Meditation

The fun and excitement I’ve garnered playing tennis, basketball, running, volleyball and golf have been a blessing for as long as I can remember.

But far more significant than the fun and excitement have been the life lessons sports have taught me. And the good news is, you don’t have to be Michael Jordan to reap these benefits. Ordinary athletic skill will do.

Look no further than my hand-eye coordination-challenged older brother Andy, who’s butt I kicked when we were kids in tennis, basketball, ping-pong…you name it. He responded to these childhood shellackings by taking up distance running in high school where he destroyed me and everyone else. He eventually became a star of the Harvard cross-country team and ran a 29:30 10K road race. But I digress…

Back to the question at hand. What are these crucial life lessons we can all learn by playing sports?

1. Experiencing the genius within

The most direct experiences I’ve had with the brilliant, mysterious, omnipotent entity inside me, something we ALL possess, have come through sports. There have been countless times playing tennis, to which I devoted the lion’s share of my athletic attention, where I’ve hit a great shot and then immediately wondered, “How the heck did I do that?” Here’s how. Because my mind had precisely NOTHING to do with hitting any of those great shots. It was 100% inner instinct. “I” had nothing to do with it.

The lesson? I learned firsthand that getting “myself” out of the way was critical to success, which, of course, is critical to succeeding at just about anything. Whether you’re a songwriter, a pianist, or a salesman, the key to maximizing your performance is to get your mind out of the way and let your inner genius do the work. Sports provide the ideal proving ground for experiencing and realizing this dynamic.

2. Conquering fear of failure

I tell my kids all the time: The only way you can become a winner is to learn to be okay with losing/failing. The irony is that people choke in pressure situations because they’re afraid of failing.

I tell my kids that when Michael Jordan demanded the ball to take the final shot, the last thing on his mind was, “Man, I better make this or everybody’s going to think I’m a big loser!” To be honest, the greats like Jordan and Tiger Woods don’t think anything when the pressure’s on (see #1 above). The bottom line is, the best athletes don’t give a hoot when anybody thinks of them.

The lesson here is obvious: Sports give us an actual playing field for working on any fear of failure we may have in other parts of our lives. “I’m not going to go for that promotion because if I don’t get it I’ll look like a big loser.” No. You just go for it! And see what happens.

For those of you with kids, this might be THE most important reason to steer them into some kind of athletic endeavor. Sports will help them, if you and others counsel them properly, to develop a thick skin when it comes to not worrying about what others think of them. I can’t think of too many things more important for kids to learn than that.

3. Learning to emphasize process over outcome

I’ve noticed in the last several years that most great athletes emphasize process over outcome. What does that mean? It means they put their focus on doing the work (process) and not on winning the Super Bowl/Wimbledon/Masters (outcome). All of their energies go to hitting the weight room, jumping rope, hitting thousands of practice golf shots, serving buckets of tennis balls, etc.

A quintessential example of this was what LSU football’s wide receivers did in the summer of 2019. Jamarr Chase, Justin Jefferson and Terrace Marshall each caught 10,000 passes that summer. 10,000! What happened in the 2019 season? LSU went 15–0, won the national championship and that team is considered by many to be the best in the history of college football. Chase, Jefferson and Marshall combined for 51 touchdowns, which is absolutely unheard of. How did they pull it off? By focusing on process over outcome.

So if you’re taking up golf, don’t focus on breaking 100. Focus on practicing your putting. And your short chip shots. And developing a consistent swing with your driver. Do all those things and you’ll eventually break 100.

Again, the lessons in life are obvious. If you’re a writer on Medium, don’t constantly check your reader stats or worry about achieving some arbitrary number of followers. Put ALL of your energy into writing the best stuff you can and then let the rest take care of itself.

This is another great one for the kids. Teaching them, through sports, to focus on the work and not the outcome would pay them dividends throughout their lives.

4. Developing discipline

While running on the cross-country team in high school, I had to get up at 6 a.m. when it was dark and cold to get to school by 6:30 for our morning workout. It was brutal. Truth be told, I didn’t make it every morning. But I did most of the time. And it proved to be incredibly valuable throughout my life.

Because what is discipline? My definition is simple: Getting yourself to do something you don’t feel like doing, but that is good for you.

As for our lives, discipline is required in myriad areas. Everything from getting into the office at the crack of dawn to prep for that crucial client presentation to cracking down on the carbs and sugar because you’re having troubling fitting into your jeans.

The takeaway

Playing sports is fun and the exercise is great for our physical and, more important for me, mental health. Sports’ help in developing valuable life skills makes this a no-brainer.

So if you aren’t already playing a sport, give it a shot. Just about anybody of any age can play golf and even tennis.

And if you have kids, get them into a sport. It doesn’t have to be the center of their lives. They can still do piano, acting or whatever else they’re into.

Because with good parental guidance (i.e., not pressuring them to be the next Tiger Woods), sports can teach your kids to not fear failure, help them develop discipline and favor process over outcome, all of which will serve them well in adulthood.

Maybe most valuable of all, though, sports will teach them that success in all endeavors comes when we get ourselves/minds out of the way and let the brilliant, conscious self within guide our ship.

There are myriad strategies for traveling the spiritual path. We can focus on nonattachment. Or impermanence. On not clinging or resisting. On not wanting or fearing. We can emphasize letting go. Or being present. And others, I’m sure.

But whatever they are, they all seek to achieve the same thing: Shedding our conditioned, egoic, mind-dominating selves. The more we shed, the more awakened and conscious we become. This manifests as an inward feeling of peace and an outward flow of love and compassion toward others.

Mickey Singer gets it right

My favorite among the above is Mickey Singer’s focus on letting go of our conditioned selves. He teaches that we all have good and bad experiences as kids and adults. The problem is that instead of experiencing and then letting these things go, we hold onto them. The massive collection of all this emotional baggage is another way of describing this egoic self.

