Awakening Through Creative Presence
Student/teacher collaboration (2023)
May 10, 2024
Around thirty men sit up while resting their hands on their knees in a basement cafeteria. They follow the sensation of air as it flows in and out of their chests with their eyes closed, which makes it easier to focus since many of them suffer from anxiety and attention deficits. A man in back slumps to the side as relaxation sets in. The smoker in front of him coughs deeply, so I remind him to proceed gently since there’s no reason to hurt himself.
My students live at the Methadone to Abstinence Residential shelter in the South Bronx, where they receive counseling and wellness support through Acacia Network, one of the city’s largest human services organizations. I’m hired to teach them techniques that will aid their opioid addiction recovery such as mindfulness of breathing, which I practice daily as part of the calm abiding (shamatha) of mindfulness meditation discipline.
“Now relax,” I say. “And listen.”
The piercing chirps of coquí frogs fill the space once I play a recording from the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico, the archipelago of Caribbean islands where most of the men were born. Many of them grin upon hearing the high-pitched calls that ward off rivals and while alluring females, which can be heard from the streets of San Juan to the most pristine mountain paradises where the heavens kiss the earth.
Their eyeballs dart around behind their eyelids as they focus on the chirps that punctuate the buzzing of cicadas, the rumbling thunder, an ambience that conjures the spaciousness of tropical rainforest. As audio perceptions morph into images once I instruct them to visualize the sounds, an exercise in imagination that seems to fascinate them.
“Now grab a pencil,” I say after a few minutes. “And draw whatever you saw but keep your eyes closed.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” a man with facial tattoos asks.
“You can see with your mind,” I tell him. “Try it.”
“Abe” traces his pencil over paper until lines curve into orbs, cellular forms that feature cilia like tendrils as coquís chirp and cicadas buzz over my Bluetooth speaker. “Sound drawings” have become the quickest method for introducing my students to subconscious creativity, for getting them to move beyond limiting mindsets since their sobriety will hinge upon the replacing of old habits with newer ones. To get them to think in the abstract.
It’s a struggle I’m familiar with as the son of an addict, as a writer and artist who’s embraced abstinence after decades of a lush life that’s shadowed me from the post-punk underground of the 1980s to the queer subculture of the 1990s and beyond. A trajectory of messy excess as well as creative and spiritual growth that’s evolved into a daily meditation and study discipline that sustains my cleaner living as a Buddhist.
Abe’s peers draw in silence as he does, a policy I enforce to minimize distractions as well as to connect them to their creativity since few of them expressed any interest in artmaking. Most of them were curious about meditation, however, a practice that could help them to relax from what they understood, to control the emotions that perpetuate the cycle of trauma-response that’s daunting to reverse after decades of addiction.
Abe looks up when I strike the meditation bowl to end the sound drawing exercise, his expression blank. Something has shifted for him it seems. He stares me in the eye when I approach him, the light in his gaze brightening. It’s an intimacy, a warmth, that I don’t expect since he was skeptical—antagonistic even—from the moment I arrived.
“Everything okay?” I ask him.
“I can’t believe it,” he says.
*****
I stand before a dozen women at the Lehman Village Senior Center in East Harlem later that week, a facility that’s administered by the Carter Burden Network. The nonprofit serves the city’s seniors through an array of services that address elder abuse, food insecurity, and lacking access to health and wellness resources that improve quality of life.
The women follow the movements of the breath as they gaze downward, a focus to return to whenever sounds on the street, thoughts in their minds, pull them away. A mindfulness practice that trains them to remain present regardless of what’s happening around them, despite the catastrophizing that robs most of us of too much precious time.
The resonance of gongs and bells fills the classroom once I transition to a sound meditation, when they listen with their eyes closed, with their hands on their knees. As I strike my meditation bowl to add an acoustic ambience to the recorded tones that echo and cascade over one another. As the metallic vibrations spark visions in their minds, which I instruct them to observe as they settle into the sonic contemplation.
“Now draw how the sounds feel,” I say. “With your eyes closed.”
“I can’t,” a woman says. “My arthritis.”
“Show me what the pain looks like as long as it doesn’t hurt too much,” I tell her. “Do you think you can do that?”
“I guess.”
“Evelyn” throws me an incredulous glare before grabbing a pencil. She draws a line that spirals and wanders as gongs and bells guide her once she closes her eyes. When she appears to lose herself in the process as I strike my meditation bowl to heighten the tension, her hands as rough and gnarled as ancient tree roots. As worn and wise.
