Into the Magic Shop Read online

  My mind had gone off, and I hadn’t even noticed it. I went back to thinking about my breath but then started thinking about hanging out with a guy from my class. He lived in the “nice” part of town. His father owned a construction company, and they lived in a huge house, and his parents drove matching Cadillacs. He had invited me for dinner once last year, and during dinner his mother asked where I lived, and then what type of work my father did. I wanted to crawl under the table and disappear. My father didn’t have a job and had been arrested on more than one occasion for being drunk and disorderly. It wasn’t something I could tell her and probably wasn’t something she wanted to hear.

  I had done it again. I was thinking about something other than my breathing. This was hard. I couldn’t do it. It seemed like I could only take about five breaths before I started thinking about something else. I decided to count how many breaths but then realized that if I was counting breaths I was still thinking. This was actually impossible. Are people really able to do this? Could Ruth do this trick? How many breaths could she take without thinking about something? Should I ask her? Did it take Ruth a long time to learn or was I just really bad at it? What’s the point anyway? And on and on I went.

  I tried my best to slow down my thoughts, but apparently my mind was unable to sit still like the rest of me. Would Ruth know if I just faked it?

  “Open your eyes.”

  I looked at Ruth. I had totally failed this one. “It’s too hard,” I said. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can do anything, Jim.”

  “Not this.”

  “It just takes practice. Just try to stop your thoughts for a second. Then a few more seconds. Then a little longer.”

  “I’m really not good at this.”

  Ruth just looked at me and said nothing for a few seconds.

  “Everyone who tries this says the same thing at first. You can be good at anything you want. Even this. You just don’t know it yet.”

  I suddenly felt the pain of all the times that I felt that I wasn’t good enough or didn’t belong or couldn’t afford something. And just like that I felt my eyes start to sting. Every once in a while, during that time with Ruth, those feelings would well up and I would want to lay my head down and cry.

  “When your mind wanders away from your breath it’s not good or bad. It’s just doing what it does. Just notice it. Then guide it back to your breath. Help it focus again. That’s all. You just have to show it who is in control. All I want you to do is notice when you are thinking. Then you’ll begin to notice when your mind isn’t running all over the place.”

  “I’ll practice.”

  “Excellent. That’s all you can do. Practice, practice, and more practice.”

  “Is that the way it was with you?” I asked.

  “Exactly the same,” she said. I already felt better.

  “Do I relax my body first?”

  “Relax first, then calm your mind by taming your thoughts. Eventually, all the tricks I teach will just flow together and you’ll relax and quiet your mind at the same time, but for now do it step-by-step.”

  • • •

  I WENT HOME that day determined to master the art of silencing the obnoxious deejay in my head. My dad was still gone when I got home, and my mom was in her room in bed. I sat in silence in my room concentrating on turning off the deejay, slowly breathing in and out, but the silence only seemed to make the voice in my head grow louder. I knew my dad was on a drinking binge and at any moment he could burst through the door either really drunk or really hungover. It was like this scene in my life was on repeat—playing out over and over again, always the same. He would walk in the door, my parents would have a loud fight, he would blame her for all his problems in the past, and then make promises for the future that he could never keep. Over and over again.

  If anyone in my family noticed me sitting in a chair with my eyes closed, more often than not they never said anything about it. No one asked me what I was doing. No one asked me what I was thinking. And they certainly never asked what I was feeling. I tried my best to practice Ruth’s magic, but with every day that my dad stayed away, I could only wonder and worry about what was going to happen when he finally showed up. How would the argument begin? What if my mom overdosed on pills again? I tried to stop thinking, but it was impossible. Would I call the police or an ambulance? Who would I have to talk to? How would I explain my brother hiding under the covers in our room when they came for my mom? Would they take my dad away? I tried to focus my mind on my breathing, but my mind could only conjure up disaster scenario after disaster scenario—each one beginning with my father walking through the front door. It was like knowing there was a tornado about to touch down but being so frozen in fear you couldn’t run and take cover. Sometimes I had dreams like that. Nightmares really. Where I opened my mouth to scream out a warning to someone but no sound would come out.

  Ruth seemed to know I was struggling, because she switched things up on me a few days later.

  “Let’s try a different way to stop all those thoughts in your head.”

  Ruth had brought a candle and she lit it with a little cardboard match. She put it on the office desk. She had me move my chair so that it was facing the candle.

  “I want you to focus on the candle. The light of the candle.”

  She had me take deep breaths in and out and just stare at the lit candle.

  “Just think about the light. Every time your mind wanders, focus it back on the light.”

