This Is It E-Book

Conor Creighton

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Conor Creighton came out of the womb chewing his fingernails. A chaotic childhood saw his default mode set to 'generally miserable', so he left home at 17, vowing never to return. The ensuing decades of disorder resulted in chronic anxiety. At rock bottom, he signed up for a ten-day silent meditation retreat. It was hell. His legs ached. His butt felt like it was on fire. His mind threw at him a never-ending collage of regrets, wants and realisations. Then, suddenly, for the first time in nearly twenty years, he felt calm as relief and, eventually, joy washed over him. He learned that meditation has just one goal: to recognise that this is it. There is nothing else. No desire to get anywhere or change or improve anything. When Conor stopped trying to get somewhere or 'be someone' and realised that this, and this alone, is it, his anxiety abated, he learned to like himself and he discovered that he might even be happy. By remembering that 'this is it' in uncomfortable times and in comfortable times, your life can become a lot like meditation. In this highly entertaining, refreshingly honest memoir and meditation guide, you'll discover how.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to my mum and dad.I wouldn’t be here without them.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

How Does a Bogger Become a Meditation Teacher?

What Happens when You’re Away with the Fairies?

Up to 90

Stop the Lights

Getting a Grip

This Is It

How to Be Happy Out

Mindfulness vs Balubas

If It’s Under a Rock, You’ll Find It

The Fear

So What?

Change and the Irish Summer

Notions and the Self

Are You Satisfied with Yourself Now?

Emptiness and the Bog of Allen

Sure Look

What RIP.ie can Teach Us about Life

Losing the Head

The Craic

Relax to Fuck

Kindness

Forgiveness

Purpose

What Ever Next?

Frequently Asked Questions

Glossary of Weird Buddhist Terms

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

Reviews

Introduction

I wrote this book during the first stage of the Covid-19 lockdown in an apartment in the Neukölln area of Berlin. It was a time of seeming impossibilities. I grew tomatoes on a cold, north-facing window; I strengthened my friendships, although I only saw friends on Zoom; and I fell apart and put myself back together again, all from the comfort of my kitchen.

I’d been living in Berlin for over ten years but had just made the decision to move back to Ireland and become a full-time meditation teacher. I’d returned to Berlin to finish a meditation course I’d begun with a group of Syrian refugees, only for the pandemic to hit. I was landed with a decision: do I stay in Berlin and just put my plans aside, or do I go home to my parents and risk infecting them? My father was high-risk. When I talk to my friends I recognise that most of our fathers are high-risk. Medically and emotionally.

In the end I stayed in Berlin, and those plans – a new series of courses in Dublin, a retreat at the Cliffs of Moher and a number of studios who all wanted me to teach regular slots – fell through. I couldn’t complain. None of us really could. ‘The rain falls equally on all things’ is one of my favourite Zen expressions, and at the time it felt that this was true. Everything was unprecedented. Nobody felt in control. We were all, to different degrees, sinking more than swimming. Here’s something good I heard once: admitting that you’re not in control of what’s around you is the first step to establishing control inside you.

I never imagined that I would teach meditation. I certainly never imagined that I’d write a book about it. I sincerely hope I’ve done a good job.

I taught some of my first workshops in the artist Maser’s studio in Dublin. Huge pipes criss-crossed the ceiling carrying water from the flats above. They sounded like rain sticks, the kind you might hear at a soundbath or early morning at a house party in east Clare played by the one guy who didn’t take mushrooms, he’s just like that all the time.

At the end of one of those classes a woman came up to me and pointed at the simple Tibetan bowl that I used to signal the beginning and end of each meditation.

‘Are you sure that’s such a good idea?’

‘Why?’

‘It’s triggering,’ she said.

‘It is?’ I asked.

‘It sounds like a mass bell. Every time you bang it, I get the shivers.’

‘Do you think I should ditch it?’

‘I would, yeah,’ she said.

I never brought the metal bowl to class again, and swapped it for a solid oak one that could only have triggered someone who’d been traumatised by woodpeckers.

