I was very enthusiastic to learn about vipassana meditation.
I was listening to the meditation teacher who was about to give a real vipassana practical training.
Vipassana indicates “to observe things as they really are,” and that is exactly what I wanted to experience.
This was the first time in my life I was in the formal training of vipassana meditation though I used to do it randomly on my own at home.
Our teacher told us to ask any questions that the participants had before the formal practical training.
In most of the programs, question-answer sessions are generally at the end of the session but in this program the question-answer session was in the beginning.
I asked, “I remain busy due to my nature of work, my mind is always occupied with things, so I often don’t get time to meditate and I generally skip. What do you recommend?”
The teacher said, “I’m not here in a position to tell all of you what to do and what not to do. That is your job. I’m here to share with you what I learnt through my more than two decades of meditation experiences.”
“Just remember, many important things in life are really boring. So, it’s up to us whether we find time for it or make time for it.”
He further indicated to me, “You said you remain very busy all the time, that is very good for you, but being busy is your choice, I can’t help that. Therefore, I request all of you, never ever say I don’t have time, I can’t do this because I’m busy. You’re busy means the task you’re avoiding isn’t in your priority. In my personal view, busyness, in general, is a way to escape important things in life by completely substituting them with only urgent, semi urgent, and mostly mundane things. Urgent has immediate consequences but important has long term consequences so we need to balance both.”
He further said to me, indicating my question, “Can I ask you something? Do you have time for breathing?”
The whole participants laughed, I felt embarrassed and stupid, I said to myself why the heal I asked the question.
Teacher looked towards the organizing committee and asked, “how many people were supposed to be here according to your invitation response?”
Organizing committee representative replied, “around 40 people replied ‘yes’ to attend this session but only 28 people made it today and physically they are here.”
Then again he added, “Look at here, it’s not that only you are busy, there are so many out there who are also busy like you and they couldn’t make it today even though they said they would make it in the invitation reply. You made it, that’s great, thank you for being here.”
He elaborated more, “Majority of us don’t find time to do boring things in life such as meditation, but very few of us make time to do it. Just remember, many important things in life are really boring. So, it’s up to us whether we find time for it or make time for it. We don’t need to find time for meditation but we need to learn to respond the thinking why I’m not getting time for meditation.”
“If nothing works in your life, your daily routine of any good habit will work, your daily routine will change your biology particularly, the nervous system.”
I remember Andy Puddicombe, co-founder of The meditation app Headspace and author of ‘The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness‘, he says all the time that our challenge isn’t about eliminating distractions but learning how to respond to them.
Puddicombe says, “Meditation means letting go of our baggage, letting go of all the prerehearsed stories and inner dialogue that we’ve grown so attached to”.
“Whatever we are doing for a day, just stop for two minutes, close our eyes, and count our normal breathing, feel and observe it. How many times did we breathe in and breathe out? No need to think and plan,” my teacher added.
He said, “We did meditation for the day, we just did 2 minutes meditation, no need to suffer, no need to find time for it, no need to change our schedule. Let’s repeat this at least 10 days regularly, we will know what meditation is and what it does for us.”
“If we stop in 4 days without completing it’s dose, it won’t work.
Think of this way, what happens to our 10 days’ antibiotic dose if we stop in 5 days? Does an antibiotic work in our body?
What would your doctor respond if you say you didn’t finish the 10 days’ antibiotic dose?” he elaborated.
This is what I learned personally from any kind of training in my life: once anything good becomes a habit, we have to treat it as a lifelong task.
The benefit would be exponential.
Once we start the task, we have to stop for a day when we still feel like continuing to do it and do it tomorrow, and day after tomorrow again. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Rumi, the greatest poet of all time, said in similar lines of Aristotle, “What you seek is seeking you.”
We’re not only looking for our act, it’s also looking for us. We wouldn’t have had the desire for an act in the first place if some higher power or our intuition didn’t put it there.
Charles Duhigg, the author of ‘The Power of Habit‘ says “Habit formation is the secret of success for any life long act or project”. By the way, one of my favorites from ‘The Essential Rumi‘ “Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open”? Bad habit puts us in a prison but a good habit helps us to find many doors in life.
Our teacher ended his session by saying, “if nothing works in your life, your daily routine of any good habit will work. Remember, there is a scientific backing, your daily routine will change your biology particularly, the nervous system.”
“If you are serious in your health and make your health a number one priority in your life, never ever settle with one doctor, one test result, and one medical equipment, each can mislead you.”
In 2015, in Philadelphia, I asked a very simple question to my primary care physician doctor in a follow-up appointment during the discussion of my lab test result.