So Singer teaches that the point of our lives is to consistently and persistently let go of this baggage/self. How? Each time we notice that one of our buttons has been pushed, i.e., we feel our ego rearing its ugly head, we immediately relax. All over. Then we let go of that feeling. I like to visualize a small bubble of emotion traveling from my stomach up and out of my head.

The previous two paragraphs sum up the one and only course Mickey Singer ever created. It consisted of eight fantastic, mesmerizing hours of talks (you can find it at soundstrue.com).

My letter to Mickey

I was so moved by the course that I wrote Singer a letter thanking him for it. But my letter also contained a suggestion. Something I thought he should emphasize more than he did. What is that suggestion?

Well, it has to do with one of the three steps in his technique which are: 1. notice 2. relax 3. let go. And the winner is…

NOTICE.

In my letter, I urged Mickey to place more emphasis on people noticing when a piece of emotional baggage (which he calls the Sanskrit word samskara) has arisen. Why does that need more emphasis?

Our emotional buttons are like water to fish

Because our buttons, both big and small, get pushed every single day. And this has happened every day for decades for many of us. The point being that when it has been such a “normal” part of our lives for so long, it takes extra conscientiousness to notice when these feelings come up. It’s like telling a fish to notice the water around it!

So the first thing we need to do is to become extra vigilant about noticing when our “stuff” comes up. But there’s something we need to do before we even notice. And that’s the focus of this piece.

What is that? It’s something practical and commonsense oriented.

We need to think about the main triggers in our lives that stir up our insides.

We want to think of the subjects or areas that cause us the most grief and then be on the lookout for when those things come up in the day.

Here are my own examples. No judgment, please. (Come to think of it — check out my article from a year ago about why judging isn’t good for anybody!)

1. The feeling of pressure I get, mainly in the morning, to produce articles, which, along with teaching online meditation and mindfulness classes, is my main job these days. This goes to my core issue of feeling like I need to be a traditional “success,” mostly because my five older siblings (I’m the youngest) were all hard-charging Harvard and Stanford types. It’s the one major piece of baggage I most need and want to let go of.

2. Related to #1 is the impulse to check my Medium reading statistics and ponder how much money I’ll make in any given month.

3. I get uptight, cranky and downright angry when my kids fight with each other or just make a ton of noise.

4. When my wife says something to me that is meant to get a rise out of me. “Sorry I’m so crazed, but I have a REAL job unlike somebody else around here…” That kind of thing.

5. Hitting red lights consistently raises my ire and is something I work on just about every day.

Write yours down. And don’t write a list of twenty things. Try for a top five. That way you’ll be better able to remember them when they come up.

All of this is in the service of buttressing our ability to notice when our buttons get pushed. Because we can’t relax and let go of our baggage unless we notice it has reared its ugly head.

Letting go is the whole ballgame

I’ll close by reiterating something I’ve written many times before: Letting go of our baggage is the indispensable key to attaining peace, happiness, enlightenment, nirvana…whatever your version of the spiritual endgame is. We can take every class, read every book, listen to every talk, meditate for 10,000 hours and spend 25 years in an ashram, but if we don’t let go of ourselves, we’ll never find that pot at the end of the spiritual rainbow.

It’s hard work and it takes a ton of commitment. But there’s no more important work that we humans can do.

A few months after we got married, my wife and I moved to Paris for two months. 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? And off we went.

We rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the Latin Quarter, 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.

Our life was idyllic. I’d wake up early, get an espresso and a croissant, then come back and write all morning. Steph, who had worked her buns off in Washington, D.C. at the White House and on Capitol Hill, then in Los Angeles for the Dodgers baseball team, basically caught up on ten years of lost sleep.

Our Paris life

She’d get up around the time I finished writing and we’d head out for the rest of the day. One day it was the Pompidou. The next was the Picasso Museum. The next it was Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur. We took a weekend trip to the Loire Valley, where we visited some wine caves and the opulent castles of Chenonceau and Chambord.

Many a night we’d have a bottle of wine, fantastic cheese, a baguette, and a simple salad for dinner (all bought at sublime French outdoor markets), followed by listening to the Something’s Gotta Give soundtrack and an often bruising game of Scrabble. And by bruising, I literally mean bruising, as Steph more than once hurled one of those wooden tablet holders at my head after I jokingly (she says cruelly) rubbed it in after executing a devastating triple word score.

Zoo revenge

She got back at me one night when she came from behind at the very end to beat me with a triple word score using ‘zoo.’ A half-hour later we’re sitting in bed pondering what to do the next day and she says, “Oh, I don’t know. How about we go to the… ZOO!!!!” Touche, mon ami.

I was so enraptured with the French and their lifestyle that I later wrote a television pilot script called Expats, about four young professional Americans living and working in Paris. The central theme of the show was Americans learning about their “American-ness” (work, work, work, rush, rush, rush) by experiencing the French way of life. Amazon bought the script, but alas, the show never made it to a television near you.

Which is all a long (long) way of introducing the four French habits and customs that the rest of us would do well to emulate.

1. Enjoying simple moments

The French don’t need to go to a U2 concert or a World Cup soccer game to have a satisfying experience. They are happy to sit at an outdoor café, nursing an espresso or glass of Chablis, content to merely take in the sights and sounds of the world passing by. Or they go out for a leisurely walk and do the same. This enjoyment and appreciation of the simple things in life is pretty close to the definition of mindfulness.

2. Moderation in eating, drinking, everything

When I wrote above about enjoying an espresso or glass of wine, notice I didn’t say four espressos and an entire bottle of wine. The French don’t do that. One person doesn’t devour an entire baguette. Or eat a dozen escargots. Or eat a five egg omelet stuffed with cheese and ham.

