How Not to Be a Hot Mess - A Survival Guide for Modern Life - Craig Hase Page 0,6

a big bump in focus, and it stays with them long after the retreat ends.6

Ten minutes of mindfulness heals the break in focus associated with multitasking.7

Eight minutes of mindfulness decreases mind-wandering.8

Ten hours of mindfulness training increases baseline levels of both focus and working memory.9

So mindfulness works a kind of focus magic. Coming back to the breath again and again trains you to bring your attention to just about anything. If you can pay attention to your breath, you can pay attention to your work. You can pay attention to your pickleball game. You can pay attention in bed. In other words, your sustained awareness in all these areas will likely get a good little bump. And the more you practice, the bigger the bump you’ll see.

But all this can seem a little vague and brainy. So let me tell you a story about a meditator I know pretty well who saw big gains from learning focus. His name is Craig, and he’s my husband and the coauthor of this book. Craig got into meditation when he was pretty young. And it’s a good thing, too, because he was kind of a mess.

Craig and I had really different experiences in high school. While I was getting straight As and playing volleyball, he was getting high and playing rock music and always on the edge of being thrown out of somebody’s history class for mouthing off about left-wing politics. Without getting into the details, Craig seemed an unlikely candidate for sitting still and feeling his breath. Then, when he was fifteen, he picked up a book by Joseph Goldstein. And he had one of those moments. Things in his mind kind of just came together. “Yes,” he thought, “this is my jam.”

This was 1994. There were no meditation apps. No one he knew was talking about mindfulness. Meditation, in fact, was still something relegated to people who wore flowing dresses and cymbals on their fingers and talked about astral planes. Or else Buddhist monks in orange robes in Asia. Or at least that’s what people in his secular, middle-class, workaday world mostly thought.

Still, Joseph’s book in hand, Craig started to meditate. Cross-legged on his bedroom floor in the suburbs of New York City. And like most of us, the first thing he noticed was that his mind was a blizzard of thoughts, desires, resentments, distractions. He literally could not bring awareness to his breath for more than a few seconds.

He tried. Then he tried again. And again. And again. But he could not get a handle on it. His mind was like a rodeo bull. He just got thrown and thrown.

After days, he saw no improvement. Weeks of floor-sitting brought nothing. In fact, if anything, he felt crazier, sitting there, alone on the floor of his room, trying to muscle his attention into place.

Finally, he decided he needed a teacher. There was no way he was going to wrangle his own mind without guidance. And so, long story short, and after several false starts, he found himself driving his father’s car to the dairy country of upstate New York on a freezing November day a week before his seventeenth birthday, on his way to his first weekend retreat.

Things lined up after that. He went home and talked to his new meditation teacher every week on the phone. He started sitting ten minutes a day, then twenty, then thirty. But things still didn’t change overnight. In fact, college wasn’t so great for Craig at first. He was plagued by self-doubt, procrastination, anxiety, and the very real inability to actually sit down and get stuff done. He managed to do well enough in most of his classes. But he was frustrated. He really liked what he was studying and wanted to knock college out of the park.

Over the summer, after his first year, he signed up for a monthlong retreat at that same center in upstate New York. Halfway through the retreat, something became clear: he wanted to take a semester off from college and sit a really long meditation retreat. And, because he’s kind of an extremist, that’s exactly what he did. Yes, when Craig was nineteen years old, he ended up sitting a five-month meditation retreat.

When he came back to college after that, things felt different. Almost overnight, he was doing really well. Where before he had trouble wrangling his attention and getting things done, now he could sit for four-hour stretches at the library, poring over Kant’s indecipherable