Meditating with Grapefruits

A story about feeling it

I like the idea of meditating but have no fucking idea what I’m doing when I try, so mostly, I don’t. But I think I’ve figured out something approximate with grapefruits. Allow me to explain.

This began in Patagonia fifteen years ago as I camped outside a little Argentine village called El Chaltén and ate a grapefruit on the banks of a meandering river. After living out of a backpack for a month I’d been savoring every bite of food I carried. But this grapefruit was different. I vividly remember peeling it to the sounds of the rippling water, portioning out each section and slowly eating them, taking in every bit of their sour flavor.

Of course, I’d eaten grapefruits before. Growing up, my mom would cut them in half for breakfast and we’d pour way too much sugar on top, scooping out the insides with those sharp-edged spoons and slurping down the sugar juice left in the bowl—but sitting by that river was the first time I’d eaten one without trying to mask the true taste of the fruit. And this is how I inadvertently discovered my path to meditation.

By now it has become somewhat of a ritual. Taking five minutes to pay attention to what’s in front of me, letting the grapefruit do the work of boxing out any judgement. I guess you’d call it my stand in for a mantra.

Because I find it hard not to judge my feelings when they arise. For a long time when a thought came up which I didn’t like I pushed it off altogether, hoping it would disappear if buried deep enough. But, no, that’s not how it works—for those thoughts there’s only one way out and it’s right between our eyes. Anything shoved into the bottom of our souls only rots and festers until it hollows us out completely, or else eats its way out sideways in the nastiest manner imaginable. Depression, anxiety, disease . . . nasty.

I know because I’ve been there. Waking up every morning with a pit in my stomach at the thought of facing another day. Not wanting to be who I was. That shit lasted for years. And the worst part was I felt entirely alone in my feelings, like no one could possibly understand what I was going through.

Alongside a few years of therapy, it only took about 80,000 people to finally change my mind.

somewhere down there I ate the grapefruit

Bonnaroo music festival, 2006. Late nights wandering through the fields of central Tennessee, lit by beams of flying light from tents where bands played and the intrinsic glow of each person there to enjoy it. Cynics might pin it on something else, but how can you not have an altered state of mind with that many people in the same place for the same reason.

Everyone I ran into felt like a brother and a sister, and somehow I knew they felt the same exact way. There was an overwhelming sense of connection among us all. Durkheim might call this our collective effervescence. Emerson would call it the over-soul: “the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related.” Whatever it’s called, I was no longer alone.

But that’s what art is for, isn’t it? Feeling things we might not be able to feel on our own. Why 80,000 people can feel connected at a music festival. Why you might start crying watching a movie or with a novel in your hand. In the end, what is life itself but art!

If you don’t believe it, maybe you don’t live your life with enough style. Read this from Charles Bukowski.

        Style is the answer to everything.
        A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing.
        To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it.
        To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.

If you want your life to be art, you’ve got to live dangerously. This does not mean taking unnecessary risks and acting like a fool. No, it simply means feeling everything to the fullest—the good, the bad, and all that lies between—welcoming it inside, then letting it out right between your eyes. And as it turns out *that* is meditation.

But don’t take my word for it. I’ll let one of history’s great sages have the final say.

        The Guest House
        By Rumi

        This being human is a guest house.
        Every morning a new arrival.

        A joy, a depression, a meanness,
        some momentary awareness comes
        as an unexpected visitor.

        Welcome and entertain them all!
        Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
        who violently sweep your house
        empty of its furniture,
        still, treat each guest honorably.
        He may be clearing you out
        for some new delight.

        The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
        meet them at the door laughing,
        and invite them in.

        Be grateful for whoever comes,
        because each has been sent
        as a guide from beyond.

That’s a beauty.

To be fair, though, sometimes this is asking a lot. I’m still working on it. I don’t expect that will ever stop. And whenever this stuff starts feeling like too much, I try and forget about it altogether—instead I go eat a grapefruit.

-Martin