He said to me, “you’re pre-diabetic, and your cholesterol is also slightly higher, you’ve to lower these numbers.”
I pondered and asked myself how did it happen? I always felt that I’m healthy but I never knew where and how I screwed up my health.
A sudden but random question came to mind, I asked, “doctor, what exactly this insulin resistance is and why my body isn’t properly responding to insulin?”
To my surprise, my doctor said that insulin is a hormone and after that sentence, I simply saw only he was making circle without clear scientific knowledge, he couldn’t answer it properly.
It was quite a shock for me.
He was above 60 in his age and doing medical practice for the last 30 plus years.
I directly came home from the clinic even though I had prior planning to go back to my office. I was preoccupied and thinking to myself only how I screwed up my health?
I was also a little bit frustrated when my doctor couldn’t explain the chemistry between insulin and my blood glucose level.
I remembered many years ago one of my teachers told me that 90 percent or more of the knowledge that we gather during our lifetime we simply forget, because we never use it.
The only knowledge we remember is the knowledge which we use by action consistently.
Sometimes we become contagious in our daily work without thinking much deeper about what we’re doing.
Probably that’s what might have happened to my doctor. I’m not judging him and his competency, simply putting my thought on what I observed.
The number 121 mg/dL, my fasting glucose level in blood, was bogging me so I called another clinic and made an appointment for the next day.
In the USA, at least, we have the privilege to change our primary care physician if we want.
I didn’t change my physician but saw the second physician for my lab test in a different clinic.
On the morning of the second test day I intentionally ate a peanut butter sandwich with two pieces of whole wheat bread. I also ate a bowl of cheerios with two percent cold milk, and 4 pieces of strawberries on top of it.
I also drank hot tea made from boiling water, two percent milk, tea leaves , and 2 spoonfuls of sugar.
I took my glucose test for the second time, I got 117 mg/dL.
Nurse said to me, “your number is not bad, the doctor will tell you what steps you need to take.”
I remember the first glucose test number 121 mg/dL was on fasting but this number 117 mg/dL is after eating.
“Why is this discrepancy?” I said to myself.
I guessed that these numbers keep changing according to the time difference between my eating and testing time, who knows what’s going on in this body.
Without telling my wife, otherwise she would tell me I was a nerd, I also took the third test after seven days in the third clinic, I got 115 mg/dL.
After this test, I didn’t care much about these numbers, I knew these numbers could not represent my body mechanism.
I learned this “If you are serious in your health and make your health a number one priority in your life, never ever settle with one doctor, one test result, and one medical equipment for any kind of diagnosis. Any of the above can give you errors or mislead you due to various reasons.”
“Any numbers in our life are a way of communication, they are just indicators, they don’t have absolute meaning, they are relative.”
After knowing these numbers I realized that my life is somewhere else, at least not in these changing numbers, I have to look in different place.
Truth to be told, I was neither ignoring nor skipping these numbers, I was simply trying to see deeper in my body what is inside my body.
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a leader of French Revolution, said, “Numbers don’t lead, humans lead. Numbers follow”. The beauty of life isn’t in managing desired numbers, beauty is in making the desired numbers, therefore, I made health a number one priority in my life through good habit formation.
If we only manage life, we have to avoid vanilla ice cream, sugar, and many mores throughout our life but if we start to make our life we don’t have to avoid any of these all life.
Let me confess this, vanilla ice cream is damn good, if you can’t eat due to your glucose numbers then you are missing the taste of life.
As a result of this life philosophy, I breathe everyday, my glucose level has consistently been under 100 on fasting for the last 5 plus years. How I did this could be the topic for next time, it’s not difficult, it’s just the beginning of small consistent good habit formation. James Clear, the author of ‘Atomic Habits‘ says about 1% rule that means just 1% better every day can lead to massive improvements over a year.
What I learned over the years is, our life always runs on circular track, we know the upper number, we know the lower number, we also know what is the correct range.
More than that, our doctor and nurse also keep reminding us of these upper and lower numbers quite often.
But, we never try to understand at core what exactly these numbers are doing in our life.
We never try to see these numbers in the bigger picture. If there is something wrong with these numbers we never try to fix them, we only try to manage them.
I’ve seen many people around me only managing these numbers without knowing how the desired numbers actually can be made.
The bottom line is, if we are stressed out because of these undesired numbers we are living in the past, if we’re more anxious only about the desired numbers, we are living in the future. But if we know what these numbers do in our life and how to make them then we are at peace, we are living in the present.
