At night, my wife wears a night-guard from the dentist because she grinds her teeth when she sleeps. Often at night, before going to bed, she talks to me with the night-guard in her mouth and I find it extremely annoying. My hearing is not the greatest and, in spite of the fact that her English is near perfect, English is her second language which can sometimes make her more difficult to understand than if she was a native English speaker. Combine these two factors with the night-guard, and her speech sounds mumbly to me, which often frustrates me more than it should. 

Tonight, was one of those nights. I came home after spending several hours at the jiu-jitsu academy for kids classes followed by team pictures for my daughter’s wrestling team and, when I got here, it was relatively late and my wife was already ready for bed. My daughter and I both needed to shower and eat dinner, and while we were each getting squared away for the evening, my wife began talking to me about something. She had the night-guard in and I immediately got irritated. 

As I felt myself growing increasingly more annoyed, the thought came to me that I had not yet eaten dinner. I was hungry, tired, and wanted to take a shower. Maybe my irritation had nothing to do with my wife talking to me with her night-guard in her mouth. Maybe I simply needed to eat, clean up, and sit down. It then occurred to me how many of our marital spats might be avoided altogether if one or both of us simply acknowledged that the thing we think is bothering us is not actually the thing that is bothering us. 

Life is funny this way. Very rarely is the perceived problem the actual problem. There is often more going on beneath the surface than what presents itself at a superficial level. But it can be very difficult to go deeper when we are always in a reactionary state to the stimulus that is right in front of us. Without a buffer between ourselves and our environment, the world bumps into us and we bump back into it. It’s like a never-ending pinball game of actions and emotions. 

The very fact that I did not react to my wife when she was talking to me with her night-guard in, in spite of my being hungry, tired, dirty, and grouchy is unusual for me. It is not in my nature to keep my mouth shut when something irritates me. I have a long history of speaking up with the wrong words at the wrong time. I’m very good at making things worse. But I have noticed that something has been different with me lately. Something has been changing. 

I’ve observed that I am not nearly as reactionary as I used to be. I have far fewer knee-jerk reactions to the things that annoy me. In fact, I’ve noticed that fewer things annoy me these days. I have no doubt that this change that has taken place within me is the direct result of a consistent meditation practice. 

For quite some time now, I have been extremely disciplined about setting aside time every morning to meditate before I leave the house. I try to do this before my wife and daughter wake up. Along with my other prayer and spiritual reading, meditation is an essential part of my morning routine. In fact, it is probably the part of my morning I look forward to the most when I wake up each day. 

There are many different forms and styles of meditation and I have tried several over the years, but the one that works best for me, and the one I have stuck with for the longest, is called centering prayer or contemplative prayer. There’s just something about this particular style of meditation that really resonates with me and, like I said, I look forward to my quiet time each morning. 

It took a while before I started to see results from my meditation practice which was a bit frustrating when I first started out. Like most of us, I wanted to see immediate, noticeable results. I wanted instant gratification and instant transformation. Spiritual change is often slow change, however. Unless you have some kind of life-changing white light or burning bush experience, you are likely to have what I have heard referred to as “the educational variety” of spiritual experience. That is, if you practice consistently, change will come slowly, over a long period of time. 

As I said, one of the changes that I have seen from my meditation practice is that I am less reactionary. It’s as if meditation has given me a built-in pause button that allows me to process stimuli for a moment before reacting to it. This buffer between the world and my reactions to it has saved me from making things worse on multiple occasions. And what is most interesting to me is that this pause simply comes. It’s not something I initiate. I’m not doing it. It’s just there.

If not getting myself in trouble by saying something stupid and regretful when my wife talks to me with her night-guard in were all that meditation gave to me, it would be enough. Meditation has become one of the most important things that I do every day and, as I said, I look forward to it each morning. I can honestly say that there is no other single practice that has had a greater impact on my mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being than meditation. But I know I have only scratched the surface on the depths of this practice and I look forward to going deeper. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.