I’ve always found teaching meditation in Ireland a unique experience compared to everywhere else I worked. If I ever used the Irish weather as a way of explaining the concept of change, people got me in a way that my students in Los Angeles, where it rains all of three days every year, didn’t. Or if I talked about death, and the importance of integrating it into our daily life, I knew that most of my class had probably seen a body in an open casket at a traditional Irish funeral, but none of my other European students would have. And if I wanted to talk about the unique capacity of nature to momentarily tame the mind, and bring you to places and states reminiscent of deep meditative practice, it wasn’t hard for people to imagine that unique power, because in Ireland you’re never far from some mist-bejewelled, rainbow-bordered, geographic manifestation of what might just be god.

There’s a cryptic old expression that the veil is thin in Ireland, meaning that the boundary between the rational and the spiritual worlds are not as thick in Ireland as they are in other places. I don’t know if this is true. Meditation, to begin with, is not magic, it’s actually highly scientific, but to believe in it, to actually see it work, you have to have some patience, an open mind and not a little bit of hope. Hope is hardwired into Irish people. I grew up following a national football team who taught me so much about the thrill of crushing defeat that I feel uncomfortable with victory. The hope creeps into our choices. I set off hiking on many a sunny morning that transformed into a winter squall by lunchtime, and I knew so many young men who died young – in road accidents, by suicide and sudden deaths – that it felt like there was a certain amount of luck, and maybe hope, involved in surviving your twenties in rural Ireland.

There are many things hardwired into us Irish people. My intention in writing this book was to explore the ways that meditation, and contemplation, and the simple folk wisdom you learn from just watching time pass, are actually hardwired into us too.

This book is a meditation guide. It will show you the benefits of meditation and the special Irish connection to meditation, but, most important, it will show you how to meditate.

There was a great Indian meditation teacher called Jiddu Krishnamurti. He moved to California and hung out with Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, and a whole host of other acid hippy-intellectuals. Aldous Huxley’s niece was my landlady and neighbour when I lived in California, and she’d come down every morning and shout Krishnamurti’s quotes through the window of the metal storage container I was renting from her. This was my favourite: ‘There is great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere.’

Long before him, in some field in Connemara, an unknown Irish farmer, probably struggling to keep a roof over her head and food in the bellies of her children, stumbled upon the same wisdom and announced it in a simpler, more direct Irish proverb: ‘A dog owns nothing, but is seldom dissatisfied.’

A satisfied mind is your birthright. When you restore your own factory settings, when you manage to bring your mind back to its default place, you’ll find that you’re actually happy.

It begins with a simple instruction:

Take a deep breath.

How Does a BoggerBecome a MeditationTeacher?

Everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt, unlike any other, is a visionary without scratching.

– WB YEATS

That’s life: starting over, one breath at a time.

– SHARON SALZBERG

I came out of the womb chewing my fingernails. I was born in St Finbar’s, Cork, on a wet April morning at the start of the eighties. My father is and was an eternal child, and my mother is and was hopelessly in love with him. I took one look at the pair of them, barely in their twenties, skint and hopeless, naive as parents come, and I knew that I probably shouldn’t have selected ‘surprise me’ off the menu in the waiting room between lives.

We were fairly poor. Not in the romantic, live-off-the-land way; more the tense, nail-biting, where’s the rent coming from way. The actor Roberto Benigni won an Oscar in 1998 for the movie Life Is Beautiful. In his acceptance speech he thanked his parents for the greatest gift of all: poverty.

I’m not saying we had to beg or climb into bins for food, but Santa’s gifts never came in their original boxes, rent was something we prayed about and when we visited our cousins they’d say, ‘That’s my jumper, trousers, shoes …’. We were poor, but in Ireland in the eighties, you didn’t have to look far to find someone poorer.

We lived in a caravan in west Cork for the early part of my life. I can’t remember many of the details, but I think I can locate the genesis of my residual fear of spiders, the cold and food shortages to that caravan.