  In a way, it was easier for me to quiet my mind with my eyes open. It was when I closed my eyes and everything went dark that most of my worries came rushing out. In the dark there was no distraction, and every fear seemed to want to come out and play. When were we going to get evicted again? Why did my dad have to drink? Was my mom ever going to get better? When would we have money? Why couldn’t I fix my family? What was wrong with me? When I stared at the candle flame it was like I could get lost in it. I could focus on the blue at the bottom of the fire, then on the orange in the middle, which looked like a Halloween candy corn. Sometimes I would focus on the white tip of the flame. It almost felt like I could go inside it. It was so much easier to quiet the deejay simply by staring at the single flame that would flicker ever so slightly with each breath I took. It also reminded me of the time when friends of my family invited us several years before to their cabin in the mountains. There was a fireplace and I remember sitting in front of it. During that brief period of time my father had a job. He hadn’t gotten drunk in some time. My parents were civil, and my mother’s health seemed better. I sat in front of the fire and looked at the flames and for a while I was lost in them. I was feeling warm. Feeling good. Feeling happy.

  I spent so many hours over those weeks with Ruth watching that candle. To this day the sight of a lit candle brings me to a place of calm. I didn’t have a candle at home that first day. I remember going with a friend to the Catholic church several weeks before because his grandmother was ill, and he put a dime in a box on the inside of the church and lit a candle and said a prayer. It seemed very foreign to me. On the way home, I made a detour to the church and took two candles and some matches, leaving the fifteen cents that I had in my pocket. And every night, I struggled and stared at the candle flame trying to stretch the gap between my thoughts.

  As a surgeon I have often heard my patients describe how they experience pain more acutely at night—it’s not that their pain is worse at night, it’s just that there’s no distraction. The mind gets quiet and the pain that was there all day seems louder. It’s the same reason why our eyes can fly open at 2 A.M., and every anxiety about the future or regret about the past will play itself out in the dark of night. Ruth taught me how to control my mind, and in doing so she helped me stop reliving the guilt and shame of past events and the anxiety and fear of imagining possible future events playing on the radio station of my
mind. Or perhaps more important, she taught me not to respond emotionally to these thoughts the same way I had previously. She taught me the pointlessness of wishing for a different past and the futility of worrying about all of the frightening futures over which I had no control.

  In all we spent almost three weeks practicing three different ways to make me aware of my thoughts and bring quiet to my mind. Focusing on my breath, staring at a candle flame, and the final method—chanting.

  • • •

  “DO YOU KNOW what a mantra is, Jim?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t have a clue.

  “It’s kind of like a song or a sound you make that helps you focus your mind. Just like you’ve been focusing your mind on your breathing or the candle, this is another way to trick your mind.”

  I looked at her again and noticed she was wearing a necklace with a whistle and a bell. Is that what she was talking about? At that moment she leaned forward toward me and the bell made a little tinkle. I almost started laughing. She looked down at it and laughed. “No, that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “What kind of sound?” I had a feeling this was going to be weird.

  “Well, it depends. People sometimes say a word that is important to them or a phrase that has some magical meaning. But it can be anything. The words don’t really matter; it’s the sound that matters.”

  “So what do I say?” I asked.

  “That’s up to you. Whatever it is, you are going to chant it over and over again.”

  “Out loud?”

  “No, to yourself.”

  This was definitely going to be weird. I had no idea what important words I was supposed to come up with. The only words I had ever said over and over again in my head were curse words, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t what Ruth had in mind.

  “So what’s it going to be?” Ruth was waiting patiently for me to come up with some magical word, and I had absolutely nothing.

  “I don’t know.” I knew that, in magic, words were important. Abracadabra. Open sesame. These words had to be just right to work.

  “What is the first word or words that come to mind? Anything at all.”

  “Chris,” I said to myself. It was the girl from the upstairs apartment. I was searching in my head for what I thought would be an appropriate word. I couldn’t think of anything else. Suddenly the image of a doorknob popped into my head. A knob. Chris knob. To this day, I don’t know how I arrived at that combination of words or what meaning they had to me at that moment.

  Ruth looked at me. “Well, do you have it?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I suddenly felt shy. I had chosen the wrong words. They were going to sound stupid and probably wouldn’t work.

  “Now say it to yourself, but slowly, and stretch out each word as you say it.”

  “Chriisss . . . Knobbb . . .” I said it to myself.

  I did it again a few times in a row.

  “Now I want you to chant it to yourself. Over and over for the next fifteen minutes.”

  Ruth looked at me and I’m sure I looked back at her like she was out of her mind.

  “Just focus your mind on the sound of each word. Don’t think about anything else.”

  Ruth was right. It was hard to think about anything else while I was chanting my made-up mantra. And even though I was saying the word Chris combined with the word knob over and over again, I couldn’t even focus on her or the doorknob. It didn’t matter if she knew I existed or what she thought of my tooth or if she noticed I had a pimple. That wasn’t the point. The point was, I didn’t hear the deejay. He had stopped playing.

  • • •

  I PRACTICED MY MANTRA at home. Sometimes for hours at a time. For reasons that I understand now, it was amazingly calming. Repetition. Intention. The surest way to change your brain. By combining the breathing technique that Ruth had taught me with either looking at the flame of a candle or slowly repeating my mantra, things began to change.