I love this about the French. They create the best food and wine on earth but don’t pig out like many of us in America. No 32 ounce Cokes, triple cheeseburgers with supersized fries, or scrambled eggs with sausage, toast, AND a mess of hash brown potatoes (something I’m guilty of ordering when out for breakfast).

They serve delicious, simple omelets with a small piece of bread and a green salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing. For dessert, they don’t eat a two-foot high, 50,000 calorie brownie sundae (hi Cheesecake Factory!) or a massive piece of apple pie accompanied by a pint of vanilla ice cream. No. They eat one or two exquisite macaroons or a smallish cup of chocolate mousse.

What this boils down to is moderation versus gluttony. Trust me, I’m no saint in this area. Just last night I ate too much at dinner, drank too much wine, and smoked a cigar and a half. And guess what? I didn’t feel great last night OR this morning.

I don’t think there’s any debating this point. The French have it right. Exercising a modicum of restraint when enjoying food, drink and even exercise and work is the healthy, mindful way to go.

3.Working to live, not living to work

For a large swath of France, a job is something that provides the means to do what I’ve already mentioned: Sit at a café watching the world go by, enjoy a baguette with a creamy brie or take your kids to Luxembourg Gardens for a puppet show.

One anecdote from our time living in Paris captures this sentiment of the French and their view of work. We saw three construction workers in our apartment courtyard several days in a row fixing something (I can’t remember what). One day as we headed out around noon, we saw these guys eating lunch. A brown bag with a ham sandwich and a thermos full of water? No.

These guys, in their dirt-laden, white, construction tee-shirts and overalls, had made a makeshift table, covered it with a WHITE TABLECLOTH (I kid you not), on top of which were a couple of baguettes, some cheese, charcuterie, and, drum roll please, a bottle of red wine!

My wife and I looked at each other and laughed in amazement. In a million years, would you ever see that anywhere in America?

There’s so much pressure in America to be seen as a success, which is chiefly gauged by how one is doing in their job/career. Hedge fund stud making millions on Wall Street? Great. Waiter at a local Italian trattoria in Brooklyn? Not so great. A-list screenwriter in Hollywood? Awesome. The receptionist at the agency that represents this screenwriter? Not so awesome.

Do they go overboard in France on the whole job thing? Probably. The unions have negotiated 35 hour work weeks and five weeks paid vacation and there seems to be a strike somewhere in France on any given day. But things seem to chug right along despite this as France boasts the seventh-largest economy in the world.

How we view our work is highly personal. But I think it’s safe to say that placing our job at the center of our universe, to the exclusion of family, relationships, and the basic enjoyment of life, does not typically result in a ticket to Happyland, something the French figured out long ago.

4. Simplicity and elegance in style

French-style can be summed up in two phrases. The first is less is more. The second: casual elegance. 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.

And they look amazing. And sexy. Why? Mainly because they don’t come off as trying too hard. Which radiates an aura of confidence.

Their apartments are spare and uncluttered. They place a premium on flowers, but not massive bouquets with seven different colored flowers. Half a dozen yellow tulips hits just the right note.

The takeaway

It’s worth giving this French way of life due consideration. Savor your food, while not eating too much of it. Eat slowly. Take your time with meals. Enjoy the simple moments in life. Don’t put all your eggs in the ‘job’ basket. Dress simply, but smartly.

C’est si bon.

Be present. Be in the moment. It’s what so many spiritual traditions offer up as the most important endeavor we humans can pursue. But entering the present moment is much easier said than done.

Why? Because it’s hard. Really hard. Why is it so hard? Because our minds, aka our egoic selves, constantly wrest our attention away from the present and into Thoughtlandia.

Eckhart’s solution to this conundrum offers two options for entering the moment: Going outside or inside.

Looking out the window

Outside means using our sense perceptions. For example, if you’re driving through brutal traffic, feeling uptight and want to ditch the thoughts and feelings of annoyance coursing through your veins by becoming present, try looking out your window and just noticing what is there. Where I live that might be a palm tree or a bright, blue sky (thank you, Southern California weather Gods!), or people walking along the sidewalk.

Looking at things in our immediate view fosters presence. Why? Because what’s in front of us and around us is what comprises our present moment.

Something I do at the grocery store now and then when I feel myself getting uptight about a long checkout line is I find five different objects in my view. Could be Kate Middleton on the cover of People, carrots, sign saying ’15 items or fewer,’ black leggings on woman in front of me and Snickers bars. It’s virtually impossible to do that AND be stuck in your head complaining about the long line.

Smelling and listening

Or enter the moment by using other senses like smelling a flower if one is nearby. Or listen to all the different sounds at the store, like the beeping of the items as the checker runs them through. Or the loudspeaker woman saying, “Price check on aisle 5 please. Also, I need security at checkout #3. Some guy in my line keeps looking around the store with this weird, contemplative look and it’s freaking me out!” I kid…

Accessing the present moment from the inside would be closing your eyes and feeling your inner body. Maybe feeling the tingling in your fingers. Or just sensing the energy/life force/aliveness moving throughout your body.

Using your breathing

Then of course there is the old standby of going to our breath. This is the one I find most useful when I’m in a conversation that is going south. Instead of letting my egoic mind steal my attention from the present and plunge it into the angry waters of my lower self, I immediately shift focus to my breathing. It’s amazingly effective.

I’m not going to lie and say I do this every time I get into an argument. My wife reads my articles and would post a response calling BS on me, which would be quite embarrassing! But when I am successful at shifting attention to my breathing, the result is always better than when I don’t.

