It's 5:30am, and I can't sleep. Insomnia has been a problem lately, so I've increased the time I spend meditating. The reason why is, my baby boy came for a visit with his mom, and I'm overwhelmed with excitement. His mom falls asleep and he stays up for another hour or so, until he finally succumbs to sleep. It's not so much that I can't sleep but that I fell asleep earlier, before my visitors appeared at my door's steps. Normally, I'd go to bed around 10pm and wake up slightly a few minutes before my alarm goes off at 5:22am, but my baby's mom, a flight attendant, gets here close to midnight and given the joyous occasion, sleep goes out the window. I see his angel-like face and wonder what he's dreaming of. I am living the dream, no sleep and all.
Given my recent break-up with my fiance, I have lost weight and sleep. In retrospect, I've gained far more. I counter this grief period with exhaustive workout routines, meditation and writing. Lack of sleep, however, has awakened this thirst inside that I can only quench by doing all the things I should have already done and in the process, I've undone some of the mental anguish and self-inflicted pain that this has caused. I tell myself, things will get better in time, put myself through an emotional quarantine (a period lasting forty days in which I do not contact the significant other) out of which emerges, not an egotistical self on denial and bent on vengeance but a far better self both in and out.
The best vengeance of all is to continue to enjoy the little things in life, no need for redemption, no mindless retaliation. I'm out to exorcise the inner demons, grab my battered ego by the balls and ready to make amends with the past. Lifelong friendships have emerged out of this phase, and I must be doing something right when more than a dozen of people I've been romantically involved with are still friends on Facebook.
I don't dwell in self-defeating thoughts and accept that episodes of anger, regret, feelings of loss, grief, blame will swirl in and out of my head. Introducing then the most lethal remedy in my arsenal, good to defeat the most haunting inner shadows, for whatever ails you: meditation. You can see on my iTunes library how many times I've played "Call of the Search" in the past two months alone: a staggering 841 plays. All in all, nothing can survive the cleansing meditation imparts and surely things are starting to look up, downward spiral feelings have waned. Unlike past insomniac instances, this time around is because I am beside myself at the spectacle of having my baby boy here for a visit. I feel like a kid, sleep or no sleep. First nights alone were harsh, to say the least, I drank more heavily than usual, straight up cheap vodka mixed with orange juice and passed out on the couch for a few hours, immune to the earthly celestial sounds of "Call of Search". I brought my older child from the Bronx and stayed with him for days, and in those nights I slept sober and had no recorded history of insomnia. My baby boys are what I hold most sacred in this life and if there's a habit that has the same resonance in it as well is meditation. They only bring out the best in me.
Meditation is a conscious choice, or at the very least more conscious and therefore more of a choice than sleep, the mind more than the body needs sleep. "Exercise your body, meditate your mind" I wrote once. No one needs meditation, unless you've experienced the tangible bliss it can be in our lives; then it is no longer a choice, but almost second-nature, a deeply-rooted habit. Hence the argument: can you consider something you can't be without a choice? It's more like a vice, if it weren't for the measurable benefits it bestows upon its subject. I can remember going without food temporarily, due to lack of resources or emotional deprivation; I can remember going without sleep, the result of an overactive mind or a consuming task that needed tending to, excessive stress, etc. I can remember overcoming nicotine addiction and it gets easier to undertake anything else once you climb that proverbial mountain. I can remember just about anything and everything that ever become obsessively important to me, not be so important anymore, whether it was worthy of it or not. I've gone days, even months without exercising, even days where I had no money at all. I can remember a day, here and there, going without an orgasm. But I can't remember a day that has gone by without me putting my mind mind at ease through the process of meditation ever since I began meditating.
Now, maybe this has something to do with my obsessive-compulsive nature, but if I were to draw similarities to it, I'd say meditation is more like writing. It is undeniably more useful and I, too, have gone a day or two without sitting down to write. The love I have for meditation and writing, coincidentally, evolved around the same time: in my mid-teens, like most hardcore habits that daunt us for the rest of our lives. I know that, for as long as I live, I will consistently do two things and I won't be able to call life it my life if it weren't for these two things, which I will do and continue doing until when I do no more: meditation and writing. If I had to choose one over the other, and I hope that day doesn't come, I'd go for meditation. In fact, I don't think they're two things but one in essence, just like everything else. Meditation, and not an orgasm, should be considered like a small death; orgasms are more like dying than death. I don't say this in a metaphorical sense; I mean it. I mean, meditation achieves the not-doing, just being, and the not thinking, just barely breathing, that one can conceive of as being in death. If done right, meditation doesn't even involve being, the phenomenon that we call life, if only for a brief eternity, ceases to exist. Maybe death is nothing more than the most profound and uninterrupted form of meditation.
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