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“Coming Back to the Page 101 Times” is an excerpt from the final chapter of Craft: A Memoir. The book features personal stories from my development as a writer that illustrate craft elements central to my body of work as a poet. This final chapter turns the book decidedly inward, focusing on how meditation and mindfulness practice can help us redirect our inevitable daily distractions so that they are a productive element of our writing process rather than a hindrance to our writing. — Tony Trigilio

Coming Back to the Page 101 Times

Nearly every morning before breakfast, I sit on a cushion in my living room for fifteen to twenty minutes and do nothing goal-oriented or accomplishment-based. I just sit and breathe, refocusing my attention as much as possible on my in-breaths and out-breaths. I try to notice, rather than follow, the thoughts chattering in my head — the random memories, feelings, ideas, and to-do lists that arise with each breath.

I began a daily meditation practice in 1994, and it’s been inseparable from my writing practice every since. Ironically, as important as meditation practice has been for my writing, my first experience with it was rife with distraction.

I was a third-year undergraduate student at Kent State University. A close friend had dropped by my apartment to see if I wanted to join him for that evening’s meditation sitting at the Kent Zendo. A Zendo is a physical setting, usually a formal temple or meditation hall, where a trained Zen Buddhist teacher guides students through sessions of sitting meditation. In our case, the Kent Zendo was the Zen teacher’s large, two-bedroom apartment in a courtyard building on the north side of our college town.

I’d been curious about sitting practice for a few years, and this was my first chance to try it. I sat comfortably on a meditation cushion on the hardwood floor with a group of seven others, including the teacher, in the Zendo’s spacious living room. My body settled into what looked to me like the same quarter-lotus sitting position everyone else was in. I found myself easily following the Zen teacher’s advice to breathe and take notice of my in-breaths as they touched my nostrils and my out-breaths as they tickled my upper lip. The eight of us sat in silence. I settled into a calm, abiding awareness of the moment: “right here, right now, just this,” as my current Zen teacher likes to describe this feeling.

Everything changed just a few minutes into the session. The Zendo’s next-door neighbor was a drummer, as it turned out, and he started practicing not long after I’d noticed that feeling of meditative calm pervade the room. Quite a distraction for me, but not because of the noises produced next door by a full drum kit (snare, bass drum, tom-toms, and cymbals). Instead, as a drummer and percussionist myself, I was preoccupied with judgmental evaluations of what the neighbor was playing. I could hear him attempting complicated snare-tom-bass triplet sequences. Then he’d stop, as if to gather himself, before resuming with familiar warm-up snare rudiments I’d learned when I first started playing the instrument. When he nailed a difficult rhythmic pattern, I felt a mixture of happiness for him and also jealousy, despite my confidence as a musician, as I allowed his success to make me feel self-conscious about my own limitations. As relaxing as it was for my first meditation experience to unfold with a drummer practicing next door — not so much for my fellow meditators, as they said later, during our large-group discussion — I found it impossible to observe my breathing while also sitting in judgment of the neighbor’s musicianship. I permitted myself to be led around by my wandering thoughts, like a dog chasing a stick, instead of merely noticing them as a cat would watch, but not run after, the same stick. I was consumed by the drummer, expending most of my imaginative energy listening to him instead of noticing the rise and fall of my breath.

I wasn’t allowing the neighbor’s drumming to reach my ears as the noisy, non-conceptual silence of raw sound — that is, as something my mind, for a split-second, did not try to fit into logical categories like “good” or “bad.” I was obsessed, instead, with envious internal monologues every time his technique seemed better than mine, which, in turn, generated catty self-satisfaction when he made mistakes that led me to conclude I was, indeed, the superior percussionist.

