The Big Guy Stops By

I woke up at 1:30 am to intense wind and rain. The sound of the rain pelting the metal roof and windows of our bedroom is usually soothing to me. But on this particular cold and dark morning, it was like nails on a chalkboard. My wife was fast asleep next to me, so I slowly shifted around in bed, trying to find a comfortable spot. After a few minutes, I became aware of a suffocating sensation. My head felt totally congested. I sat up partially, and the choking feeling dissipated a bit. I lay back down, struggling to slow my breath and to push through the suffocating feeling. I was surrounded by darkness, and felt a smoldering discomfort in my own skin. All kinds of crazy questions cycled through my unsettled mind. “What if this is what it feels like to be on your death bed?” I thought. “What if my wife isn’t around to console me? How am I going to tolerate any more of this?” This was a familiar feeling for me – I had been here a few times before. I chalked it up to anxiety. But tonight, it seemed more powerful… and dismal. In a word, I felt alone. Maybe this was the “unutterably alone[ness]” that the Austrian poet Rilke wrote of, I thought, as I used every faculty to lay still and breathe. But I wasn’t alone – my wife and dogs were in our bedroom, and this week, we had a house-full of out of town guests staying downstairs.

The shortness of breath became intolerable. I sat up, put on my bathrobe, and got out of bed quietly. Ordinarily, I would have just closed the bedroom door, put a movie on and made some snacks to distract myself. I didn’t want to awaken the house, so that trick was out of the question. I started a fire in our living room fireplace, its cold, black cast iron encasement reflecting my mood. Maybe I could read myself to sleep next to the fire? But first, I had an idea – to take a dip in the hot tub in our backyard, no matter that it was 40 degrees and pouring rain.

Our hot tub sits on a deck outside our back door. The house provides some protection to the rear, and a treed hillside flanks to the right, crowned by a massive cherry tree spreading her branches to the sky. In the daytime, the blue ridge mountains are stunning viewed from the hot tub. But in the pitch back, rainy night I was stowed away in, I barely could make out the outline of the trees 50 ft away. Sitting halfway immersed in the hot water, with the cold rain stinging my shoulders, I tried to meditate. I closed my eyes. The rain drizzled off the edge of the roof of the house onto a metal barbecue grill to my right, making an annoying buzzing sound that filled my head. Wind chimes hanging under the deck jangled chaotically in the wind. Meditation was not going to happen. Wide awake now, and more uncomfortable than before, I decided to try something new – a prayer. I whispered to myself,

“Lord, will you please help me find my purpose in this life. I am lost. How can I serve you?”

I waited, listening to the rain, breathing slowly, continuing to meditate. I was not sure what I was waiting for. The buzz of the raindrops on the grill continued, but gusts of wind caused the chimes to sing a three note melody – over and over. Arising from the hill in front of me, a rumbling sound started building, and my first thought was that it was thunder. As the sound got louder and closer, I opened my eyes to the sight of powerful waves of wind moving through the treetops, which were dimly silhouetted by the cloudy sky. Then it came – the words that boomed so loudly in my consciousness that all other thinking ceased for a moment:

I AM HERE.

An irrepressible shudder of energy welled up in my chest, and moved up through my throat, ending up in my forehead and eyes. I felt, at the exact same time, tearful and joyful. A sense of peace ensued – about my wife, my children, our finances, all of it. I was covered by a feeling that was the diametric opposite of what I had been marinating in since I had awakened. PEACE. Just peace. A knowing that it would be ok. That it IS ok.

The intensity of the feelings going through me dissipated within a few moments, but left me changed. It felt like a weight had been lifted from my chest, and I could breathe. Oddly, the rain falling on my shoulders no longer felt cold. I stood up in the hot tub to confirm that what had felt chilling and uninviting a few minutes prior no longer was. Had my prayer just been answered? I wasn’t sure. But all I knew was that a sense of ease had overtaken me. All of me. And I could breathe. No longer cold, and no longer alone, I got out of the tub to return indoors.

I settled in my leather recliner next to a now glowing fire to reflect on the words I had just heard, still ringing in my head. “Was any of it real?” I thought, just as the wind picked up again for a moment, as if to remind me that He had not gone anywhere.

