GUIDED MEDITATION by Emily Mitchell

First, before we begin, find a comfortable position. You can be sitting in a chair or lying down on the floor or on a bed. You can be on your side or on your back or on your stomach. Whatever is right for you. Whatever you prefer.
Once you find your position, let your head rest easily and let your hands fall open. Allow your arms and legs to relax so that you can feel how they are supported by the surface beneath you. Release the muscles in your shoulders, your neck, your back. Relax your forehead. Let your breathing slow.
Is all this clear? Remember: this is about finding the pose that is right for your body. As long as you are comfortable, you can even stand up if you want. At least, I suppose you could, I don’t see why not, although that would be kind of unusual. I don’t want you to worry about it too much, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that something as trivial as the position in which you decide to sit or lie will affect your ability to get the full range of benefits meditation can provide. That isn’t how it works. I mean, do you really think that if there was someone who couldn’t lie down or sit in a chair because of a disability, that he or she couldn’t access his or her deeper states of consciousness? I think you should probably examine the prejudices that underlie that assumption as soon as you are finished meditating.
So whatever you would like: sit, stand, lie down. I suppose you could stand on your head if you wanted, although why you’d want to do that, I’m not sure. Once, I taught a guided meditation class at a local community center and there was a man who came every week, a young man with piercings and tattoos in Celtic-looking patterns all over his torso that you could see because he never wore a shirt in class, and who always arrived carrying the same courier bag covered with the logos of punk bands from the 1980s, bands that he could not possibly have been old enough to see live or even to have bought their music while they were still recording. Each week, while he was sitting on his mat waiting for the class to start he would be smiling smugly to himself like he had discovered the secret stash of endorphins at the heart of existence, and then when class began and I would say that part about finding whatever position suits you best, he would – this is really true – flip up into a shoulder-stand and stay like that the entire time.
Can you imagine how distracting that was for the other students? For me? I mean, he could not have found a better way to call attention to himself if he’d stood at the center of the room screaming “Look at me!” over and over. At least if he’d screamed, I could have asked him to leave but as it was I couldn’t really say anything because after all, I had just told everyone that they were free to take any posture they wanted and I didn’t want to seem to have suddenly turned judgmental and hypocritical.
Every week, when time for class rolled around again, I’d hope that maybe he wouldn’t come, but he always did, regular as clockwork. Eventually, he started to unnerve the other students so much that the numbers in the class dropped drastically and the community center canceled it and filled that time slot with jazzercise instead. I lost my job, which was really terrible for a while, although I’m over it now. All because of Mr. Shoulderstand. Wherever he is now, I hope that one day he’s doing a shoulder-stand and his neck gets stuck so his head is permanently frozen at a 30-degree angle to his shoulders and, for the rest of his life, he has to walk around looking at his own belly button. That would serve him right.
Anyway, once you are in your comfortable position, whatever it might be, close your eyes. Relax your eyelids. Feel your tension ebb away. Feel it draining down, as if it was water being let out of a sink, slowly spiraling towards the drain until it is gone. If you don’t feel the tension draining out of you, you really need to try a bit harder to relax. And don’t tell me that you don’t have very much tension to get rid of, because obviously you do. Otherwise why would you be doing this meditation? If you were just fine, if you had no stress or problems, you’d be out doing something more productive with your time, like brushing up your Spanish or finally learning how to ballroom dance or volunteering to help the hungry or the homeless or some other group of needy citizens in your community. Or you might be reading one of those books that you still haven’t read even though it has been on your list of must-reads for years now, like War and Peace. But instead, you are here lying or sitting or squatting or whatever because at some point you felt bad enough and tense enough to buy this recording.
I don’t claim to know what your particular problem is, of course. Maybe you have trouble getting to sleep. Or else you have trouble staying asleep through the night. You wake up in the early morning hours, in those dead-still hours before dawn when even the stray cats are silent, and you find your heart racing and your stomach doing flips inside you, and you are certain that there is some all-important thing that you forgot to do the day before and, though now you can’t remember what it was, you’re just as certain that your failure to do this forgotten, all-important thing will alter your life forever, irremediably, for the worse, and you lie in the dark with your heart flailing in your chest like a drowning person until finally after what seems like years dawn comes seeping underneath your blinds in a sad flood.
