How Meditation Helped Me in the Hospital (And After)

Actually, those years of practice really made a difference.

There’s obviously a lot happening in the news right now, but a lot of my attention is turned inward as I recover from the injury I described in last week’s newsletter. So I’m going to stay on that theme this week as well. -jm

For many years, as I practiced and taught meditation, I’ve wondered about how well it would work under extreme circumstances, like the ones I’ve been in for the last ten days. Had I banked enough hours on the cushion for the skills to be there when they really mattered? Or would the stress just be too much for them?

I’m happy to say that I passed the audition. The basic skills of mindfulness meditation, and some of the core teachings of the Dharma, have come through in the clutch. I’d like to share some of what worked, less as a survival guide and more as inspiration if you’ve been meditating, or trying to meditate, for some time. tl;dr — in my experience, those hours are worth it.

Mindful Breathing. The skill of using the breath to center oneself quite well-known —my seven-year-old daughter has already learned it in school. But it was still a (figurative) life-saver for me, including when I twice experienced severe hypotension, which is when the blood pressure suddenly crashes (in my case, to under 80/40). I have to say, it’s an interesting experience when you see the facial expressions of medical professionals suddenly get very serious and concerned. Was I just about to faint, or was I about to check out of this plane of existence? I’ll never know. But as I settled in on the breath, as I’ve done thousands of times before, it felt like coming home. I felt present and even at peace, not because things were okay (they were not) but because this is my home, this mindful attention to the body and the breath. Ultimately, I remember thinking, I have no control over what happens to me, but I can do my part, which is calmly, mindfully breathing as normally as possible. And if the worst were to happen, I remembered Joseph Goldstein’s aspiration that his last breath be a mindful breath. (“In, out, in, out, dead,” were his exact words on a retreat I sat in 2004.) What else was mine to control?

Moving Really Slowly. Everyone recovering from an injury knows that you have to move carefully and slowly, especially at first. And while meditation is not a prerequisite for doing so, I have found it helpful over the last week when I slowly rise up and get down and slowly put one foot in front of the other with my walker. (It also helps that if I move the wrong way, I am ‘punished’ with shooting pains in my midsection; I am, as finance bros would put it, highly incentivized.) Lifting one leg up, slowly putting it down — I did this for hours on in end walking meditation, and now I do it getting in and out of bed. The movements feel familiar, even relaxing. Again, I feel like I’ve practiced for this and have been here before.

Midjourney, not me.

Nothing to Do. A few days ago, I joked to my daughter that what I’m supposed to do for the next few weeks is this . . . and then I just sat there. And sure enough, I’m not working or moving or doing that much. I am banking a lot of meditation time; sometimes mindfulness meditation, sometimes ‘resting in awareness’, sometimes just noticing the sounds and sights of my home. Along with the combination of disorientation and gratitude that I’m feeling, there’s a strong sense of what some teachers call ‘enoughness’: that this moment, even if it is objectively dull or even painful, can feel like enough. Here you are, reading these words, breathing, alive. Of course, the world is not in a great place, and maybe you aren’t either – but there can be a temporary feeling of enoughness, in which there’s nothing to do, nothing that has to be better than it is. That feeling passes, of course, but when I’m feeling it, it’s delightful. And I do have a lot of down time.

Noticing Thoughts. That said, my brain still has a lot it would like to discuss. I’ve watched a parade of thoughts and feelings these last several days: despair, contentment, anxiety, assigning blame, gratitude, disappointment. I will be fine, I will never be like I was. How could this have happened, things like this happen all the time. A couple hundred times, I’ve done the cognitive two-step of (1) allowing these thoughts to happen (not repressing or banishing them) and yet also (2) not believing them or taking them too seriously. What do I really know? I’m not a doctor or a scientist, and nothing is certain anyway. Emotionally, I’ve had good days and bad days, and I’ve kind of let the days happen. They pass. Everything passes. As Todd Schulman put it, thoughts appear and disappear like little farts.

The Dharma. The source of mindfulness is Buddhism — more specifically, a modernized version of one strand of Buddhist teaching. Mindfulness meditation can be just a technique, and as such, it works well in secular as well as non-Buddhist spiritual contexts. Yet over the twentyish years I’ve been practicing meditation, I’ve found that it is greatly enriched by the deeper wisdom teachings which brought it into being 2,500 years ago. Ditto over the last two weeks. During one particularly acute period of pain, it was so helpful to just see what was happening simply as dukkha, as suffering, which is an unavoidable part of human existence. Dukkha is a feature of life, not a bug. It’s just part of what it is to be human, subject to human nature, and maybe a good use of our time on the planet would be to lessen the amount of it worldwide. (Conservatives may disagree.) It was also helpful to see these periods as anatta, as not ‘me’ or ‘mine.’ The causes for this injury were present, the injury happened, and now here are the effects. Again, it’s not that something bad happened to me. Things like this happen. One night, you’re dancing at a party on Fire Island, and the next night, you’re in the ER. Things are impermanent. This no-bullshit, stoic-like wisdom has been a huge support to me.

The Sacred. And yet, I’m not only a mindfulness practitioner. I am also an aspirational mystic who loves the sense of the sacred. And so for the last two weeks, I have loved cultivating moments of ordinary mysticism: sitting in the sun, listening to music, reciting the Jewish Asher Yatzar blessing after going to the bathroom (which I obviously do not take for granted at the moment), listening to Ram Dass’s “I Am Loving Awareness” talk. This sense is often a quiet sacrality, not the fireworks of a psychedelic experience. But of all the consolations, this one might be the best.

Comfortable with Failure. Finally, I’ve found it really helpful to be comfortable with failure, when everything I’ve said so far doesn’t work. I admit, I hesitated to even write this essay because I didn’t want to sound cheerful, pollyannish, or like I have everything under control. That is definitely not the case. Sometimes I feel really shitty. But fuck “success.” Screw Here Are Eight Tips To Feel Better Even When You Break Your Pelvis. To hell with the lies of the wellness industry, whose purveyors are always sweeping the dust under the rug. The dust is part of life too, isn’t it? ‘Failure’ is totally fine. It’s not like wishing it away is going to work anyway. Obviously where ‘failure’ impacts other people, that’s a different story – but if it’s just falling short of some ideal, then bring it on.

So, there are seven ways in which meditation, mindfulness, and something approaching mysticism have contributed to this journey of recovery. I hope some of them resonate with you, both as inspiration for the possibilities of meditation, and more immediately, since we’re all a little (or a lot) traumatized right now, with wars and authoritarianism and eco-anxiety and the destruction of American culture and leadership. You don’t have to break your pelvis to feel this way. Although I guess it helps.

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It has been, as

Daniel W. Drezner

put it in his excellent “Let’s Put All This Into Perspective” piece, a complicated week in America. Please share some of your favorite takes in the comments. As for myself, I have a dozen ideas to develop, but this week I’m happy just to make it to the refrigerator without pain. Thank you to all my subscribers for your support; that really matters now, and I’m committed to continuing to publish this weekly newsletter. The tide is worsening, but it is also turning. The data shows it and I think we can feel it. Now is the time to stay engaged.