Episode Transcript
In 2013, I was living in Thailand and went on my first meditation retreat. It was about an hour outside of Bangkok, and the first few days broke me physically. Here I was in my athletic prime years of martial arts, three professional fights, and I couldn’t sit cross-legged for more than an hour without my hips and back feeling like they were on fire.
But a few days in something shifted. I found postures that worked, and when the physical pain quieted, a different kind arrived, it was a familiar itch. I realized I’d been masking my entire life. It had to do with the abuse I endured from my father. So from the time I was 13, whenever those memories surfaced, I trained them away.
I’d pushed myself to the breaking point at the boxing club, run hills until I couldn’t stand. Competing professionally as a fighter gave me a socially acceptable way to basically routinely punish myself. I could always just rationalize. I was training hard because doing so protected me in the cage.
So here I was in Thailand surrounded by monks. All I wanted to do was leave the temple, do sprints until I vomited. The itch was unbearable, but inspired by the monks around me, I refused to leave. I kept sitting, and as the hours passed, something became clear that I hadn’t been able to see before. What I thought was healing… the training, the fighting, the physical punishment was a habit of running away. It was the best tool I had at the time, but it was a bit like applying Icy Hot to a torn ACL. It may help with the pain, but wasn’t addressing the deeper structural stuff. At various points in the retreat, I just wept at the new insights that emerged because I could now observe my thoughts rather than be ruled by them.
At other points, I looked around the room to see others weeping as well. Some were entering the hardest moments of their lives, not to relive them, but to realize they no longer had to live inside them. Through this retreat, many of us had realized we have a new tool now. One we can use anytime we need it.
We can observe our thoughts from a distance, no longer needing to get swept away in them or act out on them. Thoughts can be like this matcha bowl, right? They can arise. We can practice the capacity to see them. We can turn them around, notice that they’re 3D, notice that we are not them. See them from different angles… to try to learn from them what we can and then we can set them back down. As I’ve learned in meeting people from dozens of countries, most of us have some version of the itch I spent years trying to, trying to train away, and most of us have developed our own way of dealing with it. Mine was brutal physical training.
For others, it’s, pouring themselves into their career or pouring that next glass of wine or getting lost in a novel. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. In fact, there can be a whole lot right with them, especially early on when they’re the only tools we have. In this sense, even what we deem today as very bad habits could have been at some point a very helpful habit.
It’s just that our tool set was limited. It’s like you can pound a nail into a wall with a wrench, but a hammer or a drill would probably be better, right? So not all tools, kind of like not all habits, are bad. Sometimes we’ve just outgrown them. The question worth sitting with isn’t so much, what you do when the itch surfaces, although that’s important.
It’s whether what you’re doing is serving a past you or the you you are right now. See you next week.
Show Notes
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