Meditation! A life saver.

I truly feel like my entire adult life has been shaped by meditation! When I was a teenager the first form of meditation I ever learned was Tan Dan meditation at World Karate Institute. Little did I know that this simple breathing practice would open the door to an ongoing meditative practice that would have profound impacts on my life.

Shortly after I learned Tan Dan meditation as a 16 year old, I got into a fight with my cousin. This was not a one off occurance, by far, but this time it was different. My cousin had just turned 18. He called the cops, and after this engagement, I got sent to juvenile detention to await my court date. After a week in there the judge ordered me to supervised house arrest for 6 months. During this time I was only allowed to go to school, home and church functions and nothing else.

It was during this time I reevaluated my decisions and took a deep dive into my practice. I would practice my martial art techniques (puching, kicking, blocking, and shadowboxing) for 30 minutes and then I'd practice Tan Dan meditation for 30 minutes to an hour every day. Most of the time I would sit for over 45 minutes, focusing on my breathing, relaxing my body, and trying to figure out how/ why every time I think I'm making the right decision I'm always the one getting fucked over.

Without meditation I surely would be long dead right now. I would've killed myself long ago, by my own hand or through someone else's. Meditation has impacted my life so much that I think it's the one thing I replicate in my art most often. Even when the piece isn't directly about meditation it bleeds into every fascet of my art. I have done many pieces specifically on meditation for a variety of reasons. They're mostly a sitting dude while whatever message I want to portray circles within or around my little sitting personification.

I've always felt my inside world as much more vast than the world I'm confronted with day in and day out. I go inside myself daily to weed my inner garden, and prune the mental illness that plagues my life. I wasn't always this way, but I find myself better for it. Meditation is where I go to look into the mirror of my mind. Over the years I've shifted away from entertaining the stories I tell to belittle myself. Even with a more comonplace silence, I strugle to find joy in most things. My default is to bicker and fight with myself constantly. Second guessing my actions, blaming whatever reason I can find for my self imposed torturing worthless existance.

My brain seems ever content to deminish the healing benefits the Tao (god or whoever the fuck) brings to my life and those around me.

I always turn back to living a life of meditation. In the begining meditation was akin to listening to all that's going on and giving myself the freedom to listen, or simply be with it. After a while of regular practice meditation became something else for me. It became a place where I could see the way I cut up my life into symbols, explanations, or reasonings for what has happened to me in the past, and what things I worry that could happen to me in the future.

The more I practiced eventually this chatter has come to show me that the more I get pulled by these things the less of my life I really get to experience. The more I practice currently, the more I find these things don't really matter, regardless of how my emotions get pulled by them. Sometimes dreams shove my emotions in a direction, other times it's an abrupt sound or stressor. Taking time to be quiet, feeling without attaching or wrestling with whatever, helps things calm down for me. Now a days I look at my life as simply being. Being is meditation, and meditation is being. Being without contradiction or contrivance. To be.

Being, I've traveled the 5 phases of my mind and eternal peace is. Then if I want to do something with it, I can.

​And then...