Sometime in April of 2023, I passed a milestone of sorts. I have been meditating daily for fifty years. Every morning, I wake up, make a quick stop in the bathroom, and then sit for twenty minutes. When my wife and I were raising children, that was it. In the years before children and the years since, I have meditated for another twenty to thirty minutes sometime in the afternoon or evening. Perhaps I have missed fifty days along the way—babies being born, early-morning flights.

Here is how it began. At my college, there was a week between classes and the final exams. In the Spring of my junior year, I was stressing over finishing papers and studying for final exams. I began having gastric pain. I went to the student health center and was prescribed barbiturates and antacids. One dose of the barbiturate was enough for me—not my drug of choice. I consumed the antacids, bore down even more intensely, and sailed through final exams.

I went through the same cycle at the end of the Fall semester my senior year. In the Spring of my senior year, I said to myself that I needed to do something about this developing pattern. I had been accepted into graduate school so there was no end to writing papers and taking exams. I had taken the Type A personality test and gotten a perfect score. I was twenty-two years old, working on an ulcer, and would die of a heart attack in my fifties.

In those days, Transcendental Meditation classes were available on every college campus. I looked at the poster of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and thought he was the personification of serenity. He defined one end of the serenity continuum; I was living near the other end. I understood that I needed to move myself at least to the other side of the midpoint.

I signed up, took a few classes, was given my secret mantra, and began practicing. I cannot describe fully why, but I felt better from the very beginning. I was able to relax my body to a noticeable degree. My thinking continued at a nonstop pace, but Transcendental Meditation teaches to not be bothered by that. I was willing to trust the process.

One thing I learned early on was the power of breathing abdominally. When I meditated, I breathed slowly and deeply, and it slowed down my body and my mind. I realized that all the rest of my day, I was breathing up in my chest and I was tense and reactive. I adopted another practice. Whenever I noticed that I was tense or anxious, or if the person I was with was tense or anxious, I said to myself, “Rick, shift your breathing.” I would then take several deep abdominal breaths. Over a period of five to seven years, I went from being a chest breather to an abdominal breather—as my default mode.

I came to understand that the most effective way for me to shift my attention or shift my thinking was to lead with my body through breath. In the past, when I was having trouble concentrating, I would try to bear down, drive myself to stay on subject, or push myself in some almost harsh way. I call this “pouncing” on the task and trying to ride it to a conclusion. I have since learned instead to get up, move my body in some version of a gentle stretch, sit comfortably, breathe deeply, and ease my attention into the task. Instead of pouncing, I am gently sliding my focus to the task.

I had had digestive issues on and off since childhood. After I had begun meditating, I began applying deep abdominal breathing when I experienced intestinal cramping or other symptoms. This usually gave me some immediate relief. It was perhaps twenty years before these issues went away for good.

When I meditate, I sit comfortably in a quiet space. I breathe abdominally. After a few breaths, I repeat a mantra silently in rhythm with my breathing. At some point, without my realizing it, my attention goes off in some direction and I think about one thing after another. At another point I recognize that I have thought about a string of things and lost the focus on my breath and the mantra. I tell myself that I have gotten distracted, that I need to let go of whatever I have been thinking about, and I return my attention, gently but firmly, to the expansion and contraction at my waist as I breathe, and then begin again with my mantra. The cycle repeats. At some point I am lost again in thought until I have that moment of recognition, sweep away the thoughts, and bring my attention back to my breathing and the mantra. Over time, I have developed the capacity to reliably let go of thoughts.

As a practicing clinical psychologist, I undergo a version of this process during every therapy session. The client offers a variety of experiences, issues, and concerns. Some of these experiences or issues spur my own associations, and I am in my own head and no longer listening to the client. Sometimes, my thoughts or reactions are worth sharing, and other times not. In the latter case, I need to let go of my thoughts and transition back to listening well. So, my profession provides multiple training opportunities every hour to let go of thoughts.

