film’s climax is in Paris and the soundtrack has fantastic songs by Louis Armstrong, Eartha Kitt, Charles Trenet and other French artists. Most people have Spotify, Pandora or Amazon music these days and you can find this album and other French greats like Edith Piaf there.

FILMS: If you really want to go all out, after dinner watch a Paris-based film like Midnight in Paris, Moulin Rouge, Amelie, An American in Paris, Charade or Before Sunset.

FLOWERS: Finally, consider buying flowers for your Paris night at home. Not a massive bouquet with twelve different kinds of flowers. Think simple and elegant, like the French. Half a dozen yellow tulips hits just the right note.

2. Go to a café

This one is tres simple. Most cities and towns have a café or coffee shop. Head to your favorite one, preferably on a weekend when you won’t be rushed.

Sit outside, if possible, and weather permitting. Order an espresso or your favorite coffee drink. And get a pain au chocolat (chocolate croissant) or regular croissant if that’s your fancy.

And then…

Just sit. Relax. Don’t gobble everything down as you would a quarter-pounder with cheese. Take your time. Watch the world go by. Maybe intersperse that with reading a book.

This is what the French do. Instead of rushing and stuffing stuff down their throats, they savor. It’s a mindful way of being.

3. Go out to dinner at a French restaurant

Actually, I recommend a bistro over an expensive French restaurant. Bistros normally serve the traditional dishes that people throughout France eat at home.

What are these dishes? Coq au vin (chicken cooked in wine), cassoulet (a hearty stew of white beans, sausage and pork — it’s amazing!), sole meuniere (sole in a butter and lemon sauce) and duck confit (duck legs cooked in duck fat) to name a few of the can’t-miss options.

For dessert, try a chocolate souffle. Or if you really want to live on the decadent edge, order vanilla ice cream profiteroles topped with chocolate sauce.

Again, the mantra here is go slow. Don’t rush the meal. Savor is the name of the game.

Two final points before wrapping up:

Try not to dress slapdash

First, dress casually elegant for all three of the above. Try not to wear shorts and flip flops to dinner at home or the café. I know this may sound presumptuous to offer sartorial advice, but the French generally don’t wear leggings or sweats when they head out.

This is most true with the way French women comport themselves. They apply minimal makeup and don simple outfits — well-fitting jeans, flats, a white tee-shirt, an unflashy sweater, and a light scarf. Maybe a bracelet or a necklace. Probably not both.

For men, just a decent pair of pants and a polo or button down shirt. Nothing too flashy.

In the end, it’s about showing respect for yourself and the meal/experience you’re partaking in. And it’ll enhance the Parisian vibe.

Walk like you’re in Paris

Second, after your dinner at home, café stop or dinner out, go for a walk. My wife and I walked miles every day when in Paris. It’s good for the heart, good for the brain and, most important, good for the soul.

Bonne chance, mes amis.