I’ve refined my approach since teaching my first group of seniors in collaboration with The Clemente, a direct response to the increasing mortality rates and mental decline that the COVID-19 lockdown had accelerated by 2022. A crisis that we met through meditation and storytelling workshops where participants reported that a daily practice had reduced their anxiety and physical pain, their quality of sleep improving.
“I can’t believe it,” Evelyn says once we finish.
“What’s happened?”
“Never mind,” she says as if afraid of speaking too soon.
*****
The journey that leads to this work begins when I slop paint onto art paper in kindergarten, when my curiosity unravels as I’ve yet to experience as a five-year-old. As blue mixes with yellow to make green, I find, just as red and blue turn purple, scents and revelations that spark my first transcendental states before an easel.
When an inner voice guides my decisions, “the other me within” as I describe it in a book that I’m writing. The whispers of a wiser, courageous self that directs one action after the next until colors mix into a brown muck, a companion who convinces me to learn how to play the recorder three years later. Impulses that propel me onto the artist’s path.
On a creative quest that coincides with a spiritual search that guides me to my first meditation class in my twenties. When I sit up while following the teacher’s instruction, my attention fixed on the movements of breath as a runaway train of thoughts races through my mind. A discipline that intimidates me, which I’ll return to once I’m ready.
I venture deeper into Transcendental Meditation (TM) practice for the calm and clarity it provides during the COVID-19 lockdown forty years later. When I extend my sits to forty-five minutes before plunging into my writing projects with the spaciousness of mind that I settle into. When my fiction improves once I feel my way through the work rather than overthinking it. When my creative and spiritual paths merge.
Yearning to help others, I register for Tibet House’s 100-Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training with David Nichtern, a transformative turning point in 2020. When I combine meditation instruction with memoir writing to help my students process the shellshock of the pandemic, the seeds for what will evolve into my creative mindfulness workshops, the merging of Buddhist and artistic practice that I use to help others.
An intuitive fusion that Chögyam Trunpga Rinpoche elaborates upon in True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art (Shambhala, 1994): “And as you meditate more and work on your art more, the boundary between meditation and the practice of art, between openness and action, becomes fuzzy—which is what everyone experienced in the past.”
My goal is to spark “flow states” for my students, the focused absorption that artists refer to as The Zone—the open spaces of possibility that resemble meditative concentration (samadhi). Optimal states for releasing stress through the stimulation of subconscious creativity, as happens while they’re composing sound drawings, an instinctive approach to creating that bypasses the ego’s control mechanism to uncover their purest being.
In the space of mind that I encountered while splashing paint onto paper as a five-year-old, which I’ve revisited while playing guitar, framing photographs, and drafting stories for nearly fifty years since. A ritual surrender that’s deepened my meditation discipline, which seeds the mind for even more inspiration, a symbiosis that’s energized my life with meaning while birthing the method I’ve developed for transmitting these practices.
*****
Abe stares back at me as I await his answer in the cafeteria on our first day together. The meditations and drawing exercises have unlocked something, I assume, since he cannot find the words when he tries to speak at first.
“I never knew,” he says at last.
“Knew what?”
“That I could draw.”
I’m not sure what to tell him since I’ve never had a student confess to such a breakthrough, though I can only guess that it’ll happen again. “Develop your talent with practice,” I tell him. “And use it to relax. To stay clean.”
*****
Evelyn seems perkier on the second week, her gaze brighter than when we first met. When I encouraged her to use her pain—her arthritis—on the path to healing through meditation and creativity. When I photographed her drawing and enhanced it with filters before uploading it to my Instagram profile; a collaboration that I offer my students, who enjoy seeing their sketches transformed into digital works of modern art that strangers can enjoy.
“You won’t believe this,” she says.
“What is it?”
“I’ve been meditating first thing in the morning,” she says. “And my arthritis doesn’t hurt as much as it used to.”
It surprises me even though I’ve heard it before, beginning with the elders that I taught on the Lower East Side in 2022, who discovered that pulling their attention away from physical pain minimized the discomfort. Just as the writers I hosted online during lockdown, most of whom were living with chronic illness, who reported the same phenomenon.
My first meditations—as I tell my students—were the open spaces of possibility that I discovered as a schoolboy. Moments of focused absorption that I also experienced beside the chattering river current and rustling autumn leaves at our botanical garden, in walking meditations that reminded me that I was alive—and transcendentally so—despite my problems. My earliest awakenings, which led me to this work.
We can train ourselves to disengage from the discursive daydreaming that magnifies our suffering, that robs us of the preciousness of the present moment, by placing our attention on the breath, on the sacredness of sound, and the expression of our purest being. By fusing these practices, we can begin to live a more meaningful life of creative presence.