Newton's Fourth Law of Therapy & Why I Meditate

"For every problem in the child (identified patient), there is an equal and opposite problem in the parent."

                                                                                        -- Pedro's Fourth Law of Therapy

A friend of mine recently asked me about my meditation practice. We didn't get a chance to finish the conversation, but my first thought was because meditating doesn't cause a hangover like gin and tonics do.

I'm kidding.

Sometimes you can get a meditation hang-over.

I'm kidding again.

I meditate because it clears the noise and busyness in my mind, giving my soul a chance to speak. 

In Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Towards an Undivided Life, Parker Palmer writes about his battle with depression. While there are dozens of reasons why people get depressed (and cures), he describes his own depression rising from "burying true self so deep that life becomes one long, dark night of the soul." His depression "was the soul's call to stop, turn around, go back, and look for a path [he] could negotiate...When I was living my outer life at great remove from inner truth, I was not merely on the wrong path: I was killing myself with every step I took... We can reclaim our lives only by choosing to live divided no more. It is a choice so daunting...that we are unlikely to make it until our pain becomes unbearable, that pain that comes from denying or defying our true self."

I meditate in the hopes of aligning my inner and outer life, and meditation is one of my many hedges against insanity. My flavor of crazy isn't depression -- it is a spinning and obsessing mind, constantly trying to avoid and control and figure things out so nothing bad ever happens, which is impossible. Bad things do happen. Of course I want to be careful and not careless, but there should be a word that means being too careful to the point of failing to thrive. My favorite elementary school teacher Ms. Kolin affectionately called me a worrywart. If she had seen me two years ago, she would have called me the worry-melanoma.

I can hide my worry-wart-ness from the public and co-workers, but privately I can spin and spin and spin, which is unhealthy, not just for me but for my kids. See the Fourth Law of Therapy: for every problem in a kid, there is an equal and opposite problem in the parents. In the past two years since Pedro was away, I've had a lot of time to do my own inner while Pedro was doing his. 

Unfortunately, there isn't yet a drug for worry-wart-ness. The only way out for my disease is through. 

And so I meditate.