I was meditating the other day on the beach, and, until the past year, I had thought that meditating was a way to erase your thoughts, to enter a place of bliss or of no-thought. Dude, I was wrong!
Thoughts always exist! When you stop thinking, you’re dead! We are always thinking, using our minds, even when we’re asleep, dreaming; and for me to believe that meditating is way to stop thought was incorrect.
So, when I was meditating, I was thinking, allowing thoughts to pass through my mind. And when I do that, and not hold on to any of them, there are all kinds of pleasant and unpleasant thoughts that drift through my head. Meditation directs my mind toward my thoughts, so I notice both the pleasant and unpleasant thoughts that arise really clearly.
When I’m not focused on meditating or focusing on my thoughts – when I’m not “sitting” – but instead I’m active during the day or night - then pleasant or unpleasant thoughts meander through my mind, too. I’m just not as aware. And, what’s amazing is that my mind gravitates toward holding on to something – bad or good. If it doesn’t have something pleasant to shift toward, then my mind gravitates, meanders, wanders down the dirt roads and asphalt freeways of my mind toward something unpleasant.
Sometimes, I think things like:
“Man, my back hurts.”
“Is my foot falling asleep? What if I get up too fast after meditating? Will I break my leg?”
“I need to pee. Don’t pee. I need to pee”
“Is that someone coming toward me? What if I don’t know who they are and they knife me in the back? That would suck, but it would be an interesting way to die. Death. Death and dying. Breathe in life, breathe out death. Are they still coming?”
“Oh shit, I just realized I have no computer. I hate that. Let go. Let go of the computer. Fucking Amazon. Sending me the wrong computer. They suck.”
“My shoulder is KILLING me. I need to relax. Relax. My shoulder is killing me. Relax. I need to relax. My jaw is killing me.”
Yes, all this, is contained in my meditations. So, as I was on the beach meditating the other day, I then wondered: Why do our minds gravitate toward unpleasant thoughts when we are not focused on pleasant thoughts?
This may not happen to you. You may live in a world of unicorns and butterflies. Where everything is pleasant all the time and no one has ever hurt you and you have no pain or suffering. But if you’re reading this, then you’re probably human, like me, and this does happen to you.
So, Grasshoppers, what if we stop looking for the unpleasant? And what if we stop looking for the pleasant? What if we just don’t look? What if we stop seeking? We just are.
Here’s another way of looking at this in a positive light: I have thought a lot about when people say, “What’s the worst that can happen?” People say “what’s the worst that can happen?” all the time. They mean it in a positive way. It’s when people are getting ready to do something new, or preparing for something. Maybe they’re excited about a performance or hiring new employees or their art show opening at a new gallery or they’re record is coming out or they’re speaking in front of 5000 people. Maybe they’re going out surfing for the first time. Maybe they’re leaving their country for the first time or seeing an old lover for the first time in 10 years. Maybe they are going to a party they don’t want to go to or the have to go confront their soon-to-be-ex-husband as they get a divorce. They say to themselves or to others who are embarking on this maybe-risky, maybe-not-very-fun or terrifying adventure: “What’s the worst that happen?”
I was doing a show back in November 2014. I hadn’t been on stage for a couple months, and I was rehearsing with Adam Hammer, Erin Ebnet, Jonas Dubin, Jeff Vee & Tommy Vee at the Vee’s studio in St. Joseph, Minnesota. We were just ending our second rehearsal – we were going to be only rehearsing as an ensemble twice for this gig – and it was a full two sets of mostly original material written by Adam, Erin & I – 21 tunes – so it was a lot of material for six people to pull together in only two rehearsals.
Toward the end of our second rehearsal, I said to Tommy, “That was pretty good. We should be able to pull it off.”
And Tommy said to me, “Well, the worst that can happen is we all die.”
