Long Red Light

In the last few years, things haven’t been going too well for me. My grandpa passed away, then my father-in-law. A few months later, I got laid off. The company took so much advantage of me.

When I decided to build up my own business, my mom went through a huge and dangerous surgery (thank God she is good and healthy now, one of the best things in the last few years!).

After getting back on track, I started to feel burned out in my favorite thing: music. All of a sudden, the only thing I was so proud of, the only thing I identified myself with for the last 10 years, the love of my life, was shaking.

But in the meantime, I tried to find something new to take a break from music. I learned data analytics, learned how to code, how to play with data, how to build a machine learning model, and I loved it!

When I wanted to gain more real-world experience and started to apply for jobs, after over 400 applications, nothing. Back to the red light again.

Even now, my red light doesn’t seem to be turning green yet.

Despite these years of red lights, my wife once told me, “You’re actually in a pretty messed up situation in life, but you seem happy, still. And that’s the part I admire!”

(Yes, this green light, red light is a reference to Matthew McConaughey’s book: Greenlights, which I highly recommend!)

Well, I Meditate

That’s my answer.

From time to time, my thoughts get messy, my emotions fluctuate, my mind is up and down like everybody else. But as a media music composer with delivery deadlines, there’s no time for me to feel grumpy. Sometimes I have to write two 3-minute music tracks in a day!

So I did some research, trying to find ways to avoid this situation, or at least decrease the frequency. Then I found—tada!—meditation!

In this site, I try not to talk about the usual benefits of mindfulness and meditation—that they can help you relieve stress, sleep better, blah blah blah. I want to share the cool parts I found in other aspects.

But today, I still have to talk about how meditation helps me control my mind better.

How Meditation Helps

Mindfulness and meditation are basically the same. Mindfulness is trying to have that little meditation feeling in your everyday life, and meditation is like a deeper mindful state.

With only a few months of practice, I felt the difference.

When I encounter anger, depression, grumpy days, or not-so-great people, I can notice my emotions objectively, like watching my emotions move from a different angle.

As Sam Harris says in his meditation app Waking Up, “Try to get into this meditation state in your daily life, even just a blink moment is good enough.”

Since I can see what affects my emotions more objectively, I can avoid being led by bad emotions like anger, sadness, or depression. So I can have a steadier mind.

But of course, I’m not a Jedi master or in a Bene Gesserit sisterhood. I still feel angry, sad, betrayed, and soupy all the time. But when I encounter those feelings, now I know how to get out of them sooner.

And that’s the secret that helped me get through the longest red light so far in my life, and still feel fulfilled every day.

Meditation Exercise

As some research says, even 5-10 minutes of meditation a day can have a huge impact on your life.

It’s very easy:

1. Find a place to sit or lie down, without distractions.
2. Relax your body, from toe to head.
3. Focus on your breath, feel the up and down in your chest, feel the flow through your nostrils.
4. I usually imagine I’m in a black space, sitting on a water surface.
5. Everything is your consciousness: It’s a trick I learned from Sam Harris' meditation app Waking Up. All the things you hear, feel, taste, think, love, and hate are in one space—your consciousness. This trick taught me how to face bad emotions and see my mind more objectively.
6. Open your mind: In the end, I reflect on The Alphabet of the Heart, by Dr. James Doty in his book Into The Magic Shop, from C to L:
   • C: Compassion: Feel others’ pain with a desire to help.
   • D: Dignity: Recognize that dignity is an essential part of everyone.
   • E: Equanimity: Stay even when good and bad things happen.
   • F: Forgiveness: The best gift to yourself and others.
   • G: Gratitude: Is there anything you are grateful for?
   • H: Humility: Stay humble; you can learn from anything.
   • I: Integrity: Define what is most valuable to you.
   • J: Justice: Everyone can make this society better.
   • K: Kindness: The practice of compassion.
   • L: Love: The ultimate answer.

It might sound cliché to you, but I wouldn’t write them here if they didn’t work for me. Those words are powerful to reflect on. You can feel the impact on your mind when you mindfully meditate on those words.

That’s it! Just a 5-minute practice anytime—before bed, after a workout, in the middle of work—is great for you to have a clearer mind.

With a clearer mind, your mind playground gets more playabl