Notes on Meditation, Trauma and Sleeping in the Rain

In my younger days, I used to be attracted to extreme experiences. One youthful experience that stands out to me was the time in my 20s when a friend of mine and I attempted to walk across a country in eastern Europe without a tent, sleeping bag, or any camping gear at all. The only explanation I can offer here is that were young, dumb and reading too much Nietzsche. We wanted to take minimalism to a new level and so we decided to walk through hundreds of miles of a foreign country carrying only a map, a bag of muesli, and a few changes of clothing.

For anyone wishing to recreate this adventure, let me tell you: you've never had a truly bad night of sleep until you've slept on the ground in a cold, dark forest in the pouring rain. That happened on the first night of the trip, and nearly every successive night of the trip. I still remember lying there, that first night, shivering and miserable, the rain beating down on me. A single thought kept recurring in my brain: "This is a terrible idea." Worst night of camping ever.

With the benefit of age and a little wisdom, I can see now that my yearning for extreme experience was a deep-set need to fill an inner emptiness. I was an exciting kind of person then; but mostly because I was so painfully lost. I was great fun at parties; but mostly because I was medicating undiagnosed depression.

These days, I'm less fun at parties. The only kind of extreme experience I regularly participate in are periodic meditation retreats where I sit in silence with a group of other similarly brave (or dumb) humans for up to seven days at a time. But I don't want to really talk here about meditation, or the virtues of meditation, because you probably saw a thousand Instagram posts on that before noon today. All I want to say about meditation is that meditation, fundamentally, is about sitting with what is, and "what is" is often terrible. One of the core misconceptions I hear about meditation (from people who don't meditate) is that it's a kind of blissed-out experience. Yes, one can attain many wonderful and blissful states of being through meditation, but more often - particularly in the beginning - it's more of an extremely painful confrontation with everything you've spent your life avoiding. For good reason, in Tibetan Buddhism, one symbol for meditation is an image of an arrow passing through an eyeball. That's how it often feels. You're sitting on a cushion, undefended, while every insecurity and fear you've ever experienced pierces you relentlessly, for minutes that can feel like days, and for days that can feel like years. A meditation teacher of mine once mocked the popular notion of "living in the moment" and that this was supposed to be this great thing. He noted that when we really tune in to the present moment, the news isn't usually good. At best, we're hungry, or bored, or uncomfortable in the chair we're in; at worst, we're terrified of a work deadline, or sad about a recent loss, or depressed, or having a panic attack. The "moment" usually kind of sucks.

In meditation, you confront again and again (and again and again), the "first noble truth" in Buddhism, which is that life is...uncomfortable. What I want to do is to link this spiritual insight to our understanding of trauma and, in the process, tweak slightly how we think of trauma and maybe mental health in general. Here's why. When you sit in silence for long enough, when you decide that you want to face life, when you decide that you want to really see life as it is, and see through your rationalizations and defenses and lies (these are the rationalizations and defenses and lies, by the way, that allow us to keep going and functioning), you see that life isn't just uncomfortable. It's actually rather worse than that, I'm sorry to say. You see that life is really a long experience of discomfort - thoughts and feelings that are really too difficult to face all the time.

Our understanding of trauma has grown exponentially over the past twenty years, and completely changed how we practice therapy. Increased awareness of PTSD, and new treatments for PTSD, have allowed millions of people to live happier lives (and I believe that PTSD is still under-diagnosed). Yet, there is still a common perception that trauma is a kind of thing that will happen rarely and, in any event, shouldn't happen in a life that's gone well. What I want to do is to refocus our lens slightly so we can see that trauma is unfortunately part of the fabric of every human life. If you experience trauma, it does not mean that you're living an abnormal life, or that your life has gone off course; it merely means that you're living. Even under the best of circumstances - you're born in a wealthy family of loving people, you have a great career, you have plenty of money, you have a loving, healthy family of your own - you're still going to experience one or more unspeakable disasters. That's just how it is. But then why do we have this habit of mind of thinking that trauma shouldn't or won't happen? Simply, because it's trauma. Trauma, by definition, is an experience so extreme or painful that it exceeds our ability to cope with it. The idea of being traumatized is so terrifying to the human organism that we naturally repress it (rationalize, defend, lie). Otherwise, our nervous systems would be in a permanent state of activation. We must think of disaster as something extraordinary, unlikely, outside the normal course of life.

Now is the part of the essay where, morbidly, I must remind you that, of course, you are going to face trauma. And I'm going to sharpen the knife even more by referring to these experiences not in a clinical way as traumas but, more viscerally, as just the inevitable terrors of existence. Start with the obvious: you will die one of these days, either from sudden or prolonged illness. Every minute of your life you face the terror of not being at all anymore. In a relatively short time, your remnants will lie inert in a wooden box beneath twelve feet of cold ground, and you will be nothing. Every thought and feeling you've ever had will cease to exist. Your best friends will die (or continue to die, if that process has already begun for you). If you're a parent, there's a non-trivial, 15% chance that you will outlive one of your children (for me, the most terrifying possibility). If you are someone who lives alone, isolation is its own, unique form of terror. At some point in your life, you have probably been wounded deeply by someone else, if not physically then emotionally. You will probably be hurt terribly again. You may experience the terror of unrealized dreams, the powerlessness of knowing that you will never achieve what you might have. You might experience a kind of subtle, daily terror that you're not enough, that you're not worthy of love, that you won't be accepted by others. You might experience a kind of terrifying fear - particularly right now - that there is no good in the world, that good will not prevail. These are all normal terrors, the results of a "lucky" life. I'm not even including the more high-profile terrors of, say, being in a Miami condo when it inexplicably collapses, or having a child die in a school shooting, or losing a loved one on 9/11. This uplifting list I've compiled (you're welcome) names just some of the mind-bending disasters that are absolutely going to happen to you and everyone you love.