So that’s two ways to go straight at entering the present moment. When do we want to be present? Gee, I don’t know…How about all the time. Unfortunately, unless you’re Eckhart, Thich Nhat Hanh or precious few others, that’s not going to happen.

Outside and inside is all we need to remember

But if you find yourself perturbed, anxious or just ruminative, try going either outside or inside to become present. Or if you’re watching a beautiful sunset and find your mind trying to commentate on the whole experience, go inside for a short while, then open your eyes and watch the beautiful scene from a place of nonconceptual presence.

That’s it. When you come to a time that you want to become present all you need to remember are two words: Outside and inside. Choose whichever one works for the particular situation you find yourself.

My last article explained why we humans think so many useless, involuntary thoughts that cause us so much misery. I laid the blame mostly on our obsolete brains, which aren’t much different than they were 200,000 years ago. Bottom line: We have hunter-gatherer brains that are poorly designed to handle the frenzied nature of the high-tech, busy-body world we live in.

I ended by stating that while it would take evolution a long time to correct this problem, there was some good news for humanity. Here it is.

Remember in the movie The Graduate when that boring corporate tool dad tries to dispense career advice to recent Harvard graduate Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman)?

“I have one word for you, Benjamin…Plastics!”

Well, my friends, I have one word for you. And that word is…

NEUROPLASTICITY.

Before I explain what neuroplasticity is and why it offers hope for mankind, a brief and rudimentary tutorial on the human brain is in order.

Three Layers

According to Paul MacLean’s triune brain theory, the human brain is composed of three layers, one built on top of the other, with the oldest (in terms of evolution) at the bottom and the newest on the top. The oldest (the reptilian brain) we inherited from reptiles. The next oldest (the limbic system) we inherited from mammals. And the most recent addition, and most advanced (the neocortex), we inherited from our primate brethren.

Our reptilian brain carries out the same types of basic functions that a lizard’s brain does. It’s been around for roughly half a billion years, first in fish, then on land with reptiles. The main components are the cerebellum and the brain stem, which take care of vital functions that we don’t need to think about. We just do them. Things like breathing and regulating heart rate and body temperature.

About 150 million years ago the middle layer of what would become the human brain came onto the scene: the limbic system. First appearing in small mammals, the limbic system’s most important function, for our purposes, is dealing with emotions, especially fear and anger. Its chief structures are the amygdala, the hippocampus and the hypothalamus.

The top layer is the neocortex, which began a dramatic expansion in the brains of primates some three million years ago. The neocortex is the most advanced part of our brains and has allowed us to develop language, conscious thought and abstract reasoning. It’s this part of our brain that most separates us from animals.

What’s crucial, for our purposes, is that these three layers of the brain don’t operate independently, but are in constant communication with each other through myriad interconnections. This is where things get interesting.

The Amygdala — Our Brain’s Worry Wart

To explain it, I’m going to go back to May of 2003 when I was a writer on the hit TV show The West Wing. Warner Bros. had fired our boss, Aaron Sorkin, and the rest of us were waiting to see whether the new emperor (John Wells) would turn his thumb up or down on us.

I’ll never forget the moment I got the call from my agent telling me that Emperor Wells had given me the thumb down. Upon hearing this news my brain went haywire, which sent the rest of my body into a tizzy. In order to explain what happened to me physiologically, I need to give you a primer on the above-mentioned amygdala.

Shaped like an almond (amygdala is the Greek word for almond), the amygdala is located deep within the brain and is responsible for our fight or flight responses. It evolved during our hunter-gatherer period to adapt to truly life or death situations, like seeing a saber-toothed tiger and running for your life.

Our obsolete amygdalae

One of the biggest problems we modern humans face is that our amygdalae still respond to many of our ordinary life problems as if we were about to be devoured by a hungry tiger. It’s one thing if a guy in a ski mask wielding a sawed-off shotgun bursts into a 7-Eleven while you’re pouring creamer into your coffee. In that situation, sure, your amygdalae have every right to shoot adrenaline to every corner of your body.

But it’s quite another to respond this way when…you get fired from The West Wing. Not consciously, but somewhere in my being I thought that losing this job was going to kill me.

Sound familiar? We all have these extreme overreactions to challenges life has thrown our way, but virtually none of them were actually life-threatening, were they?

The Neocortex — The Cool Cucumber

I no longer have this amygdala-gone-crazy, hyper-overreaction to bad career news or similar life curveballs. Why is that? The answer lies in this notion of the different brain regions communicating with each other.

The neocortex, being the advanced structure that it is, acts as an inhibitory influence on the more-primitive limbic system, specifically, the amygdala. Example: when you see something in your garden that looks like a rattlesnake, your immediate response comes from the amygdala which gives you a quick jolt of “Uh, oh! Watch out!” But within a second or two the neocortex examines the situation more closely, then communicates a message to the amygdala that says, “No. Just a garden hose that looks like a snake.” And all is well.

If it actually were a rattler, the neocortex would yield to the flight response of the amygdala. To put this in layman’s language, the amygdala is the “nervous Nelly” and the neocortex is the cool cucumber whose job is to tell the amygdala to chill out when it determines it is overreacting to a situation.

Most important for us, the neocortex also comes into play as an inhibitory force in the general area of emotional reactions emanating from the amygdala. Remember, the amygdala is the main regulator of emotions in the human brain. So a tranquil, emotionally healthy person will most likely have a strong neocortex with ample gray matter and a relatively smaller, less active amygdala. The opposite would be true for highly anxious, neurotic people.

My wimpy neocortexBottom line: I think it’s safe to say that for most of my life I had a not-so-strong neocortex and a pretty darn fierce amygdala. So when I got fired from The West Wing, my neocortex wasn’t strong enough to override the total freak out that my amygdala was perpetrating on my entire being.