Nowhere To Be Found

The next evening I went to bed hoping for another rainstorm. Though I badly needed sleep, I wanted to experience whatever it was I experienced one more time. But I woke up at the normal 6am – no rainstorm, no visitation. As per our morning routine, my wife and I met in the hot tub. It was dawn, the orange glow of the sun peeking around the back of our house. I sat in the exact seat in the tub where I had prayed the night before. I heard nothing. NOTHING. The trees were still. Only the sound of the hot tub pump, slowly purring beneath me. God was nowhere to be found, it seemed. I shared a few words with my wife about what I had experienced the day before, and what was missing this morning. She said, “You know he’s here, right?” But I didn’t. I said, “Yeah, but last night, he really turned up the volume. Maybe just because I needed him to.” I had dropped the call, lost the connection.

God Block

Later that morning, I went to my journal. I wrote the date, 3/3/23, and then my pen froze. I held it suspended motionless over the first line of the page for what seemed like several minutes. My mind was blank. Nothing to say, nothing to write. I had never experienced such a stark example of writers’ block. Then I knew what I had to write about: God Block.

If God is there one moment, he has to be there every moment, no? It’s kind of an all or nothing thing, the way I see it. And my own experiences with spirit confirm this – when I am feeling joyful and empowered, it’s easy to see the God-nature in my world. When I am scared, jealous, or ashamed, God seems to disappear. But it’s not God that is coming and going. What is changing my awareness of God. Just like writers’ block is the illusion that I am incapable of writing anything original or good – God Block tricks me into believing that God has left the building. That’s how, a few hours after I had one of the most profound experiences of my life, I felt nothing.

The Purpose of Meditation/Prayer

I have been a meditator since my teen years. But I have gotten one part of it dreadfully wrong. I have always thought that meditation was about going inward, about settling the mind, “de-stressing.” Yes, it is all those things. But there is an important second step that I was ignoring. Meditation is also about connection. Or more aptly put, re-connection. Even if we achieve the respite from our noisy minds through meditation, that only leaves us floating in nothingness – unless we take the opportunity of the perspective shift to reconnect with God.

Quieting the mind is only the first half of meditation. The rest is Connection.

Dr. Herbert Smith, pictured above, introduced me to meditation in earnest. He was suffering with untreatable peripheral neuropathy when we met in 2000. He described it as feeling like “my legs are on fire.” Late in his life, he developed prostate cancer with bone metastasis, reputed in the field of medicine to be one of the most painful deaths possible. The last time I met with Dr. Smith was in the fall of 2010. We had dinner together, after which he asked his wife, Betty, to bring us all ice cream sandwiches. We watched as Herb turned into a 10 year old kid, devouring his treat with such zeal that all of us were left smiling. At the time, Herb’s disease had advanced to the point that he was on hospice. One of my most treasured life moments was when Herb asked me to help him to his hospital bed. As he reclined, we had a talk about what meditation meant to him. I asked him something that had troubled me since I had learned of his condition – “Dr. Smith, what do you do when you wake up in the middle of the night in pain?” His answer came without hesitation. “I just go back to the breath.” In other words, when he awoke in excruciating, intolerable agony, lying alone in the dark, he resorted to his practice of breath – he reconnected to the Source. Dr. Herbert Smith passed away at his home one week later. His funeral was attended by close to a thousand people, many of whom he had left changed as he did me.

Connection

I am convinced that meditation is practice for connection. Deep in meditation, there is a point where each breath becomes the verse of a hymn, complete with pause at the bottom and top of each breath, just like a hymn. When you learn to cherish each breath as its own song, each as a conversation with God, it makes you savor each tendril of air that opens itself to you.

When you reach this point in your meditation practice, the challenge is to cultivate the state of connection. It’s like the process of getting a campfire started – carefully nurturing a spark, first with pine needles and then dry twigs. Next, you gently blow on the flame to grow it, while shielding it from the wind with your hands. Then sticks go on, and eventually logs, until it is a thriving, hot fire that can warm you all night.

The Common Thread

This is a good time to point out, as my two close friends that happen to be ministers taught me, that the Greek word “pneuma” simultaneously refers to breath, wind, and spirit. The presence of breath – the core of meditation – is the one thing that marks our birth, and our death. If we learn to appreciate the richness that can be found in a single breath, we have found the key to maintaining connection to all that is.

The state of connection with God is not a one-and-done. I am at peace with the idea that I will be working on connection for the rest of my life. Even the Apostles, who witnessed Jesus performing miracles, were not immune to fear and doubt (the twin enemies to connection). But what I find reassuring is that God is always there when I turn to Him in earnest. It is like returning home.

Faramarz Hidaji, M.D.