By: Julian Adorney, founder of Heal the West (a substack movement dedicated to knitting our great country back together through, among other things, path-agnostic spiritual growth).
If you’re scared of the other side winning the 2024 national election, if you’re angry at the other side’s supporters and worried about your way of life, you’re not alone. A lot of us fall into that camp. 62% of Americans say that our democracy is in danger if the wrong team wins this fall.
But if you’re tired of feeling this way, there might be a novel solution: meditation. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that “Focusing your attention and meditating have been found to reduce depression and anxiety.” Meditation “helps to calm the monkey mind,” which can make us less irritable, scared, and stressed than we would otherwise be.
But what does it mean to meditate? I’ve been meditating more-or-less every day for 3 years now, and I don’t think meditation is just about sitting quietly and tuning out. Nor do I think it’s about sitting in a chair and just letting your mind wander.
Instead, I think the purpose of meditation is two-fold.
First, it can help us to observe our thoughts. Observing our thoughts is crucial because the act of observing shows us that we are not our thoughts—after all, if we were, than we wouldn’t be able to observe them. As the Indian mystic Sadhguru puts it in one of his guided meditations: “I am not my body. I am not even my mind.”
The benefit of observing our emotions is that it stops us from identifying with them. When we observe our emotions, we no longer are scared. Instead, we have fear. That’s a crucial distinction. If our fear is particularly irrational (for example, I used to have a strong fear of water slides), then we can even say that our fear is something external to us: a mind-virus that is separate and distinct from our core essence.
I think the second purpose of meditation is to help us connect with something bigger than ourselves. I call that thing God. But you might as easily call it Spirit, Source energy, Infinite Intelligence, or simply the Universe. As humans, we were made for connection; and feeling deeply connected to our world can powerfully buffer us against fear, anxiety, and adversity. Close friends are one way to achieve this connection. But God offers us a deeper and richer way. This deeper connection can provide us with strong roots; and when we feel like we’re caught in a gale of fear and anger, those roots can make all the difference.
There’s another benefit to connecting with God as well. God is not scared. He is not frightened of either Harris or Trump 2024. God may be angry, but He is never hateful. He is loving.
By connecting with God (or Infinite Intelligence, the Universe, etc) we can become those things too. When I go into the mountains and meditate, and feel the loving presence of the creator of the universe with me, it’s hard to be scared; because I am in soul-deep communion with a being who is not scared.
In my experience, these benefits are durable. Done once, a 15-minute meditation can change our whole day. Done every day, meditation can connect us to a level of peace, calm, and freedom-from-fear that I think can get us through just about anything—including the 2024 election.
But let’s not jump to daily meditation just yet. Instead, let’s start small. Let’s all, from across the length and breadth of this great country; from across rivers and lakes, mountains and valleys, cities and small towns; sit down right now and spend 15 minutes meditating. Together.
This guided meditation that we’ll go through is one of my favorites. It was recorded by my friend and spiritual mentor Mark Johnson, a men’s coach and co-founder of The Undaunted Man (disclosure: a client of mine). Here it is:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fnrqu_MvrWFy-cPyew0YClQICONKOECO/view?usp=sharing
And after you’ve finished this meditation, look inside and notice if you don’t feel just a little bit more at peace and a little bit less afraid.
