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January 2014, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil - 25 year old me meditating and then posting a thirst trap on Instagram.
“F*$k! This can’t be happening!”
My meditation journey all started in 2013 when I woke up with a large bald spot in my beard stubble about the size of a quarter. A few years earlier, my cousin had lost all the hair on his body in his 30’s from alopecia. So as a 24 year old man, I was freaking out at the prospect of a similar fate and began ruminating on how I was now destined die bald and alone.
Later that week I went to the Dr. and he confirmed that I did in fact have acute alopecia likely due to stress. He didn’t have any wonder pills for me, but recommended that I work on my de-stressing.
When I asked how to do that he gave me a few options including meditation and yoga. Having done Yoga before, the thought of being the awkward, inflexible football guy in the back of the studio did not have much appeal to me. I didn’t know much about meditation, but I did know that it could be done without an audience of people judging…this appealed to me.
In 2013, meditation was not a trendy or popular thing at least amongst people in their mid-twenties. It was definitely fringe, but I was willing to try anything. I downloaded the headspace app and did their Take 10 program. I had no idea that a fateful old bald spot on my beard would catalyze the start of something so special in my life.
It’s now been about a decade since I’ve had some form of regular meditation or mindfulness practice. And as my inner experience has evolved, how I view my practice has changed significantly. The notion that meditation could change was something that I never even considered as a possibility when I started this journey. When I started, I just figured that the practice would be relatively static like brushing your teeth. I didn’t anticipate that it could take on entirely new forms with seemingly infinite levels of depth and richness.
Below I have charted out how my meditation or “stillness” practice has evolved to support the primary processes I have undergone with the expansion of consciousness.I’ll go into more depth about each part of the journey and the various features that emerged, but wanted to provide this map up front because this is a long ass post.
The upside triangle symbolizes how as consciousness expands the awareness of totality, truth, and access to information, as well as presence of love, expands. I like to think of at as a widening of the lens to which we see, understand, and experience everything.
As for the non-duality / unity consciousness section, I cannot currently claim to have stabilized this state, but like other earlier parts of the journey, my experience has been you start to glimpse it with increasing frequency until one day it just becomes your new way of being.
One thing to note is that as my journey has evolved upward, the practices and experiences for the most part just become more encompassing. For example, when I started aligning my actions to source guidance later in the process didn’t mean I stopped practicing Karma Yoga or working with subtle energy. And trust me even though I am very focused on the heart opening, I still am still dealing with a ton of gunk in my unconscious that needs to be faced and reprogrammed. It’s almost like at higher levels you just have a greater range of experience and more tools in your toolkit.
The On and Off Again Love Affair
Like many westerners, my original meditation practice was a tool for reducing stress and in my own case, avoiding becoming a 24 year old dude without eyebrows.
In the first few years, I’d do guided audio meditations that mostly centered around feeling yourself breathing. I’d practice for a few months straight which would cause my anxiety to stabilize. I’d then think that “I’m good” and stop the practice so that I could reallocate that 15 minutes to some form of perceived productivity. Inevitably, I’d relapse into an anxious state and have to start the practice again.
This went on for a good 4 years until early on in getting Troops off the ground I hit a breaking point. My co-founder went on a trip to Israel and I found myself sitting in an office high rise by myself, completely freaking out that I wasn’t going to be able to make our fledgling venture work. There was a massive fear that I’d be found out that I wasn’t all that successful, smart, or wealthy and I’d be relegated to what I perceived as the shameful position of a failed entrepreneur who had to get a job. My heart was racing and I had to go out on the balcony and start deep breathing to just calm myself down.
This experience made realize that meditating daily was no longer negotiable in my life. Like brushing my teeth or drinking water, I needed to do it everyday no matter what. During this on and off period, I had tried many different programs and apps like Headspace, Mindvalley, and of course Oprah + Deepak Chopra! All programs were pretty much focused on the breath with some occasional visualizations.
Around age 30, I began to experiment with Insight Meditation which focuses on “noting” all physical and mental sensations. I can’t remember if I learned this from Sam Harris or Daniel Ingram in Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha, who ironically just came on the EvolutionFM podcast.
This was a very different experience because it felt a bit more active then just noticing your breath. Instead concentrating on a fixed point like your breath, you were observing what emerged. My friend Dylan described it like being in a video game where you’re trying to catch the sensations as soon as they arrive. I did this for about a year starting off with some guided practices from Sam Harris and then eventually just would do it on my own to calming music.
Glimpsing Witness Consciousness
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was really the beginning of a shift of occupying greater lengths of time in witness consciousness. I started to internalize the separation of the thoughts and the observer of the thoughts. I wouldn’t say that I had a predominant shift in identification at that point from thinking that I was thoughts and a body to the watcher of all of that, but when I practiced, I definitely could experience that phenomenon.
This whole time I didn’t really feel like there was a “goal” of meditation taking me somewhere. It was more just something that I learned to enjoy because it made me feel good, less of an asshole, and prevented major stress episodes.
My primary goals at the time were to build a huge business, meet the love of my life, be healthy & jacked, and have a rich social life. Thank you American culture for this wonderfully conditioned concept of the keys to happiness! It was meditation that made the aggressive juggling act of trying to control the world to achieve this cultural dream tenable.