I used my first-ever meditation session to prove to myself, at a stranger’s expense, what a terrific musician I was. Buddhism describes this as “self-cherishing.” It was easier to celebrate myself that day than to observe myself, easier to judge myself as a “good” first-time meditator and a “good” musician than to notice all that was, as usual, roiling inside me — all the mental chatter that distracted me from inhabiting, in mind and body, the room in which we all were sitting. My effort to stay grounded in the present (“right here, right now, just this”) proved elusive as I sat on my cushion and nurtured my reactionary ego as a musician.

Once I stopped observing my breath, I lost the concrete sense of my body in space, and my posture slouched. The Zen teacher periodically asked me to sit straighter as the night went on, because, as he reminded us, allowing your back and stomach to go slack leads to brain fog and sleepiness during meditation. I tried to follow his guidance. But I lapsed into a quarter-lotus slouch each time I directed my attention to the neighbor’s drumming and, in doing so, created extended self-cherishing narratives in my head about my musicianship.

It’s a wonder I ever made it back to the everyday consciousness of the present moment that evening at the Zendo. Still, I look back on that night with fondness for how I struggled. I was consciously aware of the conflict I was experiencing as I tried to meditate, and I felt a palpable constriction of mind and body as I obsessively followed my thoughts about the “good” and “bad” sounds the neighbor was making. Yet I also felt an expansive sense of possibility in those flashes of insight when I observed, without indulging my editorializing, judgmental mind, a wider range of what was happening in the room in which we sat—the raw sounds of the drums and cymbals as they reached my ears; the shifting of my fellow meditators on their cushions; and, as always, the incessant rattle of free-associative thoughts in my head. My struggle with meditation that night taught me an important lesson about my creative process: the imagination flourishes in that split-second before the editorializing and judgmental mind intrudes. With my attention diverted by my critiques of the drummer next door, I learned more about my distracting mental habits than if I’d slipped into the blissed-out transcendental state that our stereotypes of meditation had taught me to expect that evening. Reflecting on the struggle to stay focused helped me understand much later how precise the phrase “meditation practice” is. Meditation is a practice that, like any other, needs to be performed regularly before our self-consciousness about it drops away and the act itself becomes second nature. Our writing is no different. We are doing a writing practice, a mind-training practice that, with persistent, sustained effort, becomes easier to perform as we begin to recognize that our editorializing, self-conscious mind can become a hindrance if we allow it to take control of the imagination. Applying meditation to writing involves resisting our urge to control our thoughts and force them into language we feel is “right” or “acceptable.” Meditation practice helps us, as writers, observe more clearly what we see in the imagination and to render, without self-judgment, the details of what we see.

But given the enormous distractions of daily life, applying meditation to the writing process might seem anything but simple, especially when we’re in the midst of a creative block. In such moments, I try to remind myself that writer’s block is not a failure of the imagination. Instead, I tend to experience writer’s block when my editorializing mind gets in the way of my imagination’s need to linger in that non-conceptual, silent moment before I’ve imposed language on the sound and labeled it as “good” or “bad.” But meditation can intensify our ways of seeing, leading often to a heightened perception that can break through writer’s block by facing and redirecting the tremendous energies of our daily distractions.

My effort to embrace and reroute distraction is inspired by strategies taught by my first meditation teacher, Andrew Weiss, a lay practitioner of Insight Meditation and a student of the late Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn’s Tiep Hen School (the Order of Interbeing). Weiss would instruct us to accept distraction as an inseparable texture of the landscapes of our everyday, ordinary minds. Distraction is produced by the same mind that can quiet distraction, Weiss taught. “If you are distracted from your breath 100 times,” he would say, “just make sure you come back 101 times.” In my own individual writing practice, such an approach nurtures the imagination, helping me recognize distractions that threaten the writing process. More important, it suggests that I can redirectdistraction by facing it head-on, rather than surrender to the chattering internal monologues that characterize so much of waking life. Meditation can encourage us as writers to experience distraction as an inevitable phenomenon, an extension rather than a disruption of our creative process. If we are distracted from the page 100 times, then the imaginative focus enabled by meditation practice can help us return to the page 101 times.