A journey of letting go.
As I sat on the coach with the sun in my eyes and the man with his musky smell from the night before packed into the narrow seat next to mine, I turned my earphones on and chose a meditation. I’d been starting to feel tired, two and a half hours into my journey from Norwich to London Victoria and rather than let myself drift into sleep that I knew would leave me feeling groggy after, I decided to rest using fifteen minutes of mindful breathing instead. I’d been trying a range of weird and wonderful meditations to expand my horizons and learn more about the vast landscape of this simple yet monumental technique to bring our awareness to the present moment. It was the middle of February 2025 and I was one sleep away from beginning my course to become a qualified Meditation Teacher.
As I guided my attention to what was flowing out of my earphones and away from the glazed pink doughnut the man next to me ate in three bites, I found unexpected noises nestling into my eardrums. This was not like any breath meditation I’d tried before. I let myself gravitate to the unfamiliar soundscape that began vibrating through me, rather than following my breath, accepting I’d probably clicked on something by accident. There were no vocal queues, just the curious audio that after a time, felt intense and energising like a sound bath. Just when I felt embedded in the practice a voice spoke: ‘what would like to let go of from last year?’ the stranger asked me. My first thought was that I’d never asked this question or heard anyone else ask it. But it was one I immediately wanted to answer, and one I immediately knew the answer to. I wanted to let go of something that I’d been pulling around with me for years. Decades. Possibly for as long as I could accurately remember.
I should explain that I was travelling a day early to stay over at my sister-in-law and her husband’s home, in preparation for attending the first part of the meditation teacher training course with the British Meditation Society in London. I first got introduced to mindfulness and meditative breathing exercises when I took up yoga at thirteen, but it wasn’t until I left university that I began practicing meditation more specifically. It all started when me and my then new boyfriend (now husband of over fourteen years) went to a beautiful book shop selling a huge range of second-hand titles. I found ‘Teach yourself to meditate’ by Eric Harrison – a delicate but sturdy volume whose words held me and supported me and still offer me guidance today. Over recent years I’ve mulled over becoming a meditation teacher then made the decision to go for it at the start of 2025.
Back to that train journey. So, I had this thing I knew I needed to let go of, that had been weighing me down. It had come out in various guises in my life and for some reason in that moment on the sweaty coach where I’d just watched a man lick the icing from a Greggs doughnut wrapper, I joined the dots and saw with clarity the thing I’d been pushing down and covering over and pretending was someone else’s problem.
I had been doing something my whole life but could only now see it and the outcomes it brought. The thing I wanted to let go of was worrying so much about what other people think...about what I should be doing or what I think others expect me to do or say or look like or the job I should have...the lifestyle I should lead. But in admitting this to myself (and now to you – eeek!) I also had to admit the much harder part of it, which is that no one else cares that much, and that 97% of my worries over how I’m perceived are based on nothing more than unfounded thoughts that pop into my mind, that I weave stories with and feed until they grow into a wall I can’t see over; blocking out the reality and leaving me only with perceptions, assumptions and judgements based on non-reality. Based on the knee-jerk responses I have when I’m in situations where the part of my brain called the amygdala switches into flight/fight/freeze mode. It’s not my amygdala’s fault; it’s just doing its job and trying to protect me from danger. The problem is that this function of the brain was evolved in early humans to help them respond in life or death situations – more blood pumping to the veins to increase aerobic abilities (to get the hell away from the woolly mammoth) which means less blood flowing to the brain (less able to make sensible decisions and keep things in perspective). And in life today we have this same ‘stress’ response to a multitude of ‘minor’ situations (e.g. I think that person just looked at my hair funny and doesn’t like it. They probably hate me. I must leave this party, or I might die of embarrassment).
After a while when the revelations from the out of the blue question slowed and ebbed, a feeling of lightness remained from being honest with myself. From deciding not to take the easy, well-trodden path anymore of telling myself stories that became excuses for why I shouldn’t do things or what people might say. Feeling another layer of pointless thinking about random thoughts until I turn them into a problem slip away, I selected a podcast (the man with doughnut icing stuck in his moustache was now asleep and wasn’t going to be striking up a conversation any time soon). It was one I’d been waiting to listen to when I had some uninterrupted time, by one of the ‘Godfathers’ of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn. And so, while I watched the London eye and the Thames River come and go from my view, I listened to the profound words of the person who brought meditation techniques to huge numbers of people in hospitals with chronic pain in America in the 1970s-80s. Who taught these people who had ‘tried it all’ and still suffered how to steer their body into the relaxation response, how to use the power of their mind and body connection to reduce their pain and improve their quality of life. He guided them away from the self they’d become accustomed to and introduced them to the real mind and body they were experiencing right then, in that exact moment in time. He reminded them that we’re not alone, that we’re all part of something bigger, and that we are not our thoughts.
My bag felt half as heavy when I slung it on my back and disembarked the coach to make my way to platform three at Victoria train station (I had eaten my rather generous lunch pack-up but I think the lightness was also due to my recent liberation from my own internal dialogue). And as I sat on a half empty train on a surprisingly sunny Sunday afternoon, I heard Jon Kabat-Zinn talk about there being no me and no mine. It was simply awareness; not my awareness. It was emotions but not necessarily mine. We were each part of something much bigger. Where did our ancestors end, and we begin? Was every human on earth part of the same awareness, the same consciousness? And as I felt my body gratefully sink into the less than immaculate seat, I took in the astounding cross section of fellow humans on this journey with me. A tremor grazed my spine, as I imagined how many had sat in this seat before me (a lot going by the thriving crumb population) and how many would sit in it after me. As I counted again on the picture along the top of the train wall how many stops until I needed to get off, I suddenly wanted to laugh at the absurdity of me worrying what others might think of my decisions. Seventeen years into meditating and still every day was a school day. Instead of laughing hysterically (I might have realised it serves no purpose worrying what others think but I didn’t want to terrify the small child who’d sat opposite me), I caught the eye of a stranger and smiled. They were a passenger on this train. They were part of this moment. And they were on this journey with me, and with everyone else one way or another. They didn’t smile back but I took a deep breath and told my amygdala to calm down; this was no life-or-death situation and anyhow who knew what that person’s internal dialogue was saying.
Emma x
P.S. If you’d like to find out more about the two meditation experts I’ve mentioned in this post, here are their links:
Jon Kabat-Zinn - Professor of Medicine, creator of the MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) technique and best selling author.
Eric Harrison - Meditation Teacher and author