Finding Peace: Being Present in the Moment Through Meditation

I was sitting in a company-wide meeting, and a felt a crippling inability to breath.

I gasped and struggled for a wisp of air. It didn’t get better. No matter how hard I labored for something so basic, it wasn’t enough. It was like breathing through a straw. I looked around, sitting mid-row in this large room filled with a hundred or so reporters, editors and managers, and looked like a guy who got caught up in a bayou rainstorm. I was soaked, buckets of sweat flowing down my face. My chest felt like an orangoutang set up shop there. My neck like it had a dead labradoodle wrapped around it.

I can’t die here, I thought. Not in this room. Not now. I’m only 30-something. 

I got up and went to the bathroom where I could at least have a heart attack in private … and maybe keel over with some dignity and without an audience. While there, I splashed water on my sweaty face, and caught my breath.

Turns out I was having an anxiety attack. It was my first, no doubt from working long hours on short deadlines as a journalist.

I went to the doctor. He welcomed me to the club: you have stress, he said, and you have to figure out how to manage it.

I tried a lot of remedies: exercise, vacation, books, and vodka … They helped to varying degrees, but only offered a short respite. I eventually came across meditation. Desperate, I bucked up a few hundred dollars for a private session of transcendental meditation, or TM. 

I’ve been meditating every day for roughly 15 years — sometimes two or three times a day, if necessary. It’s been my most consistent remedy, or antidote to stress. It’s brought me a peace and calm unlike any other practice I’ve come across. It’s magnified the good, and occasionally neutralized the bad. It’s one of my non-negotiable practices.

At first, it was really difficult. My mind raced. My attention was distracted by a thousand useless thoughts or the slightest sound, creek or chirp.  Like so many of us, monkey mind — a Buddhist term for being unsettled or restless — was always dancing around. But I kept at it.

I wasn’t really sure how well meditation was working until one day an editor told me something had changed. My writing was sharper, clearer and snappier. The stories were better. And my wife noticed an immense change in attitude and spirit. I seemed to be managing stress better. I even started to thrive on it, a real asset in the news business.

I was sold on meditation. Over time, I’ve gone deeper with the practice, reading whatever I could, experimenting with different types, and checking out a number of practices — all the while making it a daily practice and searching for serenity. 

For much of my time, it had been a practice of anywhere from 10-to-20 minutes per day. Then I tried Tai Chi, a moving meditation, and another form at one of the nearby Buddhist temples. Earlier this year, I took an eight-week mindfulness based stress reduction course (MBSR) at Pace University inspired by the work of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn (and author of Wherever You Go There You Are), where at our final class we spent an entire day — 8 hours — being silent, mindful and meditating … it was difficult, but powerful. More recently, I’ve been taking a class focusing on the breadth, mantras and movement — Kundalini yoga — and am blown away by how transformative it has been.

My go-to is still TM, a practice using mantras that so many artists, actors and executives swear by. The progress has been gradual, and each practice has taken me to a new level. Meditation is like exercise or dieting: for it to be successful, one must practice often. It really must be a daily practice … one doesn’t get in great shape by going to the gym once, or lose 25 pounds by eating a salad. It only really works when you make it a habit.

Much like working out, you’ll have good days and bad days. Sometimes our minds just won’t stop: work, life and relationships have a way of knocking us off kilter. It’s those times that we ought to double down, and go deeper, in my view. There’s an old Zen saying you should sit for 20 minutes a day, unless of course you are too busy. Then you should sit for an hour. 

That one always resonates: We have to make the time. We squander so much of it.

Another Zen saying that has always stuck with me is, “If you don’t go within, you go without.”

Don’t go without.

Put away the device, turn off the tube, and take a few minutes each day to be silent and present (there are even apps like Calm and Headspace that offer guided meditations).

Every so often, I am reminded of the power of meditation. Each morning, when I go downstairs, my little puppy Nora welcomes me as if she hasn’t seen me in years. It’s lovely, except when she jumps and sidles. But when I sit down to meditate, she too calms down, sitting there in quiet with me. She’s my little Buddha pup, and it shows when we are calm, present and living in the moment, it’s contagious. Others will too.