I come from an extended family of highly stressed out working class people who typically die young from overeating and resulting high blood pressure and heart disease (although increasingly modern medicine keeps us alive longer and longer) or from self-medication. In other words, we take things, whether unbanned or banned, that we are able to obtain into our bodies to ease the high stress of capitalist society. As a young adult, I was tempted to go full-blown into the self-medication route, but thankfully, I chose the slow death/overeating route. To this day, no Little Debbie "Swiss" cake roll is safe near me. I was always and am today the captain of the clean plate club, although these days, I try not to bring those and other delicious demonic delicacies into the house. I find plenty to eat too much of without large quantities of processed junk food being in the kitchen.
Anyhow, in my early thirties, I was desperate for some kind of peace. I had been raised in a right wing fundamentalist household by a Southern Baptist Hispanic preacher man father (whom I love dearly) and an intermittently schizophrenic "white" Clay County, Georgia secretary mother (whom I love dearly) who in turn had been abandoned by her racist father and raised by her schizophrenic mother and alcoholic stepfather in the toughest then "white" neighborhood in Miami. They grew up with acute and chronic stress and they lived acute and chronic stress every day of their lives until in retirement they have gotten some relief thanks to Social Security and three tiny pensions from my dad's three overlapping mini-careers (as a small-town preacher, an Eastern Airlines ticket agent, and a state probation officer). They gave my siblings and me love the best they could and went to all our athletic events and high school performances of various kinds. However, all four of us kids have battled with some form of negative stress-reducing behavior all our lives. For me it is overeating and for the other three it is street or prescription drugs.
Through someone I met early one Friday evening outside a record store in the Deep South in the late 1980's, I was introduced to what was for me a relatively authentic and validating Christian religious denomination (Episcopal) that did not require me to check at the church door all of my intelligence. That helped some. I still love the liturgy to this day, still quietly meet some version of God there most Sundays, and, when I can make myself exercise, do the elliptical trainer and read the Psalms in the Spanish edition of the Book of Common Prayer.
The priest was this wonderful old Irish American who had been a Roman Catholic priest stationed in Rome but fell in love and, to be true to his journey, had to leave the church he had been born into to get married. He told me that the first requirement of God is to be authentic with God. That was a life-liberating concept and still is.
But it wasn't enough. After a short time attending, I was going through some non-clinical depression arising from loneliness and confusion. The Swiss cake rolls, etc. alone were not cutting it, and I had cut out the beer and pot, which I had learned were not helping me. (This is not an anti-alcohol or anti-pot rant though; if you want to drink or smoke, go for it--I am definitely against prohibition.) The out-of-town friend I was supposed to spend Christmas with bailed out on me, and I was left alone at Christmas.
I remember thinking on Christmas Day that there must be some way for me to get some peace and deciding for some reason to sit and then lay on the floor of my bedroom. Being down on the floor seemed to help. (To this day, I find that the closer to the ground I am the better I feel--and I eventually started studying soil science, and I try to put my hands in the dirt or at least visit the compost pile every day). And then something told me to try meditating, so right there, on the floor of my apartment, I came to a version of "ohmmmmmm."
And it helped me a lot. I knew right away that I had found something that worked for me that did not hurt me. And then coincidentally the Sunday after Christmas at our little Episcopal chapel, the priest said that he was going to start a little meditation group. And he introduced me to a form of meditation some call centering prayer. And he got us each a copy of Thomas Keating's Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel. Through that book, Keating, a Trappist monk, has probably taught hundreds of thousands of people to meditate in a truly simple way that works for me.
Other than usually finding some measure of contentment, happiness, or peace wherever I am whenever I slow down enough to practice meditation, the high points of my journey in meditation have been my two retreats at Thomas Merton's abbey of gethsemani and, through the writings of Merton, learning that for me what is most authentic is to be both a contemplative Christian and a radical engaged in good action, which for me in turn means working for democratic socialism and against totalitarianism across our one planet, as preached by a free-thinking leftist Anglican named George Orwell. Reading Eric Arthur Blair's plain honest words has become a form of meditation for me. (So has reading Neruda's existential poetry in Spanish, etc.)
I still grab for the Swiss cake rolls if they are around. And people who read my diaries and comments will not generally see in them their expectation of the writing of one who does meditation--I choose to write strongly for socialism even if it pisses people off and would rather error on the side of honestly speaking out for what I believe in than keeping silent. I won't say I do any of it more gracefully than any other person who inherited low grade PTSD from capitalism and who has nonetheless chosen to fight the system rather than conform. I am still a bull in the china shop of life, but now I hopefully am less of a raging bull. Hopefully I am kinder in the ways that matter most--right here in the material world of soil and other resources.
But the material world also includes us, with all our needs, and for many of us, this includes the "spiritual," however you wish to define it. We cannot wisely fill that void with junk food or anything else purchased or even organically homegrown. I choose not to try to fill the void and to accept it. By chance or whatever combination of the cosmos, sometimes I even love it, whatever it is. I think that, whether it is for those incarcerated or those out on the streets, we are making good use of our lives if, ideally twice a day, we sit ourselves down in silence, stop everything, and meditate in some way that works for us.
Peace AND JUSTICE DAMMIT.