I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stuff coming out, stuff going in. I’m just a part of everything.
Peter Gabriel
My meditation practice, as I discovered it some twenty-three years ago now, has been to sit in silence, either alone or with a group. Even though I have attended and benefited from what is called “guided meditation,” I find the insistence of another voice in the process to be more of a distraction than a benefit. However, when attending my first Courage and Renewal retreat at the turn of the 21st century, I was introduced to the concept of “the third thing.” The way I understand it is that the first thing is the group of people gathered together. The second thing is the purpose for the gathering. The third thing, then, is kind of a vehicle that brings the gathering and the purpose together, a thing that facilitates or embodies that purpose. The third thing is usually a text of some kind, a poem, a paragraph, a song, a painting–and out of that third thing comes an impetus or a spark for the work that needs doing: introspection, reflection, inquiry, meditation.
Whenever I have facilitated a group for meditation practice, I have borrowed the structure of the “third thing,” and I find this useful and potentially transformative. So, as I have returned to daily meditation practice at the start of this year, I have taken, even though I am alone, to incorporating a third thing. Here’s how it works, structurally: I ring the bell. I read out loud (again, even though I am alone) the text I have chosen. Next, I start the meditation timer I have installed on my phone. I get three more chimes of the bell, and then meditation begins. 25 minutes later, the bell on my phone chimes three times to bring the meditation to a close. I will again read out loud the text I have chosen, and then finally, to return to the analog world and the rest of the day, I chime my meditation bell one more time. So the whole process is a kind of bell/text/meditation/text/bell sandwich.
When I am facilitating in a group, I will be selective and intentional about choosing a text, but as I am by myself, and I find it a bit silly that I would invest too much energy in preparation to facilitate myself, I have chosen to work my way from the beginning to the end in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step. These are short essays, most not longer than a page, some significantly shorter, and they are essentially mindfulness meditations in and of themselves that provide a lovely little focal point for each day’s 30 minutes on the cushion. Today’s chapter, for example, was about our tendency to think too much–and how we might use mindful breathing practices to quiet that “cassette,” as he calls it! It was right on target for me this morning, as my “thinking cassette” prevented me from sleeping all the way through the night.
This is all just to say that I prefer silent meditation to guided meditation–but that silence can be embodied or helped along by the echoes or resonances of a “third thing.”
So I meditated this morning, and I rode my bicycle, and I had my coffee and my breakfast, and finally I celebrated the release date of my new single with Project MA by doing the first record shopping of the new year. I had some gift cards burning a hole in my pocket and I could wait no longer. Initially, I thought I would wait for the special edition coming out in March, but then part of me rebelled against the marketing trickery behind special editions (for which I am usually a sucker) and I bought Peter Gabriel’s new album, I/O. Peter’s album is a perfect way to end the day–and a nice way, too, to close this meditation on my meditation process. It’s a beautiful album. Like the best of Peter Gabriel, he’s making me think, he’s making me dance, he’s making me want to cry–in succession and all at once.
Here’s a link to the songs I’ve been writing with my friend Adam for our endeavor as Project MA. Oddly enough (or not), my lyrics often illustrate people having difficulty with mindfulness practice–with the exception of a song called “Where Is There,” which is my best effort in a pop song to articulate the value of living in the present moment.
michael jarmer 