A Meditation on Meditation on Writing

By Brian Watson

It started as a suggestion, a well-intentioned prescription from an online friend.

I suffer from headaches frequently, especially in the mornings. I have confounded my doctor in her search for causes. We’ve ruled out water, sleep issues, muscle issues, blood flow issues. She always asks about stress and cortisol, but stress is like a secret lover. I never know when it comes and goes; it is just there when I think to look for it. I stress about all of the usual things: work, writing, money.

And one morning I shared the headache struggle on social media. Suggestions came streaming in.

One stood out: Have you tried meditating?

I had meditated in the past, yes. Never made it a practice, I admit, because it was so difficult. Asking my brain, my nearest and dearest friend, to be silent is a task that borders on the Sisyphean. My undergraduate background in science also made me wary of the woo-woo around meditation—I know that there is good science on meditation too as well as the woo-woo.

Something shifted, however, when that suggestion was made.

I had already downloaded an app, Insight Timer, on my phone. I had tried a few sessions but wasn’t particularly inspired. I opened it again and looked specifically for meditations for queer people. Courses from one teacher, the Venerable Lobsang Tenpa, stood out. That was more than sixty days ago; I have been practicing meditation daily since then. Meditations with that teacher even inspired the title for one of my next books: My Inner Light is a Disco Ball; Authenticity Amid the Dance of a Queer Identity.

My stress levels are now noticeably lower. The headaches? They’re still with me, but my doctor now believes that the headaches are a side-effect, a reaction to a medication, and we’re testing that theory. Stay tuned.

Insight Timer recently had a major update, and the app now uses some algorithm or other to recommend other guided meditations. I still regularly listen to meditations from Lobsang Tenpa. His guided courses on queer roots and reparenting are perfect for me. But I occasionally follow recommendations, to flirt with other teachers.

One such recommendation was regrettable. It took the teacher five (out of the total fifteen) minutes to introduce himself and give background for his program. On multiple occasions he clumsily spelled out the alphabet of queer identities—lgbtqia+ is why I prefer umbrella terms like queer and rainbow-dwellers. He also repeated a mantra that lands like pabulum on my ears: love is love is love. (Queer identities also can queer the notion of love and love is love is love comes across as a cudgel, a heteronormative reassertion. Queer is more than love and our love is often as wild and queer as we are.) The nail in the coffin was hearing the teacher’s vocalizations. He apparently took inspiration from the pauses William Shatner dramatically employed as Star Trek’s James Tiberius Kirk. I’ve never been a fan of waiting three seconds for the next word in your spoken sentence.

This morning’s recommendation was different: a guided meditation from Justin Michael Williams, the author of Stay Woke; A Meditation Guide for the Rest of Us (as I later discovered). It was fun, an emotion I was not prepared to encounter during meditation. Right from the beginning, as Justin repeated a series of good morning salutations into my headset, I began to laugh at the increasing silliness, and as I laughed, Justin did as well. I had permission to laugh while meditating!

Within the first few minutes, I was inspired again. He asked me not to think about everything I had to do today, but to instead focus on what I wanted to be today. I laughed again because it’s very hard to meditate AND to be a writer. Each inspiration Justin shared was a little jolt: I want to write about this. That inspiration about doing and being made me want to write about abandoning my to-do list in favor of a to-be list, and I needed to put the mental notebook down. I wouldn’t succeed at meditating (if indeed one can ever succeed at meditating) if I was so caught up with writing ideas. I stilled my thoughts, listening more to Justin, laughing along the way, and allowed the meditation to conclude with joy.

It’s a strange thing. Once you embrace writing, inspiration can ambush you anywhere. Even in a dark room, headset on, eyes closed. I’m grateful for a lot of things my writing journey has brought me since work began on my memoir in September of 2020. I have new friends and colleagues. I have a new understanding of my voice and my potential. I more keenly feel human connections. And I am immensely, voluminously grateful for inspiration and the joy that attends my writing. And, oh yes, I meditate.
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Brian Watson is currently preparing a proposal for his first memoir: Crying in a Foreign Language; Pink Lady, Fictional Girlfriends, and the Deity that Answered my Plea. Originally from New York State, he lives in the Seattle area after years in Massachusetts, Saitama, Tōkyō, and British Columbia. His essays have appeared in Brevity Blog and in the newsletter of the Japan Local Government Center. He spends his days with Hiro, his partner/spouse of twenty-eight years. Brian lives online at iambrianwatson.com; follow him on Twitter @BMemoirist.