About 9 years ago, I went to the jungle in Thailand and spent several days in meditation with a handful of monks and a group of like-minded westerners. We were doing Vipassana, which is an ancient Indian meditation technique. It was grueling, but after a few days I began to see some progress. I would be lying if I said I really learned the technique, but I can still confidently say it had a permanent effect on my life.
After returning to civilization I tried applying what I learned to my daily life, mostly unsuccessfully. Over the course of a couple years, I discovered a handful of things which worked and stuck with me. While most definitely not really parts of Vipassana, they are at least somewhat related to mindfulness. I’d like to share two of them here.
Driving
In the months after returning from the Vipassana retreat, I was acutely aware of what I was doing, thinking, and feeling. Some things became blatantly obvious to me. One of those things was that driving really stressed me out. I had been somewhat of a competitive driver. As a teenager, I worked as a delivery guy for Dominos and for the Post Office, delivering subpoenas. In both cases, I would often have several different deliveries at a time, a handful of pizzas, sometimes up to 30 subpoenas. Being also an analytical guy and enjoying puzzles and problems, I naturally fell into a sort of “travelling salesman” problem. I would chart out the best course to deliver everything with the least amount of backtracking, and preferably in some sort of circuit, ending close to where I began.
I loved this. It stimulated my mind, while also being applicable to the real world. And as an added benefit, I became a veritable expert in my city. I knew all the back roads, how to avoid traffic lights, what speed to drive between lights to hit green at exactly the right second. It felt powerful.
Long after leaving those jobs, this still affected my driving style. I was always optimizing. Which meant that every time something happened which impacted the optimal route, I got frustrated. Someone slowed down so I missed my light, I couldn’t get into the correct lane early enough because of traffic, I had to stop at a cross-walk, all of this created anxiety. It wasn’t until after the Vipassana course that I realized that this was all being created by me, not by everyone else.
So I changed it. I adopted three rules:
- Drive the speed limit everywhere
- Choose the most direct path
- Be courteous and safe
This was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. Every fiber of my being wanted to optimize. Driving 50km per hour felt torturous, let alone 30km per hour. Everywhere I went, other drivers were annoyed with me, driving incredibly close, chomping at the bit to find a place to get past me. I made sure to keep rule #3 in mind all the time, instead of getting angry and huffy at those people, I made sure that it was easy for them to get past me. The last thing I wanted was to introduce extra danger into traffic by trying to control other drivers. This was only about my own peace of mind.
Eventually, it became easier. And then the magic happened. I started to relax, not just in traffic but in other situations. Waiting for an old lady ahead of me in line, picking out change to pay for her groceries. Carefully choosing a checkout line to minimize waiting time and then getting anxious when another line went faster. Slow people hogging the sidewalk in front of me. All of these things started to bother me less and less. I started to view this travel between locations as journeys; simply part of my day. Not something to optimize, nor something to particularly enjoy, but also not something which should increase my anxiety.
Listening
I have always been the type that loves to debate, partly because it is fun, but also because I’m pretty good at it. I was always ready with a response, a clarification, or a twist, I was always able to step back and view things from a different angle and bring something interesting back into the conversation. After returning from Vipassana, I realized that I was missing something extremely important. I was not really a good listener.
So I set out to fix that.
After some reading and thinking, an exercise emerged which has really helped me understand people better and create somewhat deeper and more meaningful connections. It is very similar to some of the basic concepts of Vipassana, just without the deep meditation aspect. Here’s what I did:
- I waited for a conversation with a single other person where the topic wasn’t a very important one. This allowed me to experiment while limiting the danger of missing something important.
- While the other person was talking, I focused all my energy on what the person was saying. Actually, more to the point, I focused all my energy on not thinking one of the following (or similar things):
- “I don’t agree with he just said”
- “That’s funny”
- “That reminds me of something”
- “I’m going to respond just as soon as I can say something without cutting him off.”
That’s it. Really simple. Don’t think about how what the other person is saying affects you. Don’t inject yourself into the conversation. Just listen.
The results were fascinating. The obvious result was that whenever the other person took a pause, I was right there, staring and listening. People are not used to this, they expect you to constantly try to cut in. So people thought I was zoning out, or being passive aggressive, or something like that. Another interesting thing was that after successfully staying “in the now” I found it sometimes difficult to focus on the voice and would instead get lost on staring at a certain part of the speaker’s face, which is obviously not the preferred result.
Eventually, after some patience from my co-experimenters, I got the hang of it. The overall results were really nice. Similar to the driving experiment, I felt like I had gained control of something. No longer was I driven to “put in my 2 cents”, and I was less worried about my points being misunderstood. From the other side, people seemed to feel more comfortable in those conversations because they began to trust that actual listening was happening, and not just a competition for air space.
Both of these exercises have had their part in helping me be more resilient and calm in cases of stress or urgency. I have become better at observing my own response to situations, reflecting on them and realizing whether the response is detrimental to my relationships, both personal and professional.
gvcolot
This is all pretty neat…..now I understand better your ability to be in the field you are in now. Not to mention the fact that it’s a great way to approach young children’s minds when one is involved in their upbringing.