My Meditation Practice

Andrew Kemendo

People often imagine meditation begins when you sit down on a cushion and close your eyes. I grow peach trees and manage my NWF Certified Wildlife Habitat (no 341,121). Peaches are deceptively hard. You have to prune them more aggressively than feels comfortable, bend and shape branches so light reaches the center, keep them alive through summer heat, and do all of this while deer are grazing your new leaves. It can be peaceful, frustrating, hot, slow, and beautiful all at once.

That is one of my meditations

My meditations take different forms and different intensities depending on the context, but the practice underneath them is the same:understanding where I am reacting and where I am acting intentionally. By intentional I mean that I am aware of the context I am in, recognize that I have options, choose among those options, and make that choice based on something other than the reaction itself.

The first and persistent all day everyday practice is simply being available enough to myself to notice a reaction when it happens. I might be reading something tedious and suddenly feel irritated by how long it is taking. I might be working in the orchard and become frustrated. I might enter a conversation where I already know I am more likely to react poorly. The important moment is recognizing: something is happening in me right now. I don't necessarily need to explain it immediately, though naming it is extremely useful if possible. I don't need to discover its origin or decide whether the reaction is justified. I first just need to notice that it exists.

Once I see the reaction, the second practice is simple: don't do anything; which just means I don't have to convert the first impulse I experience into an action, I can hold the reaction in a buffer for a moment and let my body feel angry, impatient, uncomfortable, embarrassed, afraid, tired, or whatever else it happens to be doing without immediately giving that state control over what happens next.

Sometimes the intentional choice is to keep doing exactly what I was doing other times it is to literally turn around and leave with no comment. Most of the benefit however is avoiding entering situations in the first place that I know enough about myself and the context to know what is likely to happen. The objective is to prevent reactions being confused with decisions and those turning into action.

I use mantras throughout this practice. One that follows me through ordinary life is: Everybody's trying their best.Its function is to interrupt the remarkably easy habit of assigning intention to other people's behavior and then reacting to the intention I have assigned them rather than living inside of what is actually happening: This person/these people are doing the best they possibly can given their constitutions.

The last meditation is deliberately practicing these processes under physical discomfort. Sauna and extremely long walks/runs is probably the clearest example because at some point my body begins telling me "ok its time to stop." The meditation there is to find the distinction between I want to leave and I need to leave in a place where the stakes are low but the intensity is high.

The mantra under high stress becomes some version of: I don't need to leave yet.

Eventually something interesting happens and reliably, if I am doing my work well, the desire to leave can still be present, but it stops being an instruction. Sometimes it fades altogether adn then it's just hangin out sweating my ass off. At that point I can leave because I have decided to leave rather than because the first demand for escape made the decision for me. Driving with kids, a 6 hour walk, working outside in the summer, sweeping, raking, or doing any physical work where discomfort, boredom, impatience, or distraction begins competing with the thing I have chosen to do, all of them are options for practice.

I have borrowed pieces from a number of traditions over the years. My first introduction oddly enough was from a made for TV movie my dad liked called "Tribes":

Jeet Kun Do, Zen, Christian Prayer, TM, Endurance Racing etc...I don't feel particularly compelled to decide which tradition owns which part all that matters to me is the practice. That is basically my meditation practice.