Ask for Five Minutes; Listen for Fifteen
The first time I ever meditated, I was in a karate studio in Chicago, a green belt sitting cross-legged on a worn training mat while my sensei told us to be still. I hated it. I was twenty-something and had places to be, a self to perform, a very full schedule of avoiding my own interior life. She told me afterward that I needed to sit more. I remembered that for twenty years without acting on it.
In December 2020, something was pulling at me with a seriousness I couldn’t really put my finger on. Not a crisis exactly. More like a deadline I couldn’t figure out. I found a blank notebook and wrote on the first page: This journal is dedicated to my spiritual journey.
And then I procrastinated for another month before I did the first meditation.
I had no religious training to speak of — a Catholic mother, a Jewish father and no real tradition to draw from. Baptized, a few catechism classes, saying grace at Grandma’s house and decorating a “Hanukkah bush” at Christmastime was the extent of it. No guidance or education in any real sense. When I was seven I went to church with a friend and came home excitedly talking about how the angels were falling from the clouds because I accepted Jesus as my savior. I wasn’t allowed to play with that friend anymore.
In sixth grade, I discovered C.S. Lewis, read and reread in the Buffalo Grove Public Library until I understood, somewhere around age thirteen, that Aslan had another name. The seeds of my spirituality were planted by a children’s fantasy series about a lion and a wardrobe. Maybe embarrassing or maybe kind of perfect depending on how you look at it.
What I wanted, in this mid-life moment, was to stop looking for the door through other people. Psychics, past life regression sessions, Edgar Cayce, Sylvia Browne — I had spent decades asking other people to tell me what I already suspected: that we are eternal beings having a physical experience, that consciousness survives the body, that the energy of the universe is available to anyone who learns how to be quiet long enough to receive it. I wanted to find out for myself.
So I became the experiment. The rules I set were simple: meditate, write about it. Don’t read instruction manuals. No Google. Find my own way in, and document whatever I found there.
What I found, in the first week, was that my hands buzzed.
It sounds ridiculous. I know it sounds ridiculous. But somewhere between five and fifteen minutes into most sessions, the palms of my hands would begin to feel electric, almost uncomfortably warm, and that sensation became my signal…something is here. Something is happening. Whether the something was neurological or spiritual, I couldn’t say. I still can’t. What I can say is that the feeling became reliable, and reliability, in matters of faith, is not nothing.
And that buzzing energy brought me back to another long past karate class. Whether I hated meditation or not, I had to attend class to graduate to the next level. Was this meditation stuff for real? This time I went with a plan. I sat on the mat, hands in the traditional hokkai-join with right hand cupped in the left, thumbs lightly touching. Eyes half closed, the candle flame in the center of the circle dancing and blurring as Sensei recited the lesson, her voice drifting away as I put my question to the universe. Why am I here?
Yes, that is the question I asked. Why am I here? Why shouldn’t I start with the most ancient existential query?
I repeated and repeated that simple phrase, definitely not expecting an answer. I felt like Natalie Wood in The Miracle of 34th Street, swinging her legs as she recited, “I believe, I believe, it’s silly, but I believe.”
Minute after minute I kept my mantra going, blocking out Sensei, the candle, the singing bowl. Filling my mind with those four words. And then it started. The buzzing. First in my thumbs, a tingle, then in my hands, a wave. A wave emanating up and around and out into the rest of my body. And all I can say is I felt love. And not just any love, the kind of love that makes your eyes well up. The kind of love that is all the things. Supportive, unconditional, overwhelming.
Like a six year old bursting into tears when Mommy forgives her for jumping on the bed and breaking the lamp. Or a 49 year old bursting into tears when all her friends yell Surprise! for that almost milestone birthday. This feeling of being seen, of being accepted, that I will be carried gently through this life whether I know it or not. I was cracked open with every vulnerability exposed, yet I was being held in a cocoon of love. I could feel it. I was overwhelmed by it, and tears streamed down my face as I vibrated to this truth that our true essence is love, that, and I know this sounds super woo, that is what we are, have been and shall be unto eternity. Question answered.
That was twenty years ago. I filed it away and spent the next two decades looking everywhere else. But tarot cards and psychic readings can be vague as hell. Even a very vivid past life regression where I came up as a World War II submariner named Giuseppi who died carrying the weight of failure didn’t convince me 100%.
I was looking everywhere except the one place the proof actually lived, which was in twenty minutes of silence with my eyes closed and my hands on my knees, buzzing.
When that buzzing came back, I recognized the signal. I finally had a destination. The question became, could I get there intentionally? Not once upon a time sitting on a training mat twenty years ago, but reliably, repeatedly on an ordinary Tuesday morning in a Napa apartment with my wife sleeping across the hall.
Turns out you can.
Ask for five minutes. Listen for fifteen.