What? Aahahaha! I laughed so hard at that. I kept laughing to myself all the way home. I’m still laughing. It was a brilliant statement. Of course, the show went off awesome. And really, what WAS that worst thing that could happen: that we all die. It’s not negative. It’s not gothic or morbid. It’s just true. All six of us there on the stage, and we all just die. For no reason. Or maybe we all were shot – (and I say this with great respect for The Eagles of Death Metal and their audience who were attacked by terrorists in Paris on stage during a concert last year). Or maybe we all had strokes. Or the rapture came and it was actually real – our souls left our bodies and went to Heaven (well, hopefully all of our souls went up and not down). Maybe we were all gassed. There was an explosion, a tornado, a freak earthquake, a landlocked hurricane. So many ways for six musicians to die on stage. It’s like an Edward Gorey calendar of comedic morbidity. That really and truly would be the worst thing that could happen.
What Tommy said was deeply spiritual to me, too. In essence, what Mr. Vee was saying was: treat each moment like it’s your last. Treat every gig like it’s not the end of the world and that it’s the end of the world at the same time. Treat every breath like it’s your last, and when you get to breathe in again, wow! Amazing! I’m alive, over and over and over.
So, I started flipping that “what’s the worst thing that could happen” statement/question on its head by saying: “What’s the best that could happen?”
Seriously, imagine all those moments when you thought to yourself, “Well, fuck it, what’s the worst that could happen?” and instead you embraced it, truly said, “What’s the best that happen?”
I may have written about this before, and if I have, I won’t apologize because it is truly something that I could rewrite over and over, like that amazing breath I get to breathe with each inhale and exhale. It is the best thing I learned from this therapist I had in my 20’s.
I’ve had a lot of therapy. I started going when I was 21 years old. I had been on The Search. I was on The Search to find out what was wrong with me. It started after I had this experience after a panic attack on a plane to Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 1993 when I thought I was going insane, and then I ended up with pneumonia for 5 days on the streets of Amsterdam with my friend Ruari and a Canadian traveler we met – my first ever trip to Am’dam – when I was 20 years old. Weeks and months passed, me hitchhiking through Scotland and then down to London, off to Greece and the Island of Santorini, then to Vienna, Austria and on to Prague, Czech Republic, before I started to really think I was going to die. This continued for about a year, as I moved about, back to Seattle, Washington (my home then) and then moving to San Francisco, California, going from doctor to doctor. All kinds of ridiculous experiences, where I continued to need to pee every 2 to 10 minutes and my back hurt like mad in the scar I have where I had kidney surgery in 1987 for a birth defect.
I ended up at an acupuncturist in El Cerrito, California in 1994, and she saw me a few times until she gently suggested I go see a hypnotherapist. I later imagined that her thoughts were like this, “This kid is super fucked up. Why am I sticking needles in this kid? He needs to see somebody.”
So, I went to a therapist. And I went to another. And I went to another – this time a psychiatrist. I saw 3 therapists before I ended up with therapist #4 – The Good Doctor. I’d go see him in the Marina District in San Francisco. And, maybe a year passed - a year of relaxation cassette tapes and talking and talking and books and talking and peeing and talking and hurting and parking on Pacific Heights to walk down the hill to see the Good Doctor and talking. One day, he gave me the advice that is the best advice I think I have ever received from a therapist. (Now, please don’t get me wrong here – I’ve received some really incredible advice from therapists – I still see one who is fantastic - and also some really stupid advice, too – a good therapist is like finding a good mechanic – they can fuck up your car a lot until you find the right one [input ‘mind’ in place of ‘car’ in the parenthesized sentence before this].)
So, one day we’re sitting there, The Good Doctor is his over-sized chair, and me on a couch, looking at each other. He in his khaki pants and button down sweater, me in some raggedy jeans and probably a rock tee-shirt from some Sub Pop label band I used to be into. He with a receding hair line and me with hair cropped tightly to my head, Ewan McGregor-style, like in “Trainspotting”. And, I had been talking about my need to pee all the time, or my need to pull the giant iron bar of excruciating pain out of my back. Or maybe I was talking about my family, or my girlfriends, or getting jumped, or how awful my oh-so-miserable-woe-is-me past was, or whatever neurosis-of-the-week was fresh on my mind, and The Good Doctor said, “Gentry (pause with long New Age-like stare), sometimes you just gotta say ‘Fuck it’.”