Or maybe that isn’t it at all. Maybe, instead of being anxious, you’re depressed. Maybe each day you drag yourself from bed feeling like someone has been scraping out the inside of your skull with a spoon the way that people scrape the rinds of their breakfast grapefruits. Maybe, as you move robotically through the hollow morning rituals of making coffee, showering, brushing your teeth, going to work, you feel like all you want is to crawl back into bed to hide. Maybe your bones feel like they are made of lead. Maybe you drink each day at five, to try to relieve the tightness in your throat that feels like a hand clamped around it, squeezing and squeezing without stint.
Maybe you felt some or all of these things when you picked out this recording in the bookstore or clicked to purchase it online. I don’t know what made you so desperate for the calm and insight meditation brings that you decided to make that purchase. I would never claim to know that. I’m not you.
But, whatever it was, this is really, really not the time to be thinking about that! How do you expect to be able to enter into a state of mind to gain perspective on your life when you are so wrapped up in thinking about how bad you feel? You really have to let it go, at least temporarily, if you want to move forward on this spiritual journey. Do you really think that your problems are going to go anywhere if you stop paying attention to them for a while? I can tell you from experience: they will not. They will still be waiting for you when you open your eyes. So, for God’s sake, let it go for just a little while.
I mean, think about me for a second. I have put a lot of effort into making this recording, developing this whole experience for you and you can’t even be bothered to pay attention to it for the time it takes to complete it. In all seriousness, show me the respect of trying to follow my instructions. Or if you can’t do that, at least pretend, so that I don’t have to feel any worse than I already do. That shouldn’t be so much to ask.
Okay. Now you are relaxed. All your tension has melted away. You feel like you are floating, your body light and soft, your mind relaxed but sharp and alert.
I want you to imagine that you are walking along a corridor. Any corridor in any kind of building will do, although it’s probably better if it isn’t one of those institutional corridors, the kind you find in high schools or underfunded public colleges, with linoleum tiles on the floor that alternate between cheese-color and pigeon-color and no windows and the cinder block walls that look like someone chose their shade because the paint company had it on sale back in 1973 last time they decorated. I have spent quite a lot of time in corridors like that, and I’m telling you that some other kind of corridor will work better for this exercise. Like a corridor in an expensive hotel or a grand, old Ivy League library or an exclusive Asian-style spa, someplace more reminiscent of wealth, comfort and attention to interior design.
Hospital corridors are not great for this either, for obvious reasons. Although of course, as always, it is up to you.
Walk down the corridor. At the end of the corridor is a set of elevator doors. Press the button to call the elevator. Naturally, the elevator doors will be part of your imaginary corridor, so if you failed to take my previous advice and you pictured a corridor in a DSS office or a half-way house, the door might have a dent or a curved black scuff mark where someone kicked it in frustration some time ago and no one has yet come to repair the damage. There might be graffiti on the door written in marker pen or scratched into the paint at just about eye-level so that you more or less have to look at it while you wait. Maybe this graffiti is telling you the names of two people who plan to be 2gether 4ever. Or maybe it is someone’s name scrawled in some stylish but unintelligible way. Or maybe it is obscene, pictures of human body parts or indictments of someone’s virtue or fidelity or sexual prowess.
If you haven’t pressed the button to call the elevator, you should hurry up and do so. The rest of us don’t want to wait while you hang around looking at the drawing of breasts on the door of your imaginary elevator.
The elevator arrives and the doors open. You step inside. The elevator should be empty. I hope, for your sake, it is. If there is someone in the elevator, you might want to think seriously about not getting inside because that is not part of this meditation. I can’t tell you who this person in the elevator is or what they are doing there. This is not my imaginary elevator, it is yours.
Perhaps the person in the elevator is someone you knew a long time ago and are pleased to see. Like a childhood friend or an older relative whom you’ve missed very badly since her death. Or else it could be someone you don’t really care whether you see at not, your fifth grade math teacher or your mother’s hairdresser. If it is one of those categories of people, you can probably go ahead and get inside the elevator without fear.