After that last paragraph, we all need a deep breath. Yes, all that bad stuff is going to happen, but you're here now. Smile. Inhale. Exhale.

The point of this essay is not to scare you (by pointing out the inherent traumas of living). The point is that, even when we think we're really being honest with ourselves and looking life in the face, there is a lot about life - what we could call "the terror realm" - that we usually cannot face. Unless you're the Buddha himself, there's a good deal of life that we need to exclude from our field of awareness so we can go on living. So we can wake up every morning, and care for others, and do our jobs, and not be shuddering wrecks.

If we see life as a fundamentally terrorizing, then it also changes how we think about mental health. Historically, we have thought of mental health treatment as the domain of the "ill." Today, though, in an era when therapy is more popular than ever, I would guess that most people seeing a therapist would not meet criteria for the more severe mental illnesses in the DSM. People are increasingly trying therapy because - simply - it is a very hard thing to be a human being. Every single person can benefit from someone who is warm, non-judgmental and really listens to them; and every single person deserves that gift. We all need help. Perhaps because we do experience a diagnosable mental illness but, more likely, because living is traumatic. Once we stop avoiding, and look within ourselves, we see oceans of pain. Oceanic suffering. And that's not because something has gone wrong with our lives. That's just the way things are.

I want to finish the story of the time when I slept in a eastern European forest in the rain. As befits this essay, the night was even worse that I've let on. As my friend and I were lying on the cold ground in the pouring rain, we were also swarmed by hordes of flies, which bit us mercilessly and left us with massive welts on our faces and arms. Eventually, the situation was so unbearable that our only option was to get up and walk through the night in search of some kind of shelter - a barn, a wall, something. We never did find shelter. We walked through the night and gave up on the hope of sleep. The entire time I cursed silently, and aloud, our entire dumbass, macho enterprise of walking across a country without a goddam tent.

Eventually, the sun began to rise and, just as it did, we found ourselves walking into a small town. It was one of those charming European towns that make you feel like you're in a fairytale, and there was a kind of romance in passing through a sleeping city where no one is yet awake. In that early morning hour, we did notice one light on, the town's bakery. Cold, haggard, demoralized, we were desperate for anything that might comfort us. Warm bread, coffee, a place to sit. We knocked on the door. The bakery was not officially open yet, but the baker let us in with a big smile. I remember two things about the encounter with the baker. First, the warm rolls he offered us, which nearly brought tears to our eyes. More than that, though, I recall his flawless hospitality, the friendly way in which he greeted us. He asked us about our trip and offered encouragement. He shared some information about the area. It wasn't extravagant, just a very small moment of humanity, and yet a moment that lingers in my memory twenty years later. It is something to be welcomed when you're a stranger in a strange land.

You can take two lessons from this story (beyond the obvious lesson to not do dumb things like camp without a tent). The first is that while life is generally difficult, there is also kindness and compassion alongside it. Kindness and compassion are always waiting for us to find. At any moment, we can choose to hold ourselves with a little more compassion. At any moment, we can be a friendly face to someone in need. Kindness and compassion are always available. Life being the difficult experience it is, this is the wise course of action.

The second lesson one can take from my silly story is that, even amid the difficulty, there are small joys to be found. More to the point, it's easier to find joy when you aim small. Warm bread, a friendly face, hot coffee, a comfortable chair. For me, as I write this essay, I'm looking at a bottle of white wine sitting on my dining table. It gives me a small joy looking at it: the handsomeness of its shape, the pale yellow color, the colorful label, the anticipation of eventually opening it. Libraries are full of books about the joy of drinking wine, but has anyone written about the smaller joy of looking at wine? If not, let me be the first.

To sum it all up, life is just like a horror film that we watch with our hands intermittently covering our eyes because we can't bear to look. As a species, we're all lying petrified on the ground in a dark forest in the rain, pretending that the sun is shining. We cannot hold the terrors of existence in our consciousness on a regular basis. We need to lie and avoid in order to live, because that's how humans have evolved to process trauma. If we can face the terrible truths of existence for just a moment, however - if we can glimpse even briefly the horror of our situation - then we're naturally called to kindness and compassion, for ourselves and others. What I find interesting is that when you really lean into kindness and compassion, they can become more than just small solace in life's ocean of suffering. In cultivating these states, practicing both giving and receiving them, they have a way of becoming the story itself. The reality is that, thinking back on that trip twenty years ago, I can't think of my night sleeping in the rain without also thinking of the friendly baker I met the next morning. Suffering and compassion merge into one timeless, poignant plot.