This raises a couple of odd questions. How many thoughts have I let go of? What difference has it made? Here is a calculation. I have meditated for more than fifty years. About half of those years, I meditated once a day; the rest of those years, I meditated twice a day—an average of around 550 times a year. It is hard to count discrete thoughts, but perhaps I let go of twenty thoughts per session. That would add up to letting go of 550,000 thoughts. Now we take 70,000 hours of psychotherapy: letting go of ten thoughts per session brings another 700,000 thoughts let go. Putting the two totals together we have 1.25 million thoughts let go.

What difference has it made? Who knows, but it has helped me to not over-identify who I am with what I think. To draw on a Buddhist exercise I read in a book by Ken Wilber: I have a body and I am not my body. I have desires and I am not my desires. I have emotions and I am not my emotions. I have thoughts and I am not my thoughts…

If I am not my body, desires, emotions, or thoughts, then who am I? The short answer from the Buddhist perspective is that I am a seat of awareness. The Western perspective is that I have a sense of self that can be called an ego. This ego is multifaceted and multilayered, incorporating a sense of body, desires, emotions, thoughts, memories, identifications, etc. The goal of most psychotherapies is the development of a “healthy” ego.

My own desire is not for a healthier ego, but for less and less ego at all. Here I will quote a brilliant client, Dan K., who is writing his way out of the self-restrictions he has suffered under for decades: “The ego is all and only about survival.” Fortunately, the only serious threats to my survival are disease and aging. I have been letting go of thoughts, desires, and identifications for fifty years.

Earlier this year, I came across a book titled Letting Go by the psychiatrist David Hawkins. It was published in 2012 shortly before his death. The topic of this book is letting go of negative emotions. I have long maintained that there are two basic ways to change: striving/achieving and letting go. The striving is straightforward. If you want to earn a college degree or plant a garden, there are steps to take. Letting go is wonkier—how do you get over a major disappointment or grieve the death of a loved one? Hawkins describes a process that spoke to me more clearly than other descriptions that I have read, or that I have passed along to my clients.

Hawkins says we all have suppressed and repressed negative emotions during our lifetimes. These suppressed and repressed emotions are an unconscious layer of our sense of ourselves, our egos. They impact our perceptions of the world, our thoughts, and our behavior.

In addition to my daily meditation practice, I currently devote some time each week to letting go of suppressed and repressed emotions as well as some conscious negative present-day emotions. It is all about letting go of ego.

Another thing that has contributed to my faithfulness to a meditation practice is the discovery that I am powerfully drawn to silence and stillness—an aspect of Quaker worship that I deeply appreciate. Often when people begin to meditate, they are disheartened by all the chatter in their heads. They close their eyes, take a breath, repeat their mantra once or twice, and off their minds go. Twenty minutes pass and they realize that they have been lost in thought the entire time. They conclude that they are failing. First, let me say that I have had that experience literally thousands of times. It is not a failure. I simply say to myself, “Rick, you were really wound up today.” But not infrequently, my body becomes absolutely still, especially when I pause briefly between an exhale and the next inhale. Less commonly and wondrously, I move into total silence. This silence is a profound experience, both empty and full. For me, it never seems to last very long. I cannot estimate how long because it is an experience outside of time. Qualitatively it is an experience of connectedness or oneness with all that is.

On a closing note, I have another spiritual practice, a weekly one that I have kept up for twenty-two years. In the months before my fiftieth birthday, two clients brought me a book titled The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In the book is a practice she calls writing Morning Notes. The idea is to wake up, pick up a legal pad, and not let the pen stop until you have filled three pages. She promises that after a few weeks of moaning and groaning on paper, something surprising will happen. What happened for me is the topic for another article. I wrote every morning for eight months and then every Sunday morning since.

In one note, eight or ten years ago, I posed a question: “What is it that I am to do?” My pen wrote that I was “to open hearts and minds in ways that bring about experiences of oneness.” I hope this article aligns with that intention.

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