But then again, perhaps it is a complete stranger, someone who doesn’t seem quite right when you look at him. Maybe he’s shaped strangely, as if his limbs had been stapled to one another after they were manufactured separately rather than growing all together the way normal children do. When he moves, it might be in a disjointed, marionette way, one muscle at a time, so when he turns to look at you, he moves only his head, not his neck or body. You see his face in the dim, watery light of the single bulb stuck in the low ceiling and it looks like a cloth bag full of flour, white and ponderous; his eyes are nearly swallowed up by it. He is tall and broad and he is wearing an old leather jacket that is too small for him and which looks like he found it in the trash. His white t-shirt and jeans are covered in the dark blotches of grease stains the size of fingerprints. His hair is like the stubble after a field has burned.
Have the elevator doors slid closed yet? If they have not, you could wait for the next car, although who knows how long that will take, or you could just get in and ignore the person standing in the corner. It could be that he won’t do anything, that he is just an unfortunately unattractive man with dirty clothes, someone who’s had a hard time for reasons that you can’t know. Your forebodings could very well be just your own shallow judgment based on his appearance. You’ll have to make up your mind and get in the elevator to find out. Whatever you decide, could you consider doing it soon? It is time to go on to the next part of the exercise.
Have you stepped inside? Press the button to go down to the lowest floor. Watch the doors slide closed. Is there a man beside you in the car? Is the man watching you? Look over. Don’t be too obvious about it, because if he does turn out to be a threat of some kind, you don’t want to provoke him. The doors have just slid shut and now you are inside the elevator, trapped there until it gets to the bottom of the shaft and that could be a long time, depending on whether the elevator is fast or slow. If you imagined a corridor in a municipal government building or something like it, this is probably a slow elevator which takes whole minutes to go through each floor. I wish that you had followed my advice and that you were in an elevator in a Ritz Carlton somewhere, but we’ll just have to make the best of what you’ve created here.
It’s descending now, you can feel that wobbly, lifted feeling you always feel when you ride in elevators. There are numbers on a panel by the door and you watch the lights blink as you pass each floor. The man beside you, if there is one, makes a noise that is somewhere between a grumble and a snort. It’s possible he smells. Only you can know what the ingredients of that odor are and whether it is mild or strong, a faint whiff or a stench so powerful it starts to make your eyes water.
Don’t blame me if that is happening. I didn’t put the man into the elevator with you, you did. In fact, I told you to imagine the elevator was empty and then warned you not to get in the elevator if it was occupied. So this is not my fault. However, although it is not my fault, I will nevertheless try to help you deal with this problem you’ve created. Don’t thank me; it’s my job.
So: if you can, try to visualize him disappearing, winking out, the way the picture on the television used to become a white dot in the middle of the screen before it vanished. Close the eyes inside your head, the ones you are using to see the corridor and the elevator and the man, and concentrate hard: be warned that it is easier to imagine something into being than it is to make it go away, particularly if it is something unpleasant that you don’t want to think about. Unwanted, looming things have a tendency to hang around more insistently the more you try to get rid of them. So don’t be disappointed if you open up your eyes again (inside your head) and find that he’s still there.
Open one of your mind’s eyes cautiously. Is he gone? He is? Thank God for that. Now we can get back on track and work on relaxing without such a powerful distraction.
Finally, you feel the elevator come to rest. After a moment, the doors are going to slide open and you will look outside. But before they do that, wait a moment. Don’t let the doors open yet. Listen to me first. Only if you want to, of course, nothing is mandatory. But this is important and if you’ve bothered to come this far, you might as well hear what I have to say, don’t you think? Because I want to warn you about something.
Beyond the open elevator doors is the place that you have been longing to go, but didn’t even know it. What is it like? I can’t tell you that. It is whatever place makes you feel like you belong there. That will be different for each of you. Once, I tried this exercise with a man who, when the doors opened, saw his own office with its desk and chair and telephone. He was a lawyer and it turned out that what he really liked most in the world was to be at work, with the clock of his billable hours ticking by while he prepared divorce papers or personal injury suits or last wills and testaments. At home, with his beautiful wife and three small children he was always slightly on edge; he felt like he was an actor playing a father and flubbing almost half his lines and most of his entrances and exits. He would come into the office on Monday and experience a great surge of relief, but it was not until he opened up those elevator doors and saw his favorite place, as he had always in his heart of hearts known it to be, that he could admit this to himself. He was happier after that, it changed his life but only because he was honest.
