Practical Wisdom

What keeps a meditation practice going for 25 years? Renowned author Natalie Goldberg offers some insight.

By Natalie Goldberg

My second rule is to be creative and flexible in your meditation. A structure that worked well for three years may suddenly collapse: You have a new job with different hours, or you're traveling for two months, or your wife just gave birth to a second child and the household is in endless chaos. So learn to meditate in a chair, while you sit in the waiting room of your dentist's office, or in the car as you wait for your son or daughter to finish soccer practice.

Meditation is about having a large life smack in the center of your everyday life. The challenge is how to stay open and continue. I was at a retreat at Plum Village in southern France when the person next to me asked Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who is in his 60s, how he has kept his meditation practice alive for so long. He smiled a wry, sweet smile. "So you want to know my secret?" She nodded eagerly. "I do whatever works and change it when it no longer works."

Never Give Up

My third rule: Even if you can't meditate, carry your meditation inside. When my book, Writing Down the Bones, appeared in 1986, I was invited to teach in Selma, Alabama. The thick air and the abundant trees, so different from my dry New Mexico, delighted me, and I was curious about an author everyone told me about. She lived an hour away in the country. She'd just won the PEN/Hemingway Award for her collection of short stories. It was her first book and she was in her 70s. I had the privilege of speaking to her on the phone.

"Have you been writing all of your life?" I asked, elated at the victory a writer could still have at her age.

"I wrote through my 20s and then got married and had a son," she said. "I didn't start up again until my 60s when my husband died."

I paused. I was a gung-ho writer then and wouldn't give it up for anything.

"Well, was it hard? I mean giving up writing. Did you resent it?"

"Oh, no, I didn't feel bad," she replied. "All the years I didn't write I never stopped seeing myself as a writer."

That conversation left a lasting impact on me. Even if you can't write, you can see the way a writer does, observe and digest the details of what surrounds you. This is also true of a life of meditation. There might be periods—weeks, months, or even years—when you can't get to the cushion, but that doesn't mean you have to give up being a meditator. And when you finally do return to sitting, your practice might be even fresher than when you left it.

My fourth rule is that even if you carry meditation inside—still see and feel as a meditator—there are times when you need to physically practice differently. Case in point: When I lived in Santa Fe in my early 40s, I was pushing hard on at least three books, and the mind exertion and concentration of writing felt too much like the experience I had when I sat. So I made walking my meditation.

In Santa Fe I lived near the downtown plaza and close to cafes. I'd do mindful walking to the places where I wrote. One foot after the other. I'd feel my toes bend, heel lift, hip shift, the weight of placing one foot down, and the rise of the other. I noticed how my feet carried me. Then when I was done with three or four hours of writing, I'd walk some more. I'd transfer the power of my writing concentration down into the power of my feet. I'd leave the mind of my imagination and land in the mind of the streets. My feet became my focus under the one sky, near parking meters, the rustle of cottonwoods, the smell of roasted chilies. Even though I consider writing an inner physical activity, where my whole body is engaged—my heart, lungs, liver, breath—walking grounded me to the physical world around me.

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