For Hygieia, with Love, On Meditation as Hygiene

I started meditating when I was in my early teens. I checked out all of the books from the library on it, which seems impressive on paper until I give you the context that there were at most four or five books in the entire collection. Meditation for Dummies was one of my favorites because it had a lot of useful techniques. The librarian allowed me to take the book home and keep it when it was returned soaking wet by another patron — she had dried it out in the proper way, but it was too damaged, she felt, to keep it in the collection. Its pages crinkled every time I opened it up, and the book itself was creased like frozen ripples. My parents gave me a meditation cushion for one birthday. This was before the Internet got really big.

One day when I was still very young, before the age I started meditating, I went up to my dad to talk to him. I do not recall the topic. He was sitting at the massive secretary’s desk in the corner of the living room. We were talking about something. He asked me a question that assumed that my thoughts ever stopped, and when I told him that I never had a moment when anything ceased, he gave me a strange look and stopped speaking. That stuck with me for a long time. Do other people just have times when they aren’t thinking? That was about the time in my childhood when I started absently staring at people’s foreheads, very conscious that there were things going on that I couldn’t see, until I realized that that was weird. I grew fascinated by several things: First, that every time I interacted with other people, I was interacting with phantom traces of everything that came up by association for them, good and bad, based on their life experiences. Second, I deeply wished that I could peel back the curtain on what thinking in another language was like — not in the sense of exoticism (future-note: we know now in 2024 that all languages adhere to the same basic semantic pattern), but because I knew that the patterns of puns, stacks of metaphors and similes, and other humanizing traits are not the same. The web of associative meanings is what makes language proficiency so hard: It’s not just tables of grammar and columns of word-for-word translations. Every time I speak a word, I’m aware of how it is tethered into a massive web. This is also true about time. Every moment, I am aware of how it is layered and stacked upon past and future moments, where everything I do in a space has an occulted trace of everything I have done in the space before and will do, as if time is being grooved by my aware presence. And everyone else has their own pattern of unique grooves in which they are situated. My inner sensorium is loud, and omnipresent, and sometimes so difficult to find equilibrium within. It is what makes me really great (terrible?) at puns, such as when life gives you λειμών-s, but it’s also something that can quickly turn from something lively into something explosive and dangerous, which is what I found in my 20s when I had some mental health challenges that the therapist was ill-equipped to help me solve and that were instead solved by divine grace and learning what arborescent thinking was in French literature about giftedness; I’m not gifted and never was — I failed the math portion of the timed exam by two percentage points, and I do reflect now that some of those challenges that cropped up in my late teens sound a bit like what I have since learned about some lesser-known OCD symptoms — but the observations and takeaways in the book I read really helped me all the same.

With that giant paragraph out of the way, I want to talk about what I found when I started meditating in my young teens. I would use meditation in several ways. First, I would do the guided deity meditations that came up in rituals. These are the ones where you go into a place and encounter someone there. Second, I would do expansive meditative visualizations of my awareness growing to encompass the entire universe. Third, I would do breathing meditations. Fourth, I would do those body relaxation meditations. Fifth, I would do whatever meditations seemed interesting in Meditation for Dummies. I also had a framing exercise that I would often do, where I was in a tower in the middle of the ocean and walked down a spiral staircase to a long hallway with doors, and I would go into the garden of the Goddess of Memory (who I didn’t call Mnemosyne yet) to ground myself in. Sometimes the imagery I used was scifi. I was really into her. I would also do chanting and drumming sometimes.

There was another technique that I started to use. I realized very quickly in my teens that this practice would be essential for my mental hygiene. I used to imagine myself as resting in calmness at the center of my storm of thoughts — everything in that very long mental experience paragraph could still whip by, and it could be very intense, but it would not touch me where I was because I was at the eye of it all. I recall thinking one day that if I ever stopped meditating daily, the calm eye I had carved out for myself would crumble apart, and it would be a disaster for my mental health. Which it was. I stopped meditating regularly in college, and I also had trouble keeping to a prayer schedule because college is a tumultuous and stressful time. 18-year-olds aren’t very equipped for that without (compassionate) mentorship. It was an enormous challenge to maintain meditation consistency throughout my 20s, even after I had sorted out the prayer routine bit. I would go for a few weeks and then something stressful would happen and I’d drop it. The fall was always an issue because most of my routines would just fall apart. Fall is a crunch time for everyone in higher education.

I have now meditated every day for over two years, and most days for the past five(ish?) years, even when I could only spare a few minutes. Rarely, it’s just a few minutes of breath work following a circle in an app. Most of the time, it’s between five and twenty minutes. There are always thoughts doing something. Or there’s that thing that happens beyond the thoughts, where I have an sense of an inner oscillating hum or vibration, which is not exactly silence, but not exactly not because bits and pieces of thoughts always crackle and pop like foamy soap in the layer just above.

Mindfulness and directed attention is a set of tools, each of them useful for a different purpose. I got at this in the Platonic primer that I posted a while ago where I placed specific types of meditation in specific sections of the document, which will take most people 2-4 years to get through, but which I think is essential for actually developing the foundation to do deep soul-exciting religious practices without burning up inside. James Cameron, while commenting on last year’s submarine implosion disaster, said (paraphrased), “Move fast and break things is something a lot of people say, but you should not do it that way when you’re the one inside the tech.” If the Alcibiades I teaches us that we are the soul, then meditation and other spiritual practices are the tools we are using to sanctify and “agalma-tize” our lived experience in these specific lives. I will not take shortcuts. I will also not do means-to-an-end initiations in other traditions because I do not want to ink up my soul’s subtle garments with oaths that I know deep down that I do not intend to keep. (Delphic Maxim 19, ὅρχῳ μὴ χρῶ.) Indeed, there are no shortcuts in life. So you have a deep and profound peak experience — what then? You still have to live out your allotment of years and days and hours and minutes and seconds. Cultivating endurance matters.