But now when bad life events occur, like getting fired, I don’t “lose it” the way I used to. I don’t get that awful feeling of chemicals being pumped to every corner of my brain as when I got the axe on The West Wing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel like jumping for joy when bad things happen; but I don’t feel like I’m going to die, either.

This has been the case for about eight years now. So, what happened eight years ago?

Meditation changed everything

I started a regular meditation practice. And I’m convinced that meditation strengthened my neocortex and weakened my amygdala.

But wait, you might be thinking, that would require an actual physical change in my brain, right? Humans can’t actually change their brains physically. Not through meditation or any other activity. Right? Wrong.

One of the saving graces of the human brain is that we actually have the ability to physically alter our brains through various means. And what is this dynamic called that allows us to physically alter our brains? “One word, Benjamin…”

NEUROPLASTICITY.

So how do I know that meditation is what caused the neuroplastic changes to my neocortex and amygdala? For that matter, how do I even know that my neocortex is stronger and my amygdala is smaller now than they were in 2003 when I got fired from The West Wing? Did I do some high tech, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of my brain both in 2003 and recently that would prove this? The answers to these questions are: I don’t, I don’t and no.

So am I just making some grand assumption here about meditation’s effects on me without any hard evidence to back it up? Yes, that is what I’m doing. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is solid scientific evidence suggesting that meditation absolutely does have this beneficial, neuroplastic effect on our brains.

Harvard meditation study

A 2005 study conducted by a team of researchers at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital took twenty experienced meditators and fifteen non-meditators, matched by age, race, sex and education level, and took fMRI images of their brains to measure cortical thickness and related areas of the brain. What they found wasn’t surprising: the experienced meditators had significantly thicker prefrontal cortices. And again, the stronger your prefrontal cortex, the more influential it will be in inhibiting the worrywart amygdala.

A 2011 study led by another Harvard team, led by Sara Lazar, found that an eight-week mindfulness meditation course led to increased cortical thickness of the hippocampus, a critical structure in the brain responsible for emotion regulation, among other things. More important, the same study found reduced brain cell volume in the amygdala.

The takeaway

What’s the upshot of all this? While human brains are obsolete and not much different than they were 200,000 years ago when we were hunting and gathering, we have the ability to physically change them for the better.

The best activity I know of for effectuating that neuroplastic change is regular meditation, which has been shown to thicken the cool cucumber prefrontal cortex and shrink and make less active our nervous Nelly amygdalae.

Not to be too Captain Obvious, but the conclusion is clear: Time to get meditating.

What’s the purpose of my life? It’s the most vexing question we earthlings face. Unfortunately, most people go from womb to grave never coming close to finding an answer. In fact, most of us just punt altogether, eventually saying to ourselves, “Look, there’s no way you can know your true purpose in life so stop whining about it and just make your way as best you can.”

To all of you out there still searching for your path in life, the purpose of this piece is to persuade you to NEVER punt on this question. Why? Because you don’t have to.

I should know. I was one of those punters…Until the last few years, when I did find my purpose…At age 54. What was the game changer for me? I’ll get to that, but first I want to talk about who does know your true purpose in life: The mysterious voice within you.

The voice within

The what? You know what I’m talking about. Some call it intuition. Some call it the voice of the soul. Others the voice of the supreme being. Maya Angelou called it the voice of God. I call it the voice of the Universe trying to express itself through us. Call it whatever you want, the voice is some all-knowing being deep inside all of us that knows the true path of our lives…if only we would listen to it.

But how do we listen to something we can’t hear? I don’t know about you, but when I was searching for my path in life in my twenties and thirties, countless “wise” people told me some version of, “Dave, don’t look out to the world for the answers. Look inside yourself. And listen.” Upon hearing that, I’d nod and say, “Great. Thanks. I’ll do that.”

And then I’d say to myself, “What the heck does that even mean? Go inside and listen?” Because when I would “go inside and listen” all I’d hear is a cacophony of voices swirling around like a tornado saying, “Go to a great college!” “Get a high-profile job!” “Be the best!” “Excel!”

Thought static blocks the cosmic signals

The voice within urging me to be myself, the voice that actually is myself, was drowned out. This is the case for the vast majority of people.

Why is this? I’ll answer with an analogy. Think of yourself as a car radio and the radio station you’re trying to listen to is God/Jesus/Allah/The Universe/Yahweh/The Supreme Being/The Genius of Nature…whoever or whatever you think is running the cosmic show. The “songs” that God/The Universe…is beaming out from this radio station are messages about our destiny, or Providence as others call it. And the reason that many of us, the “car radios,” can’t hear these “songs”/messages is that our racing minds create static.

What creates this ‘racing mind static?’ Well, as most of us develop into adults we incorporate the voices of our parents, siblings, friends, teachers, Instagram, Facebook, the covers of Cosmopolitan, and the rest of society into one big, noisy pot of stew. And unfortunately, if you were going to give that concoction a name, it would be Not Me Stew.

Growing up Type B in a Type A family

What caused my ‘static?’ In other words, what were the ingredients in my Not Me Stew? Mine came mostly from the Gerken Family section of our metaphorical grocery store.

I’m the youngest of six kids and all five of my siblings were go-getter type A’s. Worse, my dad was a Type A+ CEO of a big company.

Me? I was always a Type B. Growing up I was content with playing my sports, hanging out with my friends, watching my TV shows and studying a moderate amount, at best. The fact that I always felt like I should be a Type A like the rest of my family served as the foundation for a decades long struggle with depression and anxiety and a general feeling in my gut that I never quite measured up.

What’s your static?

What’s the static drowning out your ability to hear your destiny? You’ve never felt smart enough? Or thin enough? Or pretty enough? Or successful enough? Some of these? All of these?

