Mindfulness

Louis C.K Gave The Most Beautiful Teaching On Mindfulness I’ve Ever Heard.

Let your feelings hit you like a truck

Are we still mad at Louis C.K.? I’m sorry, I’m hopelessly out of the loop on these things. I’m so behind on current affairs that I’m writing about an interview that aired seven years ago on Conan. So even if you are mad at him, this predates the time when we discovered he’s a sexual deviant. This version of Louis was just a funny guy who, as far as we were aware, didn’t ask women to watch him masturbate.

Instead, this version of Louis asked questions about life. He talked about things like how cellphones are damaging to children’s development and how he doesn’t want his daughters to have them until they’re older.

So he’s on Conan, and he’s doing that thing that comedians on talk shows do, where they pretend they’re telling a story off the cuff, but in reality, it’s a finely polished routine. It’s the host’s job to give the right prompts at the right time to keep the things moving along naturally, which Conan does admirably. But then, in the middle of a story about his sadness avoidant phone usage, Louis says this:

So anyway, I started to get a sad feeling and I was reaching for the phone and I was like, “You know what? Don’t. Just be sad. Just let the sadness…just stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck.”

And I let it come and I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. It was like this beautiful…sadness is poetic. You’re lucky to live sad moments.

And then I had happy feelings, ‘cos when you let yourself feel sad, your body has like antibodies. It has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true profound happiness.

It was such a trip, you know? And the thing is, because we don’t want that first bit of sad, we push it away with like a little phone therapy jack-off [this man truly was obsessed with masturbation].

You never feel completely sad or completely happy. You just feel kind of satisfied with your product, and then you die…so that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.

I mean, let’s face it. If we weren’t trying to avoid being sad, nobody would ever start meditating. Nobody starts meditating because they want to dissolve the illusion of the self or come into the present moment or even achieve enlightenment. We start meditating because we have bad feelings inside and we’re willing to do literally anything to make them go away.

The desire to get rid of our sadness or stress or anxiety is so powerful, that when somebody tells us that sitting crossed-legged with our eyes closed can get rid of those feelings, our instinct isn’t to laugh but to sit down and start counting breaths.

Sadly, meditation doesn’t get rid of those feelings. At least not feelings of sadness. We’re human before we start meditating and we’re human afterward, and that means sadness is going to be a part of our lives. But the good news is that meditation does teach us how to stop running from sadness, which is what causes most of the problems. We can’t change sadness, but we can change our relationship with it in a way that takes away its power over us.

The bad news is that you first have to experience those feelings more deeply than you ever have before. You have to sit there, breathe, and let the feelings that you want to get rid of hit you like a truck. It sucks, but that’s the only way to learn they can’t hurt you.