By Phyllis Coletta, WRAP community member and author of How to Be a Good Dog: Learning to Sit, Stay, and Heal
For many reasons, much of my life was very chaotic, until my early forties when I realized I needed some relief from the relentless voice in my head that drove me to the kind of frenzied behavior and nonstop anxiety that compels so many goodhearted folks to substance abuse and mental health issues.
I was at a crossroads in my life—already twice divorced by the age of 42 and raising three boys as a single mom at the Jersey shore; it was either booze or Buddhism and, honestly, I’m such a lightweight I knew the path of peace and meditation was the only road.
But here’s the problem with meditation: when I looked around for resources and support, everyone in the culture of “peace” looked so calm and holy. I’m neither. I’m a second-generation Italian from Philly so you can imagine how loud I am (and live). Smiling, quiet people made me more anxious. I tried stepping into groups and retreats and always felt “less than.” Many times, I just couldn’t wait to get out of there.
I knew meditation worked. My older sister had been doing it for years. She inherited that family scourge of judgment, anxiety, fear, and a hair-trigger temper, but I started to see changes in her; she was laughing more and yelling less and I thought, “I want what she has.” My life had become unmanageable and my teenage sons were starting to pull away from me, just as I had from my mother.
So against all odds and doubts (how would I sit still???), I decided I had to try meditation.
With tons of trepidation and no idea how to do this, I started to train myself to sit still. The only quiet place in the house was the laundry room, so I dragged myself there twice a day, set a timer for 5 minutes, and sat down.
As soon as I did, the circus in my head started. We all know the drill—that loud, mean, judgmental, self-degrading commentator piped up immediately: “So what do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know you have to go food shopping? Joe’s coughing hard and it doesn’t stop. Shoot. I can’t stay home from work if he’s sick. Will I make my bills this month? You’re ridiculous. Get up and DO SOMETHING.”
But I stayed. I forced myself to sit there and listened to that nonstop yapping in my head until one day I asked myself, “Why am I listening to this noise? And how can I make it STOP?” I kept trying retreats, groups, guided meditations, etc., but all the rigid rules around silence, hand placement, mudras, chanting, breathing a certain way, body-scanning, spine-straightening, and a list of other instructions made me want to climb out of my skin. And to be honest, I was a little afraid of becoming calm and peaceful. Those folks didn’t seem like fun, and I love to laugh. Would I be allowed to laugh?
Worse than losing my sense of humor (spoiler: that never happened; I’m still funny, just not so mean), I was deep-down terrified of all the bad stuff that I’d think of if I sat still for too long. And sure enough, the demons of pain, shame, blame, loss, fear, and ridicule came calling, early and often. But I endured it; I let it happen and tried to let it go in one ear and out the other. The dark stuff came up and guess what? I survived it, and I’ve never heard of anyone dying from meditation.
I jumped in and did a 2-year program to become a Zen Buddhist chaplain. However, there was a lot about the courses that seemed so complex and unreachable. Why did I need to understand these Sanskrit words and lists of “perfections” and paths? These ways to be in the world that seemed mired in mystery? I did love the quiet, though, and the best thing about the silent retreats was that nobody talked to me, and I couldn’t talk to them. What a relief. But I had this nagging feeling that meditation was hard, of course, because we are trained not to sit still (“Don’t just sit there! DO SOMETHING!”), but teachers and rules and methods made it so much harder. There had to be a better way.
Fast forward to 2018 when I was teaching at an alternative high school in Seattle for kids in recovery from addiction. Now, the teenage mind is wild on a good day, at baseline it is “all over the place.” Throw in addiction and recovery and these kids were heroically up against it. A typical teen couldn’t even come close to understanding how the adolescent mind operates in addiction. For these students, the challenge was nonstop.
But I’ve always loved teenagers, especially the wild ones on the margins. The classes were fortunately small and I pushed them through content (like we are required to do) but mostly loved them, made them laugh, allowed their rage, and talked about emotions. One of my favorites was a young kid named Tyler—you know, that boy with the hair hanging heavy over his eyes, grousing and complaining like an old curmudgeon all day. So I decided to approach the subject of meditation through the metaphor of training a puppy. If there’s one thing more uncontained than a teenage brain, it’s a puppy.
“Hey Tyler,” I asked out of nowhere one day, “If your mind was a puppy, untrained and crazy, what breed would it be?”
His head rose up from his chest slowly, beneath his hair he glared at me, and then he sneered, “I’m a f***ing German Shephard.”
The class loved it, and off we went, talking about how destructive puppies can be, and how hard it is to train them. It was so much fun and they were so completely engaged that we managed to move it into meditation and the idea of training our minds to sit and stay. The method worked. It’s simple (but not easy) and who hasn’t endured the frustration of training a puppy, as well as the rewards that come when you turn an enemy into an ally?
A few years later I put the whole thing on paper, writing a book called HOW TO BE A GOOD DOG: Learning to Sit, Stay, and Heal. Over time, meditation transformed my mind from a crazy Chihuahua into an old black Lab. The constant barking has stopped and I don’t react with anger at every little thing anymore. It worked, without ANY rules and regulations. The metaphor is amazing, because people and dogs truly love each other and it’s much easier to train your mind (like a puppy that you love) than endure a lot of Sanskrit and chanting in dark rooms. That works for some of us, but not most. We are shaky and scared when it comes to silence and stillness and the last thing we need is “spiritual” people imposing on us. Want to learn to meditate? Just sit. Start there. Then we learn to STAY (harder), LEAVE IT! (when our minds cling to bad and negative thoughts, like a pup eating garbage), and as a result, we HEAL.
Meditation can be such a great Wellness Tool for your WRAP Toolbox, and I know it is really effective—without all the mystery. You’ve seen folks being dragged around on a leash by those untrained, unmanageable dogs? Heeling = healing. We can use meditation to regulate powerful emotions; they become a quiet companion, walking beside us, rather than dragging us everywhere.
I hope you can approach meditation like you would a puppy—with love, just taking small steps for big gains.
Learn more about Phyllis’s simple steps to meditation in this free podcast: Calm Your Racing Brain in 60 Seconds (Puppy Mind Trick).