  Eventually, my father did come home. This time he was hungover and repentant. My mother had come out of her room, and it began. The usual arguments, but this time it included the fact that we had been given an eviction notice. I had been in my room for the last few hours practicing my breathing and chanting to myself. For reasons that I can’t explain, I walked into the room and told them I loved them. I realized I saw them in a different way. I went back to my room. I didn’t feel angry or upset. I accepted the situation. I realized after a few minutes that I didn’t hear anything either in my head or outside of it. The house had gone silent. I walked back out to the living room and saw that my parents were just sitting there quietly.

  “It’s going to be OK,” my dad said.

  “We love you too,” added my mom.

  At that moment, I didn’t really know if things were going to be OK or not. I knew they loved me as best they could. And that was far different from how I had hoped for so long that they would love me. Yet at that moment, it felt like enough.

  • • •

  THE FIRST BRAIN I ever saw was suspended in a glass jar full of formaldehyde. It was gray and furrowed—more like a giant walnut or a three-pound lump of old hamburger than a supercomputer responsible for all human functioning. I stared at the wrinkled mass, and my mind wondered how such a gelatinous blob of gray and white matter could be the source of thought, language, and memory. I would learn the places in the brain responsible for speech and taste and all motor functions, but there was no instructor who could ever show me—not in a textbook or during surgery—what part of the brain I could slice into and watch love spill out. There was no cross section that would show a mother’s drive to nurture and protect her child. There was no small sliver I could biopsy that held the mysterious force that could make a father work two jobs just so his children had more than he had growing up. There was no tangible center in the brain that I could pinpoint as the place that caused one person to rush to the aid of another person—or strangers to come together in times of crisis.

  What part of the brain was it exactly that had made Ruth want to give me her time and attention and love?

  I couldn’t see any of these things in a brain floating in formaldehyde, and I couldn’t see them through a microscope while performing brain surgery. I spent many late nights during medical school using my brain to think about the brain and then using my mind to ponder the irony of it. How exactly do we separate and distinguish the mind from the brain? I can operate on the brain but not the mind, but operating on the brain can forever alter the mind. It’s a dilemma of causality—a circular reference problem like the perennial question of what came first, the chicken or the egg. One day I asked Ruth this very question.

  “Jim,” she said, “if you’re hungry, it really doesn’t matter whether the chicken or the egg comes first, does it?” I had at times been very hungry, and I would have happily eaten a chicken or an egg.

  She always had a way of breaking things down and putting them in perspective. And day after day, she was teaching me how to get a new perspective on my own feelings and thoughts. And this thinking about thinking—this ability of the brain to observe itself—is one of its great mysteries.

  With only two weeks left in our summer together, and just as I was wrapping my mind around the idea that I could observe my thoughts and therefore I was separate from my thoughts, Ruth pulled a whole new trick out of her bag.

  “Jim,” she said, “have you seen the trick where the magician saws a woman right in half?”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  “Well, we’re going to do a trick kind of like that, but with your heart. We’re going to cut it open. Split it right down the middle.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but by this time I was used to Ruth springing things on me, and I knew all I could do was settle in, buckle up, and enjoy the ride.

  Ruth’s Trick #2

>   Taming the Mind

  Once your body is relaxed (Ruth’s Trick #1), it is time to tame the mind.

  Begin again by focusing on your breath. It is common for thoughts to arise and for you to want to attend to them. Each time this occurs, return your focus to your breathing. Some find that actually thinking of their nostrils and the air entering and exiting helps bring their focus back.

  Other techniques that assist in decreasing mind wandering are the use of a mantra, a word or phrase that is repeated over and over, and focusing on the flame of a candle or on another object. This helps avoid giving those wandering thoughts attention. In some practices, the teacher gives the mantra to the student who tells no one else the mantra, but you can pick whatever word you like as your mantra. Or you can focus on a flame or on another object. Find what works best for you. Everyone is different.

  It will take time and effort. Don’t be discouraged. It may take a few weeks or even longer before you start seeing the profound effects of a quiet mind. You won’t have the same desire to engage emotionally in thoughts that often are negative or distracting. The calmness you felt from simply relaxing will increase because when you are not distracted by internal dialogue the associated emotional response does not occur. It is this response that has an effect on the rest of your body.

  Practice this exercise for twenty to thirty minutes per day.

  The reward for taming the mind is clarity of thought.

  *You can visit intothemagicshop.com to listen to an audio version of this exercise.

  FOUR

  Growing Pains

  I left earlier than usual for the magic shop because it was expected to be one of the hottest August days on record in Lancaster—triple digits. The sky was full of wispy clouds that looked more sooty than white. It wasn’t sunny and it wasn’t cloudy, and everywhere you looked was either brown or gray. I could feel the heat coming up from the ground through the pedals on my bike, so hot I thought it would singe the hair on my legs. I had to alternate one hand at a time on the handlebars so both hands didn’t feel like they were burning. I tried riding no-handed for a while down Avenue K and was just getting up a good rhythm when I heard yelling from the field next to the Episcopal church.