May You Sit On The Floor

And other things I hope for you.

If you like this piece, please push the LIKE/HEART button because it helps other people find the piece, which helps me gain new subscribers 🫶

—

Every morning, my Whoop wakes me up between 6:15a-7:15a.

I get out of bed but keep the lights off because a writer I follow does this and she’s a better writer than I am, so now I do this too.

Ben is still asleep. He’s a doctor, and so one would think that he’d be awake by now, but they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

The room is around 61 degrees, and so I put on sweatpants, a loose shirt and walk down the dark hall to the dark bathroom where I pee into the dark toilet and try not to miss the bowl before walking to the dark guest room with the dark desk where I rip my phone off the charger without looking at the screen because the writer I follow would never look at her phone this early in the sacred morning.

In the corner of the room is a wellness area: a massage gun, a vibrating faceless timer, a yellow resistance band, a heating pad, and a neck roller called a denneroll — a horribly named device invented in the early 2000s by a chiropractor named Dr. Adrian Dennewald who Ben says is not a real doctor, but then I remind Ben that Dr. Dennewald has invented a device used by millions and what has Ben done besides overslept.

I flip the faceless timer to 45 minutes and yell, “Alexa, play Meditation by Joe Dispenza,” and then place the heating pad atop the denneroll and lie on the floor looking up at the ceiling with the device pressing into the back of my neck so that my Adam’s apple is forced to the sky, because “if you don’t start fixing your neck,” my chiropractor says, “one day, you’ll end up like the old people that come into my office with the back humps.”

And I don’t want to be like them.

The pre-denneroll generation.

Curved and forgotten.

We are not meant for that.

Monkeys, we all are.

Meant to swing from tree and eat banana and throw poop. Not sit at desk and crane neck and spiral.

And spiral I will.

Every meditation starts with noticing the spiral.

And since spiraling happens every day, so too must meditation.

Two days in a row without meditating, and the days become bad, and I know this because I track it daily in Excel:

1. Beginning of day

   1. How many total minutes I meditated

   2. How many of those minutes consisted of me being in a state of calm

2. End of day

   1. How good the day was (1-10)

1a is objective.

1b and 2a are not.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that if I don’t meditate often enough, my days are worse and a scarab burrows into my solar plexus and uses his little scarab claws to pull the strings of my shoulders down, collapsing me into someone I don’t want to be.

Because, again, monkey.

54 million years of it, actually.

And then 300,000 years ago we became homo sapiens, and 10,000 years ago we agriculturally revolutionized, and only 40 years ago we got computers, then cell phones, and now all of us spend the day looking down while our upper backs atrophy and our strained necks and overstimulated brains try to keep up.

You probably have issues with your neck too.

If you don’t, you will. And if you don’t think you will, you still will.

A tiny pain in your shoulder or trap. A migraine or brain fog or anxiety or depression or poor sleep or dementia — anything you have can be connected to posterior-rooted seemingly-negligible restricted cerebral blood flow due to muscular tension you didn’t even know you had and it will grow and fester. “If all you have is a denneroll,” Ben said to me the other day, followed by, “there is no way to actually change the curve in your spine with that thing but if it makes you happy, then go for it.”

It does make me happy, Ben.

Fuck you.

“Take a moment,” the Joe Dispenza meditation says, “to acknowledge the space between your breath.”

Acknowledged. I focus on my breath. It is breathy. It goes in and out and fills my lungs and then the thoughts flood in. Like where Ben is the enemy because he never needs to meditate. Or where Mara is three days late at sending me the sales org chart.

Set a reminder on your phone right now to ask her about it, this is very important and if you don’t do it right now you’re going to forget and you’ll miss Q3 revenue no stop listen to the meditation.

It’s strange to me that not everyone meditates.

I don’t know how they manage.

How they gracefully move through life, colliding with polarizing social media and too many bills and bad bosses and squashed creativity and health issues and certain loved ones dying too soon and others not fast enough.

Maybe they don’t.

For a moment, I hear Joe Dispenza’s voice pulling me back into the audio, but then I hear Ben’s rustling in the other bedroom, and the jingle of a dog collar and, seconds after, the overhead manmade light pours in from the crack underneath the door, sweeping away my cherished morning darkness and carefully cultivated circadian rhythm, ever dooming me to the fate of less-good writer.

“Hi,” Ben whispers as he opens the door and looks down at me on the floor while I’m clearly meditating. “Are you medi—”

“—Yes,” I say, ending the conversation.

I really don’t understand that part.

Like, I understand that it happens.

But I don’t understand why it continues to happen.

When I do this every day and every day he receives the same response and one would think that, over time, he would change what he does but he does not and- “--as you notice thoughts enter your mind,” Joe says, “focus on your breath.”

Ben, work, food, sex, taxes, pimple, though not all of my thoughts are completely pointless I am incapable of choosing which mostly-pointless thought comes next, nor can I effectively retrace how I got there and, instead, jump from one non-sequitur to the other, because such are the brains of overly conscious primates whose minds barrel down a maze and every time we turn the corridor to face a new thought the wall behind us moves leaving us stuck on a forward-looking path staring down corners around which we cannot see, all we can do is hope that we get better at not being so afraid every time we turn.

I believe we’ve always been like this.

It’s why meditation has been around for so long.

Before Jesus, or Islam, or the Jews.

