Sit back, relax, and allow actor-cum-wellness guru Robert Sheehan to guide you through a meditative journey towards inner peace.
A familiar face from Misfits and The Umbrella Academy, Robert Sheehan has been on a journey to inner peace for some time now, and he’s sharing his intimate reflections with us with his newly released title, Playing Dead: How Meditation Brought Me Back to Life.
Recalling his search for purpose, looking back at the adventures – and misadventures – of his life so far, and sharing the profoundly transformative lessons he has learnt along the way, this beautiful, meandering memoir reflects a rich tapestry of experience, uncovering how spirituality has become his anchor in the constant moving tide.
Here, he shares his simple guide to meditation…
Here is a simple guide to begin voyaging into space.
Allow some time. You’ve been busy, running around talking lots of shite, so give yourself at least ten minutes to sit your ground. Set a timer if you’d like.
Sit up/lie down comfortably. Doesn’t have to be cross-legged. Admission to the indoor vacation is not exclusive to those who can sit like Buddha.
Close your eyes.
Take at least a couple of minutes’ worth of long, slow, loving vagal breaths. All the way down to the pelvic floor. Collect yourself, and get fully settled. Gently shake the obvious excess neurology out of the body.
Navigating towards relaxation is innate. Physical tension has just as identifiable a flavour as relaxation. Find it and get to know more about the corners of the body where it likes to reside (brows and lower right back are two hotspots for me). Then, let it drift away on the breeze of breath as best you can, and no rush. I find it helpful to approach meditation as a kind of unbodying experience, thinking of it as leaving my shell for a while like an overly adventurous hermit crab.
If/when the impulse to do something else intensifies, or mind- chatter appears and becomes frustrating and tediously distracting, don’t try and rid yourself of it; instead, accept it. And gently meet it with your mantra. Why not try using the symbol as a mantra? Start by visualising that as a means of replacing the incessant news- reel. And then, after a little while, allow the eye to close until it can no longer be seen.
Let beingness echo silently from your heart through the rest of your form. Filling up your whole chest cavity and skull with pleasure.
Have a little faith and ignore any and all compulsion to judge how you think it’s going or how it went. Either way – wonderfully or awfully – it’s a roadblock to the practice. To delay all judgement, good or bad, for a period of time while learning the art of sitting still and taking a look is definitely to take a leap of faith, because it will likely include a period when you must ignore your own intuition to stop.
At that critical point, to keep meditating on is to welcome this overwhelming aversion fully, this static electric surge urging you to get up and leave stillness alone, and to note how this feeling is happening within the stillness all around it, which is giving it the context of its movement. Without the stillness and peace wrapped around it, we would have no idea how to cross-reference the severity of this fierce desire to stop. The struggle to pull myself away from peaceful stillness got choppier and choppier the further and further I swam out to sea. Wave after wave crashed down on me, trying to drive me back to shore. But just like in the sea, a little further out beyond the break, once you’re floating in waters of greater depth, there is calmness.
And the rest, as they say, is present.
Dropped!
Down in the steerage hold,
For a dram of the spirit b’low
Duck!
While staggering down the scuff’d wood step,
To where the old casks roll and fleck,
From side to side and a
Clack!
As metal bands flash,
And rum bleeds out of the
Crack!
Soaking black all the wood’n scuff
And white by the heels of the
Dead!
Dragged by the nails of a few bare feet,
In the heart of the
Dark!
is a welcome rest from the gruelling heat…
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