Why You Should Live An Ethical Life.

It has been hard for me to meditate lately.

Saying that out loud sounds just as bad as I feared it would.

And I don’t mean I have been distracted for a few days, or that I missed a week because I was busy. For much of the last year, I have been dealing incessant brain fog that has made the simple act of sitting down and paying attention much harder than it used to be.

I am still trying to understand what’s going on. There have been CT scans, endoscopies, colonoscopies, blood tests, stool tests, visits to specialists, and more tests still to come. There’s inflammation in my body. I just the last three years haven’t been the kindest to by body. Whether it’s autoimmune thing or something else is still unclear.

Alongside this, I have spent much of the year moving through different time zones. New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Sri Lanka, Berlin, Paris. I have slept badly for long stretches. Some mornings I wake up and it takes a while to remember where the hell I am.

Then I sit down to meditate.

For twenty years, meditation has been the most consistent thing in my life. I have practiced through heartbreak, anxiety, career changes, long flights, good years and difficult ones. I have taught tens of thousands of people how to do it.

And now, some mornings, I can barely follow a three breaths.

I’ve been hard on myself about this. I would sit down and immediately begin measuring the meditation against some earlier version of myself. My attention used to be sharper. I used to sit longer. I used to be able to stay with the breath without feeling like my mind was disappearing into fog. I used to be more ‘aware’.

There’s a weird kind of angst and frustration in struggling with something you are supposed to know how to do.

But when I look at my life over the past year, something else is also true.

I have been relatively steady. My life has been…pretty pleasant.

Not always happy, or calm. But balanced enough. I’ve been able to move through uncertainty without completely collapsing into it. I’ve been able to work, travel, teach, love my wife, prepare for a child, and deal with the strange bureaucracy of being a person with a body that nobody can quite explain.

I started wondering why.

Part of the answer, I think, is that years of meditation leave something behind.

I sometimes think of it as a savings account of mindfulness. Every time you sit down and notice a thought without following it, every time you feel anger in the body before speaking, every time you return to the breath, everytime you’re aware of your reality something is being deposited.

Over years, it adds up.

You can stop meditating for a while. Your attention can become scattered. The practice can feel far away. But I don’t think you simply lose everything you have learned.

The space between a feeling and a reaction may still be there of course. You might still notice when you are being a jerk or you might still recognize a thought as a thought. You may still know, somewhere in your body, that this moment will pass.

Formal meditation strengthens these capacities, but eventually they begin to live beyond the cushion.

There is another reason I think I have suffered less than I might have over the past year.

For a long time, I thought meditation was the main event. The rest of my practice was interesting, sometimes useful, but meditation was the real practice.

I don’t believe that anymore.

This past year I’ve spent more time studying the Buddhist teachings on ethics and morality. How we speak. How we act. What we consume. How we earn money. How we treat people when nobody is watching. What we do with desire, anger, envy, and power.

These things have probably helped me as much as meditation. At times, more.

This isn’t unique to Buddhism of course. Nearly every religious and philosophical tradition has tried to answer the same basic question: how should a human being live?

The language changes. The Buddha taught precepts. Christianity has commandments and teachings on virtue. Judaism has mitzvot. Hindu traditions speak of dharma and the yamas + niyamas. The Stoics asked what it meant to live according to virtue. Aristotle believed character was formed through repeated action.

Modern psychology covers some of the same territory through a different door. Our wellbeing is shaped by the quality of our relationships, whether our actions match our values, how much conflict we create around ourselves, and whether we can live with the person we are becoming.

This can all sound very serious. Morality is not a fashionable word in the world of wellness. Ethics can sound like a university subject or a list of things you are forbidden to do, for those that have PTSD from early experiences.

But for me, the Buddhist understanding just feels practical.

If you lie, you have to remember the lie.

If you speak cruelly, you have to live in the atmosphere your words create.

If you constantly chase what you want, your mind learns that this moment is never enough.

If you betray people, manipulate them, or act against your own values, some part of you has to carry that.

You can meditate for an hour every morning and still spend the rest of the day creating the conditions for your own suffering. This is why some of the worst people I have met, I have met on meditation retreats.

You can’t meditate your way out of how you treat others or the world around you. You can’t use awareness to bypass narcissism, greed, or a basic lack of humanity.

This is also why ethics comes before meditation in many traditional teachings. A quieter mind is easier to find when your life is not full of things you are hiding from yourself.

I’ve come to see this more clearly during a period when meditation itself has been difficult.

Maybe the practice is also in the email I choose not to send while angry. The conversation where I tell the truth. The moment I notice that I am making someone else responsible for my mood. The way I behave when I am tired, afraid, or disappointed.

None of this requires perfect concentration.

The past few days I sit and the brain fog is still there. I lose the breath. I forget what I am doing. The bell rings and I am not sure where the time went.

I am trying to be less harsh about that.

I still meditate. I still believe in the practice. But in this season of my life I no longer believe that the quality of a meditation tells me very much about the quality of a life.

I know how I live the rest of the day will tell me more.

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