We moved to Belfast. My dad took a job back in the city where he came from. Every time there was an explosion outside, he would say ‘It’s just a car backfiring.’ When this excuse wore thin, we packed up and moved south to Raheny in Dublin. For a brief period I can remember my dad wearing silver suits, smelling of cologne and driving a car that might have even been new. If we’d stayed, I could have had the most colourful accent on the whole island, a hybrid mash-up of big city slang and culchie patois, but instead Dad had a burn-out, and we left Dublin and moved to Kildare, where I’d stay for the next fifteen years, and learn to speak in a flat, bogland non-accent: all mutter, no lilt, with my chin never far from my chest. No matter what you asked me, the only thing I could reply with was ‘nuthin’.

I can’t say I ever felt at home in Kildare, although I am more from Kildare than I am from anywhere else. That county, the flatness of the geography, the schools I went to, the magnetic, soul-sapping pull of the bog, shaped me, in the same way a brass hammer shapes soft metal.

I didn’t enjoy my upbringing that much. I got called carrots, I got into lots of fights, I smoked Carroll’s cigarettes for about five years and can’t remember liking them even once. Aged fourteen, I got traintracks on my teeth and for the next three years, a period that most of my peers would refer to as the ‘shifting era’, I just opted out of even trying. It’s hazy now – in psychology they refer to it as selective recall when we purposely place an obstructive lens around our memories – but I don’t think I even got a real shift (tongues, etc.) until I was seventeen. In hindsight these things aren’t important, but in the crushing light of teen-agerdom, if you weren’t shifting, you weren’t really living.

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the world’s most respected meditation teachers. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his activism and was a big influence on Martin Luther King Jr, and even Oprah. He has a beautiful phrase that he uses to describe the importance of experiencing struggle: ‘No mud, no lotus.’ It means that without a little bit of hardship, we never get to truly open our hearts. Struggle turns into wisdom. Sickness reminds us of the importance of health, heartache teaches us to love, the short, biting days of January help us appreciate the long, balmy month of June. Kildare made me miserable and this made me fall in love with my inner world.

For some years, from maybe when I was six to around twelve, I’d go to sleep every night concentrating on the space inside my head. I would lie there focusing on nothing more than the space between thoughts until stars and lights and flashing trails would appear, and my ears would start ringing. I’d tell my mum, and she’d just smile at me, wondering what new weirdness was coming out of her son’s mouth now, but I was actually, bizarrely and intuitively, entering a meditative state known as samadhi.

Samadhi is a heightened state of concentration. It’s a level of mental absorption that monks spend many hours and even entire lifetimes trying to attain. With no previous experience, I was somehow naturally led to this deep, transformative place. Don’t ask me why, it’s the only thing that’s come naturally to me. Everything else – driving a car, learning languages, sports, instruments, learning to shift, even punctuating the book you’re reading right now – has been hard won. It seems like the one unique talent I came into this life with was for zoning out. Although samadhi, if we’re being really honest, is actually more zoning in. Then when I was twelve my parents bought a TV, and one night home alone I came across Eurotrash, and that led me to discover masturbation, and that was the end of my brief experiment with meditation.

I’ve got no bad feeling towards Kildare, but I grew up in a house where the walls leaked when it rained, I was a target for bullies, and I was too tall to be a jockey, never mind that I was afraid of horses, so by the time I reached seventeen, I left and vowed never to return.

Leaving didn’t improve my situation. If you ask god for patience, he’ll send you a queue at the bank. I asked god for peace and he sent me a pair of decades with enough drama to fill a screenwriter’s library.

In my twenties I experienced lots of depression and anxiety, which in turn propelled me into multiple stormy relationships and a rash of impulsive decisions – somehow, I managed to find myself engaged three times, to three different people, over a five-year period. I become addicted to falling in love, but unlike addictions to substances, mine also involved damaging both myself and another person. I was constantly packing bags, moving out, leaving town, changing address. This meant that for most of my twenties and thirties, my most stable source of income was bar work. Life rarely catches up on you when you work in bars. The barman is the epitome of wisdom, prudence and control, but only because everyone else around him is in tatters. I could dispense advice and wisdom when they were listening and strong-arm them through the door by the time they couldn’t any more.

