A Wine Rep Walks into a Meditation

How I started my spirituality experiment

I blame Marie Kondo. It was during the early Covid lockdown, decluttering the office nook, that I found the stack of blank journals. I didn’t donate them. I didn’t do anything with them. A lifelong procrastination. They just stared at me like a joke as the world got smaller and smaller. Then my dad died. Then my beloved mentor Ramos died. George Floyd died. Isolation got harder. Life in the Bay Area intensified. By December 2020, I had become a cliché — fifty-four years old and having an existential crisis I couldn’t name.

So I sat down on the little bench at the foot of the bed in the spare room, blue blanket over my legs, headphones on, and opened one of those blank books. I wrote: This journal is dedicated to my spiritual journey. I had no idea what that meant yet.

Here’s who you’re dealing with: not a pastor, not a therapist, not a yoga teacher. A wine sales rep. A band geek. A pickleball enthusiast. Gay, married (spoiler: not now), no real religious upbringing to speak of...a Catholic mom who lost her church, a Jewish dad who wore a yarmulke at the cemetery and otherwise kept his faith quietly to himself. What filled that gap was C.S. Lewis and a children’s library card, and later, in junior year English class, Emerson’s “The Over-Soul”... the idea that we are all connected, that there is a universal energy we can tap into for support, for answers, for something.

The seed got planted and, well, kind of just sat there. Over the decades I visited psychics, explored past life regression, read the Celestine Prophecy and Edgar Cayce, collected the idea that there are no coincidences. I believe in spirit guides and the energy of the universe. I also have strong opinions about Burgundy vintages and WNBA draft picks. These facts coexist without apology.

Basically, I watered that seed of universal energy for thirty years with everything but the one thing that would get me there: stillness. It was time to find out.

I’ve long been a fan of the “I did this for a year” memoir, so I decided to run my own experiment. Simple and specific: every day, meditate. Write down what happened. Repeat. No classes, no guru, no certification required. Just, find my own way in and document whatever I find there.

One question underneath it all: can a regular person with no credentials, no lineage, no religious authority, access this invisible world directly? My hypothesis — yes. Everyone can. The door is always open. We just keep closing it.

Four notebooks and hundreds of meditations later, I can tell you a few things. First, there’s a method here, and it’s simpler than you think. Ask for five minutes. Then listen for fifteen. That’s most of it. Second, the universe, it turns out, is very literal. And apparently keeps excellent records. There’s a story involving a phone call, a 401K, and seventy-seven thousand dollars that I’ll get to soon. It still makes me shake my head. Third, sometimes the universe answers a question you didn’t know you were asking. My niece Kaitlyn died in early 2021. The grief was real and piercing. However, what followed deepened everything.

This Substack is where I put it all out. Essays about what I found. Practical how-to posts drawn from actual journal entries. Guided meditations built from my own process. Shorter reflections when something comes up that can’t wait for a full essay. My Spirituality Experiment is my accountability to all those stutter starts with writing: comedy, The Moth, so many orphaned journals, a career in copywriting instead of creative writing. (And maybe I’ll tell you about how the psychic told me I need to get started by age 53.)

But here’s what this is not: a conversion project. I’m not asking you to believe what I believe or adopt my framework or follow any particular path. I’m asking something much simpler. Get quiet for a few minutes a day and see what happens.

I’m not the guru. I’m the experiment. There’s a difference, and it matters. I can still see myself on the bench. Blue blanket. Headphones. Staring at that blank notebook.

I’ve been seeking the punchline my whole life, but the joke might just be on me. I had no idea what was coming. But that’s the only way any experiment works.

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