Keep On Flowing

This morning, I woke up about 2 hours before my alarm at 5am with a blood sugar of about 280. My Omnipad Dash, which I had just replaced after the previous one failed before I went to sleep, must have failed an hour or two after I fell asleep after a late night of work. I was traveling, and because of 4 pump failures during the one week period I was away, was left with no pumps. I also had no other long acting or short acting insulin, except 8 unit packs of Afrezza. I had about a 3 hour window to see my 1 year old niece that morning before traveling home.

In other words, I was shit out of luck.

I got up, used some Afrezza cautiously with snacks at the ready, and after texting a few T1D friends in Chicago, I sat down to meditate, same as I do most mornings. What does meditation have to do with this? Nothing, and everything. It didn’t solve any of my problems with regards to pump supply, or get me any more restful sleep (though training on meditation retreats to function on 4-5 hours of sleep certainly helps). It didn’t buy me more time to enjoy with my niece, or take away the uncomfortable pulsing sensations of my body trying to normalize itself after hours of high blood sugars. Pretty much all of the things I had to complain about before meditation practice remained the same.

But I didn’t. After sitting and feeling my body pulse and my mind meander for a half hour, I got up and continued on with my day. I finalized plans to get a more reliable source of insulin. I hung out with my brother and niece and sister in-law joyously and goofily, despite not being as sharp as usual or being able to share a meal with them. I drove my friend into the city and loved every minute of it. Why did I need to lug around my shitty morning with me? It was bad enough at the time, there was no sense carrying it further and ruminating on how difficult this disease is, or how jank Omnipod’s manufacturing practices must be. Of course that’s so easily said, but it’s only after years of committed practice that I find that kind of letting go happens automatically more of the time, rather than just being the mental place I wish I could get to. Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to learn to welcome “the now” fully, which is only even possible if I allow the past to move through me as fast as I can experience it, second by second, millisecond by millisecond, rather than allowing my thoughts to try to hold onto it.

In the Zen tradition, which many of you know I hold dear, there’s a story given to students for contemplation when they’re ready. Zen Master Hogen is visited by a traveling group of spiritual seekers, who arrive at his small, remote temple exhausted. He graciously allows them to make a fire to warm themselves in front of his monastery, and as they warm up, they begin to engage in a heated philosophical discussion about the nature of reality. Hogen joins in and points to a big stone in the courtyard — “That stone there. Is it in your mind or outside of it?” One of the seekers replies cleverly that everything is a projection of the mind, including the stone. Hogen quips, “You must feel very heavy, carrying around a big stone like that.”

The funny thing is, that seeker wasn’t entirely wrong — that stone was in his mind, just like all of our worries and concerns. The only problem was that it stayed there in his mind when it was time to move on and leave it behind. That dropping of the stones in our mind is one of the greatest gifts meditation has to offer.

Most people come to meditation practice because in some way or another, they’re struggling; there’s a stone in their mind that they just can’t shake. That struggle, that stone, looks many different ways externally, and each of us has a different explanation for it. These explanations at best may help us relate to ourselves and others, and at worst may mask the deeper reasons, or even the fact that there’s a struggle at all. But they're all stone; they're all struggle.

​Meditation is a great place to come when we’re struggling — in it, we learn many ways of working with and moving past these mental barriers . Naturally we come with the idea that it will solve the things we attribute our struggle to — if it’s stress or anxiety, we imagine with practice we’ll leave that behind us forever. If it’s pain, we imagine we’ll have no pain, or much less pain, once we bring our minds to a peaceful place. If we think it’s going to make us a better person, we imagine it will bring the final relief of being good enough in a grand sense.

But It’s difficult to conceptualize what meditation actually has to offer before we’ve begun to taste it. Like an excellent tea, coffee, or wine to the connoisseur, the first taste may be different than the next, and it has many qualities to explore which can only be done with time and patience. To a certain degree, we may find that it offers some of the above solutions, and many more. But the real gift is something more difficult to quantify or conceptualize, like the difference between a thick fog in which you can barely see your hand in front of your face, and a moderately dense fog where you can see a foot or two in front of you, but not much more. Maybe after a few months you see a few feet in front of you, and periodically catch glimpses of the whole block ahead of you. After a few years, maybe you can see around the block the whole time, but rarely much further than that.

This mental fog is sometimes called, “the burdensome practice of judging.” It’s our mind working to create stories out of our life, so it can keep reliving them over and over with fresh inputs. Living in this standard way, every day — despite being completely fresh — is seen as the “same old.” This fog is a base function of our minds, so central in fact that it has a core brain network associated with it. We might call it the “Default Mode Network” or the “Head Up My Own Ass” network, but however we call it, it prevents us from seeing things as they are and keeps us spinning painful in our own personal hells. And spinning there, we often pull people into our dramas and difficulties in a way that harms them, too.

My goal is to spend less time in that place, however uncomfortable or downright awful my experience in a given moment may be. To make that goal a reality, I practice meditation. I’d rather experience those worst moments for what they are than let them drag me into more dramas and shames and blames. I feel genuine gratitude when I consider that each person in this DiabetesSangha and everywhere that seems to be coming to similar conclusions — you inspire me to stay the course, and leave me feeling supported on this long journey. Let’s keep up this good work for ourselves and for everyone and everything we care about.