My problems were clear to me. I had chronic anxiety, and a unique capacity for finding the negativity in everything.

There’s a phenomenon known as bog apathy. It’s an attitude I grew up swimming in. You don’t go to the doctor if you’re sick. You don’t get further education if you’re ambitious. You don’t try to change your life for the better because there’s no point. You resign yourself to never getting anywhere because the opportunities seem so limited. Depending on where you lived, or what your parents did, you could have a trace of it or a full-blown outbreak.

‘You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that,’ said Samuel Beckett, possibly referring to the part of Kildare I knew. Like a lot of the people I grew up with, we just didn’t picture much positive coming towards us, and so we attracted none. I couldn’t manage a relationship for longer than two months. I drank often, and I often drank alone. I was insomniac on and off, and I was never really happy, but then I didn’t expect to be. My workaround was to chase after any flickering excitement that came my way. This made me reckless and impulsive. Between eighteen and maybe twenty-eight, I can’t remember saying no to a drug.

But one time, being impulsive actually worked for me. I signed up for a ten-day silent meditation retreat for a laugh. From 4 a.m. until 10.30 p.m., in one-hour intervals, for ten solid days, I sat cross-legged in a big draughty room in the mountains of Italy while a tinny recording gave instructions on how to observe the breath. Oh lord, it was hell. My legs ached, my butt felt like it was on fire and my mind, a place I’d barely explored, was a never-ending collage of regrets, wants and realisations that came at me like headbutts in a dark corridor.

It was like a lifetime of therapy every single day, and it was too much for me to take. I tried to leave, but a very kind Italian teacher suggested I stay just another day. ‘What have you got to lose?’ What a great question. In most circumstances when we’re asked it, we really don’t have that much.

I acquiesced. I walked into the hall, I sat down and within just a few breaths, I’d found myself in the same meditative state I’d known as a child. For the first time in nearly twenty years I felt calm, and I started crying. For three more days, I meditated and I cried, as wave after wave of sadness and joy washed over me. And when the last day came, and we all started talking again, and the only language around me was Italian, I made a decision to commit myself to meditation.

Buddha. My man. You had me at namaste.

David Lynch, the movie director, is also a meditator. He said this: ‘The thing about meditation is: you become more and more you.’ After my first experience with meditation, I decided to become more me. I decided to get to know the person behind all the tall stories. Here’s the thing. The energy that you put into your own self-destruction can also be put into your own construction. The best meditators I’ve met were the worst messers before they started.

I took myself off to India and lived in a monastery. I stayed with monks in the Californian desert. I studied in San Francisco with the same people who’d brought mindfulness to Silicon Valley. I read every sky-blue-covered book on spirituality, and then I came back to Ireland to be with my sick father while, high on morphine, he raindanced with dream warriors who visited him in the intensive care ward of St James’s every night.

That was a decision I hadn’t expected to have to make. When I discovered my dad was ill, I just dropped everything and came home. It was one of the easiest decisions I’d ever made. But really not one that I ever thought I would make.

Here’s a warning: if you start meditating you will also start surprising yourself.

While I was home, I got offered a housesit in Clare. One day I went into Limerick City and ran into an old friend who was working with men who’d just been released from prison. They were trying to piece their lives back together and she was helping them. We talked and I told her about meditation, and then she asked me if I’d teach them. I said yes. And again, it was one of the easiest decisions I’d ever made.

I was scared and underprepared, but sometimes in life, all the gears start turning at once. This happens when you fall in love. When you migrate. When someone or something dies. When a pandemic grips the planet. The numerous competing voices in our head are funnelled into one, clear question: what needs to be done right now?

So I decided to teach the course, despite not really feeling ready to teach meditation, and I credit that with being the catalyst behind my life as a teacher.

The first day we met as a group, I had to put my hands between my legs because they were shaking as I spoke. Shaky hands are not a good look on a meditation teacher. I felt intimidated; teaching men who were my own age and from my own country brought me back to all my childhood vulnerability. They smoked Carroll’s, and if you asked them what they did at the weekend, they might give you an answer, but they might also just say ‘nuthin’.