One of the things I did not make explicit in the document was the hygiene aspect of meditation. While chatting with a friend on Tuesday, who asked me to write about this here, it became clear to me that not everyone thinks about some forms of meditation as a mind-shower. I have always made the distinction between meditation-as-mind-shower and meditation-as-spiritual-activity. Sometimes, both aspects happen in the same meditation: You need to clean up before you can begin. Sometimes, I’m too activated by stress to transition out of the mind-shower and into the other part. We see this even in guided meditations. Most guided compassion meditations do not just throw you into envisioning pronoia flowing to all beings. They start with a few minutes of breath meditation and centering. Mental hygiene is one of the functions of meditation. The noting exercises in the Platonic primer — which, if I recall, are done at the stage where there’s increased devotion to Dionysos — are a great way to start that process.

But I was wrong about the distinction between meditation-as-shower and meditation-as-spiritual activity. At one point in the conversation, I blurted out that hygiene isn’t secular. Hygiene is from Hygieia’s name. It is sacred to her. So there is no point of the process of doing hygiene that is not hers.

The words that had come out of my mouth were new. (There is really no substitute for engaged religious conversations; they lead to surprising outcomes.) There’s a certain kindling that happens when one has correctly acknowledged the theurgic root of any activity. It reminds me of how, in fairy stories, there’s a sudden shift in the narrative whenever someone learns a true name. For instance, during Yoyo’s senescence, I became very aware of how the human-pet relationship, at its most healthy, echoes the relationship that daimons have with us, where we are their guardians for their whole lives just as incarnation-associated daimons are our guardians for our whole lives. That deeply enriches how I approach my cats as their guardian. Placing the struggles I have had with gender expectations in light of how Athene’s myths show that tension has helped me navigate stereotypes and cultural expectations better because I now associate the process with her divine activity. Finding and naming the God or divinity in any thing completes the circuit of regard, and it blossoms open the reality of what is meant by the world is full of Gods.

During the meditation, I had a very profound experience, and I lingered after the meditation was over because I wanted to contemplate Hygieia and her connection to the activity that I was doing. I will summarize the thoughts I was having in tabular form because that makes more sense than paragraphs. Some of what is here will also make much more sense to people who have read Platonists like Proclus and Simplicius or who are familiar with Plato’s Republic.

Hygieia	interface with the external world	mental stream-of-consciousness/inner sensorium	possessions of my possession (cleanliness; working with externals; sanitation; what comes in from outside and flows to what is outside)	appetitive
Asklepios	the body	the brain and its specific wiring	my possession (health)	spirited
Apollon	the self	soul seated upon the inner sensorium	myself (unity/wholeness) | inner health/unity	rational

Hygieia is either the child of Asklepios or married to him — usually, the daughter, and one of five sisters; five is closely related to embodiment, as it “comprehen[ds] the natural phenomena of the universe” according to the Theology of Arithmetic. Her mother is named as Epione, who soothes pain — perfect for a Goddess who purifies and sanitizes. Asklepios is the son of Apollon. We can think of Hygieia’s activity as being encosmically at the margins between ourselves and others; she is either the daughter or wife of Asklepios because the spirited and the appetitive soul are both contextual to this life, just as the body (what medicine keeps) and hygiene (how we deal with the many externalities of all sorts) are wedded to it. (Her activity at the membrane between us and externals is likely what is meant by attributing her to Eros and Peitho in a fragment of the Orphic rhapsodies.) Asklepios and Plato are doubled up in the hagiographies passed down to us about Plato — he was given to us for our souls by Apollon, just as Asklepios was given to us by Apollon for our physical health — and so these purifications all layer upon one another. Asklepios and Hygieia are both encosmic Gods; in the Platonic tradition, depicting a deity as female means associating that deity with either resisting or engaging with pregnancy and childbirth, which involves a greater degree of friction and contact with posterior products, so it makes sense that Hygieia would be encosmically active at the more extreme position in the purifying series.

This was very energizing to me. It contextualized the profound experience that had made way for the fireworks-flower of associations that I lingered with and rested within. It also contextualized many of my current challenges — the things that we all have, to some degree or other, and which we are working through as best we can. In Platonism, Proclus is documented as saying that if we truly hated someone, we would let them commit error unchallenged because it would mean they’d have a rougher time in the afterlife being purified of what they had done wrong. If we turn this inward to the self, if we truly love ourselves, we must be willing to do the hard things for our own true well-being. It gave me a renewed strength to deal with all of this. There was a sense of purity that I had never had before while doing meditation-as-shower; I knew it came from the Goddess, and I knew that placing my inner sensorium in her custody would equip me to tackle the behavioral and habitual and appetitive and stream-of-consciousness and self-discipline-when-faced-with-this-overwhelming-media-environment quagmire that is common to being alive today.

So, I leave you with these thoughts, and I thank Hygieia, with love.

🫧