When I was 19, I read a book on Buddhism. It was a factual, straightforward, western academic book on the topic, nothing of Buddhism, but something about Buddhism. It was maybe five years later that I bought a guided meditation and talk on tape by Thich Nhat Hanh. I was kind of a dilettante on the subject for another decade, picking and choosing pieces of Buddhism that were interesting to me, moving from atheist to agnostic to “spiritual but not religious” and back several times.
In 2009 when my marriage started breaking up, I read Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart” and it honest to Bob helped save my life. In fact, while I was reading it, I started an abortive suicide attempt involving a bottle of vodka, 100 Ativan, and my car in a closed garage. I hear that people who somehow survive jumps off of impossibly high bridges over dangerous water often realize the second after they jump that they want to live. I’m forever grateful that I chose a method that was slow, easy, and foolproof over quick and dramatic. I realized I wanted to live after about the 4th pill. I started going to meditation group and the peace I found from that couple of hours per week got me through an incredibly difficult time. But when faced with better times a couple of years later, I fell out of meditating and back into some bad, old habits (that sure were fun at times) while working through the emotional damage I’d suffered in the marriage and divorce. I sometimes meditated through those years, but it was kind of a sham.
It was in 2017 that I started meditating again with some regularity and with one might call Right Thought behind it. In the next two years, I went on some one and two day meditation retreats. In 2019, I went on a 5 day silent meditation retreat in the mountains of North Georgia and something really shifted for me. I experienced a bliss, for a couple of days of that, unlike anything I’d ever known. For the last four years, I have meditated nearly everyday.