Meditation, David Lynch, L.A.
A few months back, I started meditating twice a day.
None of my previous meditation practices had ever stuck. I always saw it as a matter of will power. I’d beat myself up: you’re too lazy to stick with something as wholesome as meditation. I rode myself even when I meditated: you’re getting distracted, your mind isn’t blank enough, you should be better at this already. I tried, and I failed.
This time I’ve had a different approach: a method called Natural Stress Relief that emphasizes that it’s okay, that you don’t need to try, that there’s no result you’re trying to get. And the technique could hardly be simpler: eighteen minutes, morning and afternoon, sitting with your eyes closed, silently repeating a syllable. I believe the technique to be much the same as the much more well-known Transcendental Meditation (also known as TM), except that instead of costing $1000+ to get trained you can download the materials for $25 and train yourself.
A few months in, I’ve become curious to learn more about meditation. I’m reading a collection of short essays put out by Shambhala, and my partner got me the classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I’m also re-reading David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish. (Lynch is maybe the most famous TM practitioner out there.) Lynch’s book is a bit autobiographical and a bit philosophical, but these qualities are elevated by the format: a sequence of short, pithy essaylets.
Here’s Lynch’s essaylet titled “Los Angeles”:
I came to Los Angeles from Philadelphia, where I had lived for five years, attending art school. Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love, but when I was there, it was a hellhole. There wasn’t a lot of love in that city.
I arrived in L.A. at night, so it wasn’t until the next morning, when I stepped out of a small apartment on San Vicente Boulevard, that I saw this light. And it thrilled my soul. I feel lucky to live with that light.
I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places. The light in Philadelphia, even in the summer, is not nearly as bright. It was the light that brought everybody to L.A. to make films in the early days. It’s still a beautiful place.
This captures so much of what I love about L.A. And it shook loose a memory, maybe one of my oldest.
It was before my brother was born, so I was maybe three, maybe a little less. We flew to L.A. to visit my grandma. Since divorcing my grandpa, she lived in a condo with a pool just a few blocks up the street from the Hollywood Bowl. But my memory is from before we made it to her place. We had gotten on the plane in foggy San Francisco. It was probably the first plane ride of my life. And when we landed in L.A. they had us disembark on the tarmac. (They still do for intra-California flights.) It was just after sundown, and we waited for the other passengers to get off. As we came up to the front of the plane, the cockpit door was open and my dad asked if the pilot would show me the controls. I looked on in awe at what must have been over a hundred back-lit buttons, together a gleaming constellation. Then we stepped off the plane.
The sky was pink and pastel blue. The air was warm against my arms. It was a quality of light, but it was also a feeling that thrummed in my small chest. I pressed it between the pages of my memory, only to retrieve it a quarter-century later, as I mark five year as an Angeleno, as my L.A.-born child nears the same age I was when I stepped off that plane.