Seriously. That was it. “Gentry, sometimes, you gotta say fuck it.”
Aaaaahahahahahaa! Eureka! I mean, really, Doc? Fuck it? That’s a lot of cash spent over the last months for two words that includes one word of profanity.
But, I started to say ‘Fuck it”. And it worked. It really did. I got over the ability to need to pee every 2 to 10 minutes. I still had some ticks and whistles, but it seriously helped. A lot.
Lately, I’ve been combining these two things together, and say to myself, “Fuck it, what’s the best that can happen?”
So, Grasshoppers, what is the BEST that can happen? Really. What is it?
I’ll go to the 3 things that are so very important to ask yourself in life to me.
1. What do you want?
2. Why?
3. How can you make what you want happen?
Ask yourself those 3 questions with incredible thought and intention, and then ask: What’s the best that can happen?
1. You get what you want.
2. You know why you want it.
3. You make it happen.
It’s that simple. Defining what you want is the first, most important thing. And it doesn’t have to be material. It doesn’t have to be physical. It can be mental or spiritual. Or all them. But BE SPECIFIC about what you want, because IT WILL COME TRUE. Visions come true. They just don’t always look like what you wanted because there are an infinite number of possibilities attached to every want. And for everything that manifests, the universe will react to what happened. The universe must compromise with what you have wanted and balance itself out. If you don’t believe them, then don’t try to ask to ask yourself what you want and don’t ask for the best that can happen. But if you do – and this is not like some bullshit chain letter or chain email – visions come true. You put the effort out into the universe, the intention, the desire, and the result is that: it will occur.
It may sound like cockypop to you. That’s the best word I can think of for this right now. Cockypop. Because, trust me, when I was in my travellin’ and jaded 20s, or even my early despondent and desirous and driven 30s, if I read something like this from some dude, I’d think, “Cockypop.” Actually, I wouldn’t have used that fantastical word. I probably would have thought, “That guy is a jack ass. Fuck that guy. Let’s go get a beer.”
So, this brings me back to our desire and our want to gravitate toward unpleasantness. If our minds can find nothing pleasant, we WANT unpleasantness. Sitting and meditating is a way of showing that. Sometimes. We find that our “Monkey Mind” - as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it – wants to find unpleasantness. Our minds seek it out. Our minds seek out those that have wronged us. Our minds seek out things that need to get done that we don’t want to do. Our minds seek out our pains and our anguish, our obsessive compulsive desires for more or less, for pleasure or distraction, for pain or disturbed thought.
But, what if we consciously try not to seek out unpleasantness?
What if we simply are aware of it? We don’t have to try necessarily. We just begin to train our minds not to look for disturbing unpleasantnesses. Instead we recognize that they are there, in the same way that we recognize that kind and gentle pleasantnesses are there. In this way, this balance, is how we can be aware of the full gamut of our minds and our wants and desires at a deep level for both the pain and the pleasure of the world. How. Cool. Is. That?
What’s the best that could happen from all this?
I don’t know the answer to that exactly, Grasshoppers. It is individual. You have to answer that for yourselves. But, for me, the best that can happen from recognizing the balance of pain and pleasures within all of us is finding contentment, joy, happiness and love. Being our own Buddha. Jesus. Fiddling Grasshopper. Whatever way is easiest for you to see it and whatever words and terms you need, apply them as you wish. We are all Buddhas if we want to be. We are all Jesus if we want to be. We are all Grasshoppers if we want to be.
What’s the best that could happen?
For more Grasshopperisms and writing, and to speak to me about Artistic & Media Consulting, please email me at [email protected]