Any numbers in our life are a way of communication, they are just indicators, they don’t have absolute meaning, they are relative.
“We don’t have to go either for movement or against the movement aggressively, we have to evolve through in between to adapt and to nurture the society.”
My 121 mg/dL number that the doctor gave me for the first time was just a representation of an instant fraction of a second’s snapshot of my body biochemistry.
One of my trader friends used to tell me the numbers on the screen about his stock trading, he used to say that the numbers on the screen are not real. It is a representation of an instant fraction of a second’s snapshot of millions of people who are doing transactions worldwide at that particular moment.
“They keep changing 24/7, don’t trust them,” he told me.
My friend said, “If you know the language of these numbers on the screen and it’s mechanism for your stock, you might become the next Ray Dalio.”
I said, “whoopee.”
Ray Dalio is a self-made billionaire and hedge fund manager who teaches us shaping our culture and investment strategies. Dalio, the author of ‘Principles‘ says “Structured consistent exercises are required to help us identify our values, motivations, and blind spots in our lives.”
Dalio is the master to read the language of numbers in life and move ahead.
In reality, our life is somewhere else waiting for many more important things, at least not in these tiny bits of snapshot numbers.
The goal is to know the whole language by all of the numbers relatively which can reinvent us.
These tiny snapshot numbers from here and there are like random words which don’t make any sense until we join them together and make a complete sentence that gives the full meaning.
I’m learning to live by a quote of a man who inspired billions of people on the planet.
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened,” Mark Twain. In most of the time, troubles appear by absolute thinking.
There are two types of people in this world. One category is those who are against the movement who manage desired numbers and the second category are those who are for the movement who make desired numbers themselves.
They both have one thing in common: their trust, therefore, the whole world is in balance.
The most beautiful thing in life is to accept wherever we are, then only we can grow.
We don’t have to go either for movement or against the movement aggressively, we have to evolve through in between.
The process of growing is basically the adaptation process to nurture the society.
Once we adapt with something good, we must use it otherwise we forget it and become useless.
The beauty of growing in between movement and against movement is that we don’t have to follow any other people, we don’t have to follow our teachers, we don’t have to follow our parents, we don’t have to follow anybody who made successful things before.
“I asked my professor, ‘Professor, what’s your GPA when you were an undergrad?’ He said, ‘not good.’ I realized everybody in this world is a working progress.”
We have to learn from their genuine causes why and how they started in the first place to take inspiration.
Growing means learning some specific thing for a specific purpose in life.
It doesn’t mean just to be educated which is very normal, it means to be genuine and proactive with laser focus.
We can learn by any means, we can learn by visiting, we can learn by meeting people, we can learn by doing, we can learn by reflection, and we can learn by writing. There are so many options.
The most important thing I am learning is by meeting people, by asking simple questions, that is one of the tools of human evolution in the 21st century.
Therefore, don’t be afraid to meet people and ask simple questions in any circumstances.
When I was a graduate student, there was a small get-together in our professors’ house. Everybody was talking about the GPA requirement to enter into a lucrative profession.
I asked my professor, “Professor, what was your GPA when you were an undergrad?”
He laughed and said, “not good.”
That answer gave me a moral boost that everybody in this world is a working progress.
Ask the dumbest question that you have in your mind if you don’t understand anything in any situation.
Who knows that single question might change your whole life.
Conclusion
When I was a postdoctoral researcher in Virginia, I used to teach chemistry for sophomores as a side hustle. I had one student from Saudi Arabia.
He was an average chemistry student but a very good swimmer.
One day I asked him a very simple question, “Though I’m your chemistry tutor, can you be my swimming tutor?”
Until then I didn’t know how to swim, but now I’m a reasonably good swimmer, at least I don’t die by drowning. This happened to me by asking a very simple question.
One day he took me to his swimming club where I met many very good professional swimmers along with some coaches.
During a casual talk I asked them, “Who is the second best swimmer in the world?”
Nobody could answer it. They only knew the top swimmer in their field: Michael Phelps.
Then I realized that what is the difference between the number one and number two swimmers in the world?
“What is the secret of this number game?” I asked myself.
Why do we remember only the number one swimmer but not number two or number three at least?
I am still struggling to get the answer of these numbers.
I remember one of the best players in the world saying, “Number one spot is always overrated. My number one spot is infinitesimal.” Remember, this universe was here billions of years ago, and will remain many many thousands of billions of years more. There were many great players in this universe before, and many many more will be born in future. Novak Djokovic, a veteran tennis player said beautifully, “Number one spot is nothing for me, it’s a tiny snapshot of my total playing career.”
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
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