A Little Background

Some of you know that I have a meditation practice that has sputtered along for the better part of 34 years. Sometimes I liken it to an old jalopy, garnering an image in my mind of Archie’s ancient car from the Archie Comics of my childhood. Sometimes the car is running decently well, sometimes it is running in fits and starts and sometimes it stops altogether. And it always needs maintenance.

And this is not an article about formal meditation nor an article about disavowing the importance of meditation in my life. Meditation is the one thing I keep returning to and I’m not going to give it up. But what about the days when I miss meditation or feel like I have very little in my tank? Does meditation need to stop?

I was always taught about the importance of bringing meditation practice into everyday life. I always agreed with that: what good is it to sit in formal meditation and then get up and live life thoughtlessly for the rest of the day? A separation between the two seems artificial.

I get that we live in a secular society and I actually have zero interest in selling spiritual practice to others. In fact if you’re not interested in this kind of thing, this probably isn’t the article for you. And honestly, I’m not hurt by that.

When I was trained as a social worker we were trained in the Biopsychosocial Model, a guide of sorts for looking at components of human wellbeing. Sometimes the domain of Spirituality was added, but it often had the status of an asterisk. For me personally, however, the spiritual dimension has always been important as a way of working with my own, ahem, biopsychosocialspiritual suffering.

A Little Experiment

All of this to say is that I am often thinking of ways of engaging in spiritual practice off the meditation cushion, whether I am diligently doing my sitting meditation or not.

Sometimes the options come to me, sometimes they don’t. But I like to be as practical as possible. I’m not a fan of the esoteric; conversely, I like to try “experiments” from time to time to see if they can help me grow. An encounter with a tangled yarn ball several years ago was an example of that.

Over the years some people have described as a warm person – in fact, someone who was once very angry at me even called me affable (!) – but many people aren’t aware that I have a strong introverted tendency and that I’m actually quite shy, especially around people that I don’t know well. Maybe it’s a mark of my neurodivergence and its repercussions, or maybe my shyness is just pure introversion but regardless, it’s a thing. And I raise this because I had been thinking that it might be good to try an experiment outside of my comfort zone, which to you, might seem pretty inconsequential. But I do think that experiments imply at least some kind of challenge.

So I thought to myself: what would it be like to hold doors open for people I don’t know? Yes, it’s the polite thing to do—and I like to think that I have been doing it many times over the course of my life—but what if I made a deliberate effort to do so? Aside from a small act of care for others, would it do anything for my heart? It turns out, yes, but it hasn’t necessarily been a smooth, easy process, with feel-good bonus points from the universe.

Holding doors was a choice of something ordinary that wouldn’t get me a medal, with a low level of uniqueness. Politeness is not an accomplishment.

And if this experiment happened to have the side benefit of helping others in the most minuscule way, this wasn’t the main point as I was doing something to work on myself: I was curious to learn whether going outside of my comfort zone would make me let go of some of my own selfishness and opinions.

I decided that I would zero in on the doors at Granville Skytrain Station  with its perpetually-closed doors, seemingly to help keep pigeons out. I also surmised that holding elevators in my building could count too as well as any other random public doors I happened to encounter in my day-to-day travels.

But I wanted to go slightly beyond just holding a door for the person right behind me. What if I waited, up to 5 seconds, when there was not someone right directly behind me but rather on their way to the door? I mulled this over and true to form, worries came up. Random questions like:

• “Would this make me look weird?” Maybe.
• “Would this feel like pressure to rush for anyone who was still a few seconds from the door?” There may be some awkwardness for both of us.
• “Would this make me late for work or another commitment?” Unlikely.
• “Would people get mad at me?” A paradoxical catastrophic thought.
• “Would people think I’m a do-gooder?” Hard to say.
• “Would I be hard on myself if I forgot to hold the door on regular occasions?” I have some control over this one.

The Data Rolls In

Shy me felt nervous to start but as I went along in this experiment, I noticed several responses from others accompanied by a range of internal responses from me:

A common response was that people said “thank you” which garnered a feeling of pleasantness in me but also with a whiff of surprise. It made me think of all the years that I have commuted to Downtown Vancouver and I have literally talked to no one, or them, me. After these new ‘thank yous’ I sometimes had an embarrassing thought that I was doing something good, albeit very small, quickly followed by another thought reminding me that this exercise was not about stroking my ego, but rather letting go of it. Right. Refocus.

Perhaps just as common of a response was when people would say nothing. Again, embarrassing automatic thoughts arose like “people are in their own world” or other random feelings like the teensiest bit hurt. But pretty consistently, I saw the opportunity to let go of expectations about how people “should” behave in this situation. After all, they never asked me to hold the door! This was my volunteer project. And the more times people said nothing, the more grateful I felt because each time was another opportunity to practice letting go.  It felt very freeing and now I don’t necessarily notice when someone doesn’t say anything.

And then there was a situation that has happened a few times that surprised me. When holding the door for one person, sometimes one, two or even three more people rush the door so that they could all get through at once. Kind of like when you’re driving and you let someone in and then the person behind them sneaks in too. At first I thought that this door behaviour was rude, and then I thought it was a slightly humorous, mildly chaotic situation. But after chuckling a little, I thought, ‘yeah, maybe those people needed that today for whatever reason.’ Again, these were chances to let go of how I felt people “should” behave.

And then even more surprising, one or two people told me to “have a nice day,” to which I replied, “to you as well!” This scenario really caught me off-guard. But in a good way.

Oh, and no one scowled at me or said anything rude. Duh.

Interpreting the Data

One of the things that I think is interesting about automatic thoughts is that they don’t have to define us, but they can inform us more about ourselves. I reflected on how thoughts could flow through me without being “me” and that they also provided clues about my own shortcomings: judgmentalism, expectations of myself/others and limitations that I put on myself. But it would be a mistake to just beat myself up about it, when instead, I could see these as opportunities to continue to work on myself and any emotional suffering that comes along with that. And the possibilities in this life are endless! I just need to take them!