My static followed me every step of the way in my adult life. First stop after college was Washington, DC, where I worked on Capitol Hill for a couple congressmen.

Then, after ten lucrative but soul-eroding years as a lobbyist, I decided to chuck it all and move to Hollywood to pursue my dream of being a writer. Soon thereafter, I got a job on the The West Wing where I was part of the writing staff that won the Emmy for Best Drama Series.

Did my static subside because I’d finally “made it?” No. Not at all. I was just as insecure as ever. The cosmic radio signals beamed my way still registered as loud static.

Hollywood kicks my butt

Then a really great thing happened to me. Hollywood kicked my butt. Badly. First, I got fired from The West Wing at the end of the season. This was followed by a couple gigs on lousy shows. Then, in a seven-year span, I got jobs on precisely two shows. Ouch.

Things got pretty dark. Here I was: 48 years old, with a wife, two kids under the age of four and a writing career that was circling the toilet. And to top it off, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis my mortgage was underwater. Bottom line: I was looking for something…anything, to keep my head above water. And I found it…

Meditation.

My sister was a regular meditator and had gotten me to try it a few times over the years, but it never took. This time I really went for it. And this time it took. I’ve been meditating regularly for over eight years now.

And what has it done for me? I’m less anxious, happier, a better dad, a better husband and a better human being.

But possibly the best thing meditation did for me? You guessed it. It calmed the crazy static inside my head. And what did that do? It allowed the wisdom of the all-knowing voice to make it through my car radio.

A direct result of that has been my decision to leave the Hollywood writing business to do what I’m doing now: spreading meditation as far and wide as I possibly can. Never in my life have I felt so in tune with what I feel I was put on Earth to do. I found my true purpose. What a gift.

So why is meditation so great?

End of story? No. Because if I’m you, I want to know how meditation calmed my static. What’s so magical about meditation?

The answer is simple. All meditation is is sitting quietly and placing your attention on something happening in the present moment, like your breathing. Then when your mind grabs your attention and throws you into thought, you simply notice that that has happened and bring attention back to your breathing.

And when you place attention on your breath going in and out, guess what you’re NOT doing? Thinking. So all meditation is doing is helping you, slowly and gradually, to quiet your mind. And when we do that, we open communication with that intelligent voice within.

By the way, this isn’t to say that thinking is bad. Of course not. What is bad is involuntary, obsessive thinking.

The voice is elusive

Now here’s the thing. Even with a completely still, quiet mind, that all-knowing voice inside is elusive. Because it’s subtle. And its messages aren’t typically delivered in the form of direct, hit-you-on-the-head epiphanies.

In my case, I’d been meditating for four years when it dawned on me that spreading meditation was my purpose. The point is, without meditation I’m convinced I wouldn’t have been able to “hear” my true purpose.

To sum it up: The voice within can be hard to hear under optimum circumstances, so that vast majority out there afflicted by near constant thought babble stands a slim chance of hearing it unless they calm their minds down.

Get quiet and start listening while you’re young!

Finally, hearing the voice is critical for anybody at any age, but it’s especially consequential for you millennials searching for your place in the world. I remember all the pressure and anxiety I felt in those years. If only I’d had meditation. So if you’re a twenty or thirty-something agonizing 24/7 about your future, please, please, please consider meditation!

If you’re looking for a place to start, go to davidgerken.net where I have a free meditation program. It’s simple, doable and designed to help regular people, like me, develop a regular practice.

And if meditation is not your cup of tea for whatever reason, pursue the silent stillness within another way. If you’re religious (Christian, Muslim, Jewish…), seek that inner quiet through prayer. Or do it by walking in nature. Or fishing. Or anything that keeps your attention on what you’re doing in the moment and not mired in your thought factory mind. That said, I know of no practice better than meditation at helping to still the mind in a more systematic, sustained way.

The takeaway

“Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

That was my yearbook quote as a 22 year-old senior at Princeton. It’s from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essay on Self-Reliance. I took it to mean: Listen to your insides and the world is yours. As it turned out, that was easier said than done as it took thirty years and meditation to finally allow me to ‘absolve me to myself.’

My point is this: Don’t make the same mistake I made. Start quieting your insides NOW. Then listen. And listen some more. And some more.

Sooner or later, if you’re patient enough, the best, most beautiful song you’ve ever heard will mysteriously make its way through that car radio of yours and into your awareness. When it does, you’ll feel more centered and at home in the world than you ever have.

It’s a gift that God/The Universe/Nature…wants to bestow on every one of us. To receive it, all we need to do is quiet down inside and listen…

Eckhart Tolle has said and written many things that resonate with me for different reasons. One in particular puts me in a state of ease when I let the words wash through me. It is this:

“Here’s a spiritual practice for you: Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.”

Aaaaaahhhh. I can just feel the “heaviness of life muck” just melt away from my stomach as I read that.

Why is this? Why do I, and probably many of you, feel better and lighter when we take our thoughts less seriously? Quite simply, it’s because a s*^t ton of our thoughts are negative at best and destabilizing at worst.

Two types of thoughts

The critical point needs to be made that I’m not referring here to all thoughts. I break down thoughts into two categories — intentional and unintentional.

An intentional thought would be “Okay, I need to go to the store. Let’s see. I need milk, lettuce, ketchup, beer, Greek Yogurt and tortilla chips.” Intentional thinking is great. It’s using the superior intelligence that our evolved homo sapiens brains offer us. It’s what separates us from animals.

What Eckhart’s quote refers to are the thoughts we don’t decide to think. They’re the ones our minds tell us to think.

Unfortunately, our unintentional thoughts outnumber our intentional ones by…well, a lot. There are millions of examples of these thoughts, but here are a few:

“I’m such a terrible parent. My kids have eaten nothing but cheeseburgers and French fries all week because I’m too lazy to make them something healthier. I suck.”