What I’m telling you is this, and I hope you’ll listen to me because I am after all the one guiding this meditation: be honest. It might be that your favorite place is a lovely, bosky forest glen with the smell of pine trees and a crystal clear blue lake beyond with a waterfall emptying into it in the distance, blah, blah, blah. There might be deer grazing amid the shafts of sunlight and a breeze ruffling the leaves. But really, the number of times I’ve gone around the “sharing circle” after a class and someone has talked about a place just like that, or about being on a beach with golden sand, or about a garden full of blooming flowers like one they saw when they were a child, well, please, if I got paid for each time that occurred, I would not have bothered to make this recording because I’d be too busy shopping. And for at least half of those people, I knew that they were not telling the truth, that they were telling me about a place they thought they were supposed to like, what they’d seen in advertisements on television and on color-enhanced post-cards from the 1970s. Not the place that really, deep down in their hearts, they truly longed for.
You can make up something like that if you want. There’s nothing I can do to stop you because it’s your mind and your desire and only you can know if you have really told yourself the truth. You may not even know you are lying to yourself when you look out of those elevator doors and see a Disney-style castle with white spires and banners waving and liveried footmen and a red carpet leading you inside. Or a boat the shape of a swan filled with silken cushions and all the chocolate you can eat. You might really believe that is the place you long to be. And perhaps you will be right. But I don’t think so.
It is much more likely that the place you really want to go above all the others is a place that no one else could possibly guess at, that other people may not find beautiful or even remotely appealing. To give you an example: my place is a supermarket parking lot. There, I’ve told you. When I was a child, my mother always bought me an ice cream cone after she was finished with the groceries, and when I think about my happiest memories, they are of walking across the asphalt to the car after my mother and her rattling cart, taking the first cold bite. It meant that all was right with the world and that week my father wouldn’t open the cupboard door in the kitchen and say, “Why the hell isn’t there any food in this house?” and my mother wouldn’t throw something or storm upstairs to cry. When I think about that parking lot I feel one thing: safe. And for that reason, it is beautiful to me, the way the parking spaces make their golden grid on the black asphalt, the way the cars slide in and out of their spaces fitting in like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, like they were meant to be there.
So, now you know. That’s all I have to say. You can go ahead, when you are ready, and let the doors slide open. Look at what is outside. Step through the doors. Walk forward and explore this place that you have come so far to find. Look around and listen and touch things and, above all, do not be afraid.
Oh, one more thing. There may be some of you who, when you tried to make the weird man inside the elevator disappear, did not succeed. When you looked again, he was still there, waiting in the corner, not speaking, looking at his shoes, which you just then noticed were unnaturally large even for so tall a person. The shoes were thick-soled, and look like they might have steel toes. Also, there was a bit of spittle at the corner of his mouth, whitish and congealed. This unnerved you even more and you felt your heart beating and you could not wait for the elevator doors to open so you could get out of there and run away from this weird, rumbling, ugly creature.
As I said before, I don’t know what you should do about the man. Now that the elevator doors are open, you could, as you planned, run away from him, into the place you’ve dreamt up and perhaps you’ll lose him among the giant ferns or bookshelves or whatever might be out there. But you might not. He could come after you and find you. He might be able to run fast in spite of all appearances to the contrary.
So I suggest that you don’t run away. I don’t think you have too many other options at this point. If you can’t make him vanish from a fantasy that you yourself created, then there is really only one thing left for you to do. Obviously, you don’t have to follow my advice; you are in charge, you are the one that this is all about, the important one, the person that we are doing all of this to try to help. This is only a suggestion, nothing more.
Turn to face the weird man in the corner. Try looking at his face if you can stand it. Then try holding out your hand to him. Open, palm up. Go on. He might take it in his own hand, which turns out to be enormous, oddly shaped, maybe with the wrong number of fingers, but warm and dry and strangely comforting. Then, without letting go, try stepping forward, leading him gently out of that back corner of the elevator into the light and space. What does he do? Will he follow?
Good. See, he’s not so terrifying after all; just ugly and a little sad. But even though he’s not the companion you might aspire to have, he’s the one you created for yourself, so don’t let go of his hand. Keep leading him forward. Now you are not alone anymore. Now you have a friend. Now you can go out and look around together.

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Emily Mitchell is the author of the novel The Last Summer of the World (W. W. Norton, 2007). Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and Guernica.