The Complete Absence of Guilt in Adulthood
There’s one thing about childhood I miss and that’s a sense of time and freedom. And by freedom I don’t mean independence, rather not having responsibilities.
There is one experience of every summer that remains alive in my memory. And currently, it’s only my meditation practice that gets me close to that feeling. When my mother wasn’t using her “float” — what we called her inflatable pool board she’d lay on to sunbake while floating around in our above ground pool.
The float was a creamy banana colour. It was flatish with a few longitudinal grooves like expanded corrugation. When it was inflated it was as hard as a surfboard. It was so old that the cracks were patched up with araldite glue. That glossy hard glue made vein-like tracks which increased every year as the float grew older.
I would lie face down on that float and literally fade away (like when I transcend during meditation). I would hear the cluck of the water hitting the float underneath. It was the most blissful time. Nowhere to be, nothing to do but to completely and utterly surrender to where I was right then.
Back then I didn’t think it was wasted time. But if I was to do it now, I would absolutely have a voice in the back of my head saying, “You can’t do this for long, you have got this and that that need to be done”. Be it laundry, cleaning, online course, cleaning the pool – grown up responsibilities. Responsibilities that if I didn’t do, I would get behind and be annoyed at myself that something wasn’t clean or complete.
Being a responsible adult means shit has to get done. There is always something pulling us away from letting go. I am not saying we don’t do it. But we have to balance those precious 24 hours in each day. For most of us, we work at least eight hours a day for paid work, plus travel to and from. Then if we are health conscious, we also fit some exercise in. Then there are errands like shopping and appointments. Then we squash in entertainment like dinner dates, movies and supposedly fun stuff. Then we add in our chores like cleaning, laundry, gardening and a hobby or five. Now if we are good, we aim for 8 hours sleep, and we fit in meals and showering. Clearly there is bugger all time left. So, if you dare stop for a moment you don’t fully relax because you either feel guilty or the mind is still buzzing.
But we need to meaningfully stop, for the benefit of mental and physical health, and find a way to fit it in without guilt. Truly give ourselves permission to. We must. Because the body was never designed to be “on” from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep.
In fact, some of the world’s leading researchers on stress and health have been warning about this for years.
Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, has spent decades studying stress. One of his observations is that humans are unique in their ability to keep the stress response switched on. A zebra on the other hand, if he gets chased by a lion and escapes, he then goes back to grazing. While humans can be lying in bed, sitting in traffic or standing in the shower and still trigger the same stress response simply by worrying about the future, replaying the past or thinking about all the things that need to be done.
The problem is that the body often can’t tell the difference between a real threat and an imagined one. If we spend our lives constantly thinking, planning, worrying and doing, then our nervous system rarely gets the message that everything is actually OK.
Dr Herbert Benson from Harvard Medical School spent years researching what he called the “relaxation response”. He found that the body has a built-in opposite to the fight-or-flight response. Heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, stress hormones decrease and the body shifts into a state of repair and restoration. It sounds obvious, but what struck me was that this response doesn’t happen just because we stop moving. It happens when we stop ‘activating’ ourselves.
Most of us stop physically from time to time, but we don’t de-activate. We sit on the lounge or at the kitchen bench, but we are still activated. We watch television. We doom-scroll. We plan and go on holidays. Yet many of us never truly switch off. The body may be sitting still but the mind is still writing lists, solving problems, replaying conversations and worrying about what tomorrow might bring. That’s where we need a tool.
I can’t bring back my mum’s pool float and it’s not always pool weather. Like now. It’s winter. But I can sit with my eyes closed and meditate for 20 minutes twice a day. There are 72 twenty-minute intervals in 24 hours. Surely, we can carve out two of those 72 for our health and longevity.
During Vedic Meditation, I sit in a comfortable chair with my back supported. I silently and effortlessly repeat my personalised mantra that lures the mind from the busy waves to the still depth of the ocean. The mantra falls away and I am left with pure being. And thankfully, there are no to-do lists there and no guilt trips either. You should try it.
