This track includes ten minutes of meditation practice; if that feels like a lot to you, maybe start at the beginning.
Turn on the TV, get comfy, and play this track after you’ve watched the episode: Heat Signature (Season Two, Episode Twenty-Four).
P.S. If you’re curious, here you can find out why I started this project.
Recording Transcript (Meditation Begins at 5:00)
Hello again, adventurer! It’s good to be with you. But you should know that when I meditate, I usually just float, so I don’t have anywhere for you to sit unless you want to undergo “the biting ritual.”
I do really quite wish that I could float while meditating, because a very common thought for me during practice is “ooaw my body! It hurts!” This is true even though I lie down for almost all of my practice, or practice “supine” (and I do quite love reclaiming the term as a positive one to resist the derogatory connotation of supine as “lazy”). Due to some chronic pain, probably a combination of at least one car accident as a child, and the way that autistic people sometimes process pain differently, or just some invisible set of factors I can’t understand, seated meditation gets pretty painful for me pretty quickly, in a way that is distracting. And when I’m watching movies, I actually don’t sit on couches cuz they also tend to hurt my body; I spend most of my time lying on the floor.
Why am I sharing this?
Well, for one to normalize that there is no wrong body posture to practice meditation in. I know that some meditation traditions disagree with me and would suggest that the posture is one of the most important parts of practice. And I’m happy if that works for people. But seated meditation is just pretty simply not accessible for me, and I know I’m not alone in this. And I’ve actually been excluded from some meditation spaces for this very reason.
Different postures are better or worse for different people, and sometimes you need different postures at different points of your life.
Another reason I share this is to normalize that settling into your body more presently, as we often do in meditation, can intensify pains and aches that are present in your body. A lot of us subtly dissociate through our lives, we retreat into our heads because our body hurts. And meditation can “turn the dial up” on sensitivities we’re holding. They can make more passive body sensations into more active ones.
For me, as long as that pain stays within a manageable threshold, practice generally helps me befriend my body, to listen more closely to my limits, and to be less afraid of the unavoidable pain that life requires.
But if I could become a vampire and float instead of sit, I can’t say I wouldn’t consider it. Even though, at the same time, in my opinion, living forever doesn’t actually sound like a very desirable thing.
Anyway: all those things aside… we’re still focused on care today before we turn toward the season finale.
I think the difference between Marceline and her friends really illuminates the way that intentions matter. Intentions aren’t all that matter; impact matters too, maybe even more. But two people could be treating you the same way with their actions, yet one is doing it for reasons of good-hearted teasing, and the other “has a plan” to push you off a cliff and let you die.
Care doesn’t always mean softness, a light-hearted tone, or treating everyone like some benevolent cookie-making grandma. Care can be communicated in so many different ways.
But care does always mean wanting what is best for the people and the world around you, and listening to the preferences and limits people set for themselves.
So one fundamental problem with knowing how care can be effectively communicated is that we often assume that people want the same things that we do. If you’re like me, you may have grown up hearing “The Golden Rule,” which simply says, “treat others the way you want to be treated.” And that may be a fine place to start.
But I think a more vibrant world of care might follow “The Platinum Rule,” which says “treat others the way they want to be treated.”
In order to give this kind of care, we have to listen closely to what people (and creatures, and the world) communicate to us about what they want.
At the same time, we have to know how to answer that question for ourselves, so we can share with others what care feels like to us. How we want to receive it.
And “what do you want?” may be one of the hardest questions we try to answer in our lives. It certainly is for me.
But getting quiet and listening to ourselves is good practice for knowing how to answer it. And it’s good practice for listening to others when they trust us enough to share the kinds of care they need.
So let’s give it a go.
🎶Oh baby yeah, baby baby baby yeah, baby yeah yeah🎶