We met once a week in a cold block-shaped building on the river. The men who came along had known tough lives. I thought I had; but perspective is everything. In middle-class circles where no one’s gone to bed hungry, I can play my tiny violin, but compared to my group in Limerick I may as well have been born with a silver spoon in my gob. Many of them came from Moyross or the Island. They all smoked, school-gate style, into their hands, on the stoop of the building, and they welcomed me like a family member.

Inside the building was as loud as a tambourine. You heard every conversation on the street, every diesel engine charging along the quays, every time a council worker mooched by with a garden strimmer and his slacks sliding down his arse. But we also had silence, and the silence in that space, with ten men, cups of tea with the bags in, Mikado biscuits gone in ten seconds, a Dimplex pouring out gassy heat in the corner, was so profound you could hear the sound of a tracksuit rubbing against a leg.

For a little over a month, we’d sit and meditate upstairs in a common room and then the men would go down to a factory space and learn how to solder, how to weld, how to carve wood into useful objects. I didn’t know the details but I knew that most of these guys had grown up in worlds that made mine seem like a bed of daisies.

At the end of my time teaching there something happened. One of the men came up to me and said, ‘You know what? We’ve stopped listening to the radio. We used to have the radio on all the time, but since we started meditating, we all just started to like the silence more. We never put the tunes on any more. It’s lovely.’

After nearly all our sessions, I left the building, turned the corner onto George’s Quay and cried. I feel so grateful to those men for allowing me to show them what I knew about meditation, and for taking me seriously.

Meditation is very simple, but it’s also really hard. You’ve got to go into it with no expectation, even though you’re obviously trying it for a reason. You’ve got to make some effort, but not too much. You’ve got to let go without dropping completely off to sleep. You need to be determined but not grasp. You need to want it, but you also need to not want anything at all. Meditation is very simple, but it’s also really hard, and after an entire lifetime you’ll still feel like a beginner.

Many students tell me, ‘Oh, I can’t meditate’ or ‘It’s not for me,’ but the reality is if you’ve got thought in your head and breath in your body, you can meditate. So if you do in fact have breath in your body, and the simplest way to check is to hold a page in front of your nose and see if it moves, you can do it.

‘Your feet will bring you where your heart wants to go’ is something my Irish teacher used to tell us when she found us milling around in the hallway, late for class. She was right, we had no interest in being near the classroom, our hearts wanted to go anywhere but there, but I hope for both our sakes that you’ve a little more interest in meditation, so let’s go on.

Exercise: The breath

You can start wherever you are. Sitting on a bus. At home on your bed. Even on the loo. You don’t need to climb a mountain or shave your head, or give up sex and alcohol. You can be an unhealthy, angry, slobby mess and still meditate. We take all comers. The only requirement is that you can breathe, and that you’re somehow willing.

Very simply, close your eyes and bring your attention to the breath in your body.

There are three main areas where you can feel the breath: the nose, the chest and the belly. So whichever one feels best to you right now, just pay attention to that.

Do this for a short while every day. You can set a timer. Five minutes is a good number to start with.

Every time you notice that you’re not doing it, start again.

Spoiler Alert: You will notice you’re not doing it almost all the time. Don’t stress about that. This is just the nature of the mind. When it’s not trained, it’s very hard to pay attention. It’s like telling a puppy to sit. The likely response is that they’ll just go chew your socks. The untrained mind is a lot like an untrained puppy. You need to be patient. You also need to be gentle. But by doing this exercise for some minutes every day you’ll slowly build up attention stamina.

Learning to pay attention to what you want to, rather than what’s just appearing in your mind, or in the world around you, is the number one thing you can do to improve the quality of your life.

Meditation can be difficult. Don’t worry. This is why we call it a practice.

What Happens whenYou’re Away withthe Fairies?

You will never plough a field by turning it over in your mind.

– IRISH PROVERB

The goal of meditation isn’t to control your thoughts, it’s to stop letting them control you.

– DAN MILLMAN