Around the end of last year—once my book had been published and my son had been born—I was able to find the space to think about the next steps and proper evolution of my philosophical work.
Philosophy and language are important tools for leading a wise life, and the hope is that cultivating a philosophy and language over time will also organically cultivate the requisite actions for creating a wise existence. Through publishing this newsletter and my book, I have learned how my work has improved people’s lives, but the organic next step is the cultivation of specific practices that are an actionable extension of the philosophy.
For well over a year, I have ended every SCL meeting by asking each member of my team to name something Eǔtopian they had done that day or week. Over time, it has become clear that being able to attach a proactively good word to their daily actions while also taking the time to articulate why the action was good has been empowering and nurturing for my team.
SCL The Word is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
However, using language and philosophy to redefine our actions and their meaning is only one part of the journey. The next step after cultivating philosophy and language is to consciously create new actions or practices that will cultivate the good you want to create in the world.
Last November, I began to focus more time on creating new practices, and this brings us to the importance of meditation.
Meditation and Creating Space
To help sustain and grow The Word with Barrett Holmes Pitner we have introduced a subscription option to the newsletter. Subscribers will allow us to continue producing The Word, and create exciting new content including podcasts and new newsletters.
Subscriptions start at $5 a month, and if you would like to give more you can sign up as a Founding Member and name your price.We really enjoy bringing you The Word each week and we thank you for supporting our work.
As I thought about the potential importance of meditation as an extension of my philosophy, I had to confront an uncomfortable truth: I am not that good at meditating. And by “good,” I mean that I do not consistently do it. I have peaks and valleys. I can consistently meditate for months, and then stop one day and not pick it back up again for months.
Also, I do not find most meditation apps or practices to be fulfilling. Most of them seem very reactionary, in that they exist to help you alleviate a problem. If you have too much stress or anxiety, or struggle to focus, there are scores of meditations to help you address these problems. Yet I have never wanted to practice meditation merely as a response to something bad, but as an act of doing something proactively good.
Using meditation to hopefully solve one problem seemed too myopic, so instead I wanted to practice meditations that could preempt potential problems. Luckily, I found a meditation called Isha Kriya that exists to proactively put good energy into your body. According to some meditative teachings, kriya functions similarly to karma. With karma, a person puts good energy out into the world and the theory is that by doing so good energy will come back to you. Kriya is a meditative practice that sends energy inward instead of outward and the theory is that unspecified good things will occur to yourself and your body.
Also, it is important to distinguish between kriya and America’s obsession with “positive thinking.” When “positive thinking” is regarded as the pinnacle it is assumed that positive actions will naturally occur. There is an inherent passivity to being overly reliant on positive thinking. There must be a step beyond positive thinking that creates positive actions and practices. Meditation and kriya are the positive practices that we need that extend beyond positive thinking.
Since I know that my meditation practices are not always consistent, I enlisted a couple friends to practice the meditation with me so that we could support and converse with each other along the journey. Each of us created the space in our day to meditate at least once and ideally twice a day. Of course, we missed a day from time to time, but we just picked it back up the next day.
I have been talking a lot about meditation within my network, and a recurring theme has popped up in these conversations. The theme is “space,” but with two areas of focus.
The first concept of “space” is simply finding the space in your day to consistently meditate. Meditation might only take 15 minutes, but it is hard for people to commit to finding the time and space to meditate when they are not sure as to why they need to do it.
For example: if you are too stressed or anxious, it is easy for someone to create the space to practice a meditation that will relieve stress and anxiety. Who knows if the meditation itself is effective, but its linear lack of complexity makes it easier for people to understand why they need to do it. This is why reactive, anti-bad meditations are very popular.
It is much harder, however, to convince people to create the space to engage in a meditation without a simple objective and a clear outcome. If people are not sure about exactly what they will get out of the experience, then they are less likely to engage in the action and create the space to do so.
I also suffer from this dilemma, and this is partly why I could be better at meditation. I want to know precisely why I am doing something, and if not, I will not engage in the action.
The language for explaining kriya clicked in my mind and it also clicked with a handful of friends, so we all created time and space to practice it.
Internal and External Space
All of us created the external space to practice a meditation that was supposed to give us good energy, yet this is still a pretty vague goal and still did not make sense to some people. Some friends still wanted to know why the meditation was important and what exactly was the point of the meditation if nothing needed to be fixed. These are valid questions that I was also hoping to find an answer for.
Eventually, I found my answer, and it had everything to do with space, but internal space instead of external space. This proactive meditation existed to cultivate a new space within us that created a subtle separation between the instinctive, natural, and reactionary version of ourselves. This definition made a lot of sense to me because I have always been good at cultivating that internal space.
For example: when I was younger most people knew me to be a very funny kid who laughed a lot and cracked jokes, but this propensity to see me as merely a comedic figure made people less likely to take me seriously. This dynamic used to frustrate me a lot, so I decided that I needed to develop the capacity to not be funny. I needed to be able to turn it on and off, so one summer I committed myself to not being funny. I had a summer job working at a hospital, and decided that I would not be funny for three months. When someone would say something and the impulse inside me would think up a joke, I would mentally pause, or meditate, for a moment and think of something else to say. I engaged in this practice multiple times a day, and I got better and better at pausing and then thinking of something interesting that might not be funny. For a whole summer, I worked and made friends with my colleagues, and they had no idea that outside of work people thought I was hilarious.
Back then, I only considered this to be an interesting experiment, but in hindsight, it was a subtle meditation practice that helped me create internal space within myself so that I wasn’t passively letting emotions and instinct determine my actions. I could always pause instead of react, and the mental space created by the pause gave me more calm, control, and clarity over my life. I never became overly stressed or anxious because I had the space within myself to pause.
However, a peculiar thing began to occur as I got better and better at pausing. Since I would rarely lose my cool or become overwhelmed with emotion people began to think that I was cold or emotionless. Because our culture does not encourage people to cultivate this internal space within themselves, the expectation is that all of us are supposed to be held captive by our emotions, and having more mindful control over your reactions to emotional stimuli becomes seen as a negative thing. The uncontrolled expression of emotion allegedly became proof of emotions, and a controlled expression of emotions allegedly demonstrated a lack of emotion.
For a long time, a skill and an internal space that I knew to be beneficial was perceived as something detrimental and it made it very hard for me to articulate how and why this internal space was beneficial. When a society equates calmness with lifelessness and considers chaos to be a fuller form of living, we should re-examine the values of the environment in which we live.
Ethnocide works to normalize chaos because the intentional destruction of a people’s culture is chaotic. To counter ethnocide, we need philosophy, language, and practices. A proactive meditation practice devoted to creating a calm internal space filled with good energy can give us the wisdom and strength to make our external spaces more sustainable, nurturing, and Eǔtopian.