Drawings of people sitting upright on the cave walls in the Indus Valley in 1500 BCE. 1000 years later, in Buddhist texts, rules around posture and breath. Taoist teachings about letting the body slip away while you fall into “a fasting of the mind.” Socrates with Stoicism, where you watch your thoughts pull you into problems, and your job is to pull yourself out.

And then in the early 20th century, Asian immigrants moved to the U.S. and meditation found its way to psychologists and medical journals and Ram Dass and dreadlocked-smelly-hippies and now it sits with me and my floor, having cockroached its way beneath/beside/beyond God, highlighting what I believe to be a paradox of the human experience unsated by faith which is that we are all meant to seek stillness in silence and yet when we find ourselves alone in that silence, undistracted by the outside world, we tend not to like what we find.

It’s important to learn to grapple with that.

To learn to enjoy spending time with the person you are forced to spend the most time with.

And there’s science that supports it.

Science that says meditation is objectively good and that you should do it.

I mean, I can’t make you, but if you don’t meditate, you’re more likely to have unstable high cortisol levels which is bad because cortisol tells your body to pause healing and instead re-allocate resources to physically fight the man who is about to stab you with a knife. After a while, if your cortisol levels remain too high for too long, you become ugly and wrinkly with blotchy skin, inflamed with brittle bones and auto-immune disorders and higher blood pressure and higher fat retention and more cancer and riskier heart problems and sooner die.

Here’s a chart I made with ChatGPT:

Doubling down on depression. Meditation is just as effective at treating depression as SSRIs, but meditation comes with none of the risks which, you would think, would make a lot more people meditate, especially the people I know, because so many of them claim to be oh so miserable, even somehow more miserable than you, and yet they choose not to meditate because meditation is hard and it’s much easier to throw up your hands and claim victim.

For example, loyal readers like Dawna Francis or Carla Guzman simply believe that meditation doesn’t work for people like them.

I do not agree.

Unless, of course, you are someone like Ben, who is really never bothered.

Ben.Ai

It does not matter how many times you shake the snowglobe of Ben’s mind; the flakes always remain glued to the ground.

In my snowglobe, however, there is somehow wind and the snow blows sideways and, at times, Ben finds it so exhausting to be around me, that I’ll be ranting to him about how the dog sitter overfed our now-fat dog and it’s a huge problem and, “we should start leaving Ralph with a camera around his collar, ideally one with a speaker, so I can patch in during these excessive treat windows and intervene. I mean look at him! This is ridiculous! So much for those fucking walks that he ALSO charged us for. You know what? We should–”

“--Hey,” Ben will softly interrupt, while petting the dog he trained before I entered the family unit — a dog who is always calm and never even barks, “you should go to the other room and meditate and do that neck stretch thing and then maybe come back after a bit.”

How dare he.

As if I’m a child.

An irritable, hunchbacked 36-year old child on his way to time out. Even the dog watches me go, “Thank God,” the dog wants to say, but can’t, his vocal cords suffocated by his newfound weight.

But the act of being sent to meditate works.

I come back anew.

And it’s working now, too.

I’ve been on the floor for 12 minutes, and I know this because that’s how long it takes for my neck to go numb from the denneroll, which means it’s time to finish the rest of the meditation sitting up.

It’s also the part of the session when my mind has slowed.

Where the scarab in my chest starts to loosen his reigns on my shoulders and back. Where the thoughts arrive more gently and leave on their own, making space for small moments of thoughtlessness, whatever that is.

Where, from a much calmer state, I can direct my mind eye towards images that reduce cortisol and increase dopamine/oxytocin like where I’m sitting outside on the grass in the sun with Ben and the dog and we have lots of money in our bank account and colorful vegetables are growing that Ben, and not I, planted and took care of and yet I get to eat them anyway.

I am calm.

Long breath.

Loose body.

The edges of my lips start to subconsciously curve upward as if I’ve taken the smallest amount of MDMA.

Being alive, as far as I perceive it, is better now than it was 20 minutes ago.

And that’s crazy.

Because nothing in my life has changed.

The org chart is still late.

100% of stressors still fully exist.

And yet the snow has settled, and the pulse has slowed, and though I have not transformed into a being of boundless energy, I have biochemically self-regulated from having sat on the floor long enough for my mind to shift.

And that’s very important. Because one day, not today, but one day, there will be no floor.

No youthful body that can easily sit cross-legged.

No hope for passive income vegetables.

No dog.

And no Ben.

And when that day comes, I would prefer to have spent as many mornings as possible noticing that, though the dog is still too fat, the light too bright, and Ben too mouthy, this life that is mine is, in fact, quite good.

If you liked reading this, please push the LIKE/HEART button at the top, because it helps other people find the piece, which helps me gain new subscribers 🫶

Thanks guys

Questions for you, my lovely readers (please answer in the comments by clicking here):

1. Are you more like Ben (the snowglobe never moves) or like me (blizzard), and if so, do you find yourself romantically consistently attracted to the one that you are not?

2. What does your personal spiral usually start with?

3. If someone looked at the Excel sheet of your mind, what would your “How good the day was (1–10)” column look like this month? Like, would it be lots of 1s (bad) or 10s (good)? And then for the days where it’s lower, what are the habits that lift it back up?

Other pieces of mine to read:

• Your parents are old. And then, suddenly, so are you

• Meanwhile, in rural Vietnam

• “My pronouns are up/yours” and other adventures from cruises