“I can’t believe he said that. What a jerk. How can anybody act so rudely?”

“I’ll never have enough money for retirement. I hope I don’t starve to death on the streets.”

Why do we allow our minds to drag our attention into all these awful thoughts? We don’t. Our minds accomplish this without our conscious acquiescence.

Which begs asking: What the hell is this mind that seems to operate independently and contrary to our interests? The mind is the entity we create starting early in childhood to defend ourselves from the outside world. I’ve called it the conditioned, egoic self in several previous articles.

The mind isn’t real

Bottom line is that it isn’t real. Which isn’t to say that its effects on us aren’t real. They are. In a big way. Our minds haunt most of us on a daily basis. They create a near-constant state of unease.

So let’s sum this up so far. The mind produces thoughts independent of our will, it isn’t real and yet its effects are deleterious. So what can we do about that?

What we can do about it

We can ‘not take our thoughts too seriously,’ as Eckhart teaches. And it’s not just Eckhart who teaches this. The basic concept that we are not our thoughts is foundational to Hinduism, Buddhism and many other spiritual traditions. It’s a concept that’s been around for thousands of years.

What most traditions and spiritual teachers, like Eckhart and Mickey Singer, teach is to not identify with our thoughts. Because they aren’t who we are.

Mickey Singer doesn’t listen to Mickey

Singer often says, “I never listen to Mickey (his thoughts). Why? Because he’s always wrong.” Which is another strategy we can employ. Just ignoring our thoughts. As if they are just an annoying person, yammering on and on.

But if we aren’t these thoughts, then who are we? We’re the consciousness, the awareness, that notices we’re having these thoughts.

What’s the best way to strengthen the ability of our conscious selves to notice this constant stream of annoying thoughts? Meditation. And practicing mindfulness.

Meditation is key

These practices, at heart, are about reclaiming our attention and placing it on something happening in the present moment, like breathing. Then noticing when our minds have snatched our attention away again and returning it back to the present. Then doing it again. And again. And literally thousands of times over the months and years of our practice.

The more we do this, the stronger our conscious self becomes and the less power our thoughts exert over us. How does that manifest inside us? We feel calmer, less anxious, less frenzied, more centered. What it all adds up to is feeling better on a moment-by- moment basis.

If that sounds appealing, it should. Can you think of anything better than what I just described in the previous paragraph?

Meditation: the best thing I’ve ever done for myself

Give the meditation thing a try. I made the plunge over eight years ago and can honestly say I’ve never done anything better for myself. What a gift it’s been.

If you’re looking for a place to get started, try my free program at davidgerken.net. I designed it to make it as easy as possible for regular people (i.e., those who’ve never lived in an ashram, as I haven’t) to get going in meditation.

The takeaway

So don’t forget: You are not your thoughts. You’re the awareness of those thoughts. The conscious presence that is brilliant, beautiful and beyond comprehension, but that is present when our thoughts aren’t.

Don’t take your thoughts seriously and you will 1) Feel lighter and better in that moment, and 2) Deprive the thoughts of their power and therefore hasten their gradual demise.

That’s a spiritual one-two punch we would all do well to pursue.

Happiness has its own cottage industry these days with numerous books written on the subject and prestigious universities like Yale, Stanford and even Harvard Business School offering courses in it. From my examination the same few things crop up in the literature on the essentials of happiness: invest in personal relationships, do work that feels meaningful and don’t get hung up on power and money.

I agree with most all of the recommendations coming out of the happiness industry, but I feel like the Buddhists come closest to getting to the crux of living a contented life. We find this in the four noble truths, which serve as the foundation of Buddhism.

What are these four noble truths?

1) Life is suffering.

2) Suffering is caused by desire.

3) Eliminate the desire and you eliminate the suffering.

4) Follow the Eightfold Path to eliminate the desire.

The key is number three. There’s your key to happiness. Stop wanting so much.

It’s about fears, too

It’s important to note that it’s not just about curbing what you want — big house, success, plentiful sex, power, etc. It’s also about not wanting the bad things of life to happen — like losing our house because we can’t pay the mortgage or our girlfriend breaking up with us. These deal with our fears. The Buddhists consider both to be desires.

This concept is captured simply and beautifully in the first line of the Verses of the Faith Mind by the Third Zen Patriarch, Seng-T’san:

“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”

Quick digression to state the obvious here: Many thousands of pages have been written about desire, fear and happiness, and I don’t have the space or brain cells to add hundreds more. So I’ll be brief in my minor contribution to this vast spiritual and psychological arena.

The ego strikes again

First, it’s necessary to know that the source of our wants and fears is the egoic, conditioned mind. As kids and into adulthood, we mistakenly learned what we thought would make us happy and also what would make us unhappy. Most of us then spend the rest of our lives pursuing and avoiding these ill-conceived desires and fears.

The key then to not wanting and not fearing is, as Michael Singer teaches, to rid ourselves of all this accumulated egoic baggage. Once we do that, we’re fine with whatever the Universe presents to us.

Just living within our moments is enough to be happy. Scratch that. It’s enough for us to be super-ecstatically happy.

Second, there are two overall strategies for achieving happiness: adding and shedding. Adding would be things like working on relationships and expanding our spiritual knowledge by reading books and taking courses. Shedding would be focusing our work on eliminating that emotional baggage I just mentioned.

We already have everything we need

I’m a firm believer, as Mickey Singer is, that shedding is the way to go. Why? Because shedding presumes that we already have everything we need inside, something I believe wholeheartedly. We just need to clear away the garbage so that that loving, compassionate genius inside us can shine its beautiful light through us and into the world. We don’t need to add a single thing.

I’ve written many pieces that have examined how we go about ridding ourselves of this baggage. Mostly it’s just using our conscious will to become aware when our “stuff” has arisen, then relaxing and letting it go. Continually. Patiently. Persistently.

Which leads to the third and most consequential point of this piece: When we find ourselves wanting or fearing, what do we do? First is to train ourselves to become aware of it. We want and fear a lot most days so that is going to be a lot of “awaring” we’ll need to do.

Next is obvious — ask yourself if you really need this thing you want or if you need to fear this thing you don’t want. Just stop for a few moments and breathe with it. Then see if you can let it go.

What works for me

What I’ve found effective over the years, is when I find myself feeling overly anxious or uptight, I stop and ask myself, “What am I wanting too much right now? Or fearing right now?” The answer to why I’m feeling off is normally found in the answer to one of those two questions.

The point is we can approach this happiness quest from many different angles. We can do the “letting go of our stuff” thing. And we can also take the direct angle of, “there’s no need for me to want this or fear that.”

My simple, happy mom

My mom had very few wants and fears and led an absolutely fantastic life. God/the Universe shone on her more than anybody I know. Call it good karma. Good living. Call it whatever you want. Good things seem to happen to those with few preferences, as Seng-T’san so eloquently stated.

Unfortunately, this idea is difficult for many, especially Americans, to accept. What the heck is life worth living for if we don’t have wants? Do we just sit around on the couch all day staring at the wall?

No. When we curb our desires the Universe steps in and takes over the steering wheel of our lives. And the Universe is Richard Petty (legendary NASCAR driver) compared to the rest of us when it comes to skillful driving!

The takeaway

Bottom line: This is another arrow to put in our spiritual quiver. It’s about summoning our will to make a conscious effort to want less, and fear less.

until age 18 my life was pretty darn great. No major tragedies or divorces, fun playing sports and chasing girls, which for me meant obsessive crushes that the objects of my affection never even knew about because I was too mortified of being rejected to ever make anything remotely resembling a move. But that’s another story for another time.

Then senior year brought my first true-blue relationship and the inner tumult that threw me into my first existential tizzy. To sum it all up, and with credit to Dickens, it was the best of times (truly) followed by the worst of times.

Seeing that I was in a funk, a friend of my girlfriend’s father introduced me to several classic spiritual works. One of those was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essay on Self-Reliance. I first read it in 1982 at age 18 and to this day it has had a greater impact on me than anything I’ve read.

One caveat for any female readers before diving in: Emerson wrote this in 1841 when men still dominated American society, thus his use of “man” in a few of these quotes.

With that, here are six quotes from the essay that capture its essence.

1. “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

This one pretty much says it all. Imitating others gets us nowhere. Cultivate the plot of ground the universe/God gave YOU and only YOU. As Emerson says, the traits given each of us are “new in nature,” in other words completely unique.

So the purpose of our lives comes down to two simple steps: 1. Figure out what our ‘plot of ground’ is, then 2. Cultivate it! Go after it with everything we’ve got. Because it is true to our nature, it won’t feel like work at all.

How do we figure out what our ‘plot of ground’ is? That leads to quote number two:

2. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

I take this to mean listen to your intuition. Or, listen to your insides. Don’t listen to society or your parents or your friends or, most important, your MIND, which is just an amalgamation of all those influences. Listen to your insides. And whatever you hear, trust that that is the best way to go.

Many may say, “But hearing my insides is hard. It’s noisy in there. What do I do?” That leads to quote number three.

3. “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”

Here Emerson refers to the ineffable, sublime effect of stillness. This one resonates with me because I absolutely agree: Whenever I’m in a church, whether for a funeral, a wedding or the occasional service, I always notice that it is the times of silent stillness that raise and inspire me. That’s because it is from a place of stillness that we access our true inner selves, God and the universe, which I contend are all versions of the same thing.

How do create stillness inside ourselves? We practice meditation, mindfulness and anything else that works to quiet our chattering minds.

What happens when someone goes all the way with this and devotes his/her life to eliminating their egoic, mind self and merging with that true, God-like inner being inside us all? Emerson describes this with unmatched poetic beauty in this fourth quote.

4. “When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.”

I’m more than a few country miles from realizing this state. But when I read that quote, I think of those who do personify it: the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, Michael Singer, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass and many other spiritual leaders. These are people who exude equanimity, serenity and, most important, compassion for their fellow humans.

It’s my sense, optimistic as it may be, that humanity is evolving toward a place where all of us will reach the level of consciousness that Eckhart, the Dalai Lama and the rest have attained. What an awesome world that would be.

These higher beings got that way by living from within, by being in the world, but not of it. They lived by this quote that ends the essay.

5. “A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

That last sentence captures it all: ‘Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.’ Money, power, fame…none of these will bring you peace. How many times do we, especially here in America, need to hear this before we actually believe it and, more importantly, LIVE it?

The crux of it is, work on your insides if you want to be happy. It’s the only path to peace.

I’ll conclude with a quote from the essay that is vital for all to take to heart, but especially those in their teens and twenties who are struggling to find their way in the world.

6. “I must be myself.I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself.”

If you have a teenager, wallpaper their bedroom with this! I’ll be drilling this one into my three kids for years to come.

So many people, young and old, struggle with this. It’s about looking inside ourselves, taking an honest inventory of who we are and then telling the world to take it or leave it.

I don’t like to use the word ‘fight’ much in my spiritual teachings, but it is apropos here: We need to fight like hell for ourselves, our authentic selves. We need to be our own best advocates. It’s critical. Why? Because if we get this one right it makes the rest of life a whole lot easier.

At the end of the day, Self-Reliance is about listening to the mysterious, sacred voice within us all and then acting on what we hear…no matter what. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and do so. You can find a free online copy here.