【1979 Archives】

March Mindfulness979 ArchivesMashable's series that examines the intersection of meditation practice and technology. Because even in the time of coronavirus, March doesn't have to be madness.

Not many Buddhist scholars cite the work of one Marshall Mathers, esq., better known as Eminem. But that's what happens in Buddha or Bust, a bestselling 2006 book by veteran journalist Perry Garfinkel about a life-changing trip to Asia to interview the Dalai Llama and other Buddhist luminaries.

Garfinkel gets the assignment from National Geographic in his 50s, right as scoliosis and a degenerative disk give him back pain so crippling he can barely crawl to the bathroom. Then he discovers the movie 8 Mileand its iconic hit single, "Lose Yourself." A Bob Dylan lover and rap music hater, Garfinkel is surprised by how much the track moves him and motivates him to do the necessary PT — and by how much it connected to his story.

"At first I listened purely for the motivation — I cando anything I set my mind to," Garfinkel writes. "But then the lyrics began to speak to me from another place. Though I highly doubt Eminem would know a bodhisattva from a bodacious babe, I detected an underlying Buddhist theme. By losing himself in the moment, that is by being present in the moment, he finds himself. If he focuses his mind, he can achieve anything. It sounded to me like the Buddhist practice of mindfulness."

Garfinkel was right, and it was an early clue that mindfulness stretches far beyond Buddhism. It's a word for a basic human need, something many belief systems aspire to. There's a reason millions of people have spent the last 18 years playing 'Lose Yourself' in the gym, or any other time they need to psych themselves up to do something important.

Only the lightest layer of interpretation is needed to show why this problematic rapper's timeless track — honored finally, and weirdly, at the 2020 Oscars — breaks down the practice of mindfulness.

1. Pay attention. Don't judge.

After the gentle piano intro in D minor, the killer guitar lick, and the spoken-word setup for his thinly-fictionalized character Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith Jr.'s "one shot", how does Eminem begin? By taking inventory of his body pre-rap battle, simply noting how everything feels:

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy

You know what comes next: mom's spaghetti, all down the front of his sweater. Over on Genius, Eminem is at pains to point out that was Jimmy'ssweater, he never threw up on himself. But either way, there's no judgment. Mom's spaghetti is simply a thing that existed, twice. You list it, you don't shy away from the truth of something even though it feels hard and embarrassing, you move on.

Another thing you notice when doing a mental inventory: hey, look, my emotional state doesn't match my physical composure. Inner turmoil will make its presence known, no matter how hard you try to cover it up. He's nervous but on the surface he looks calm and ready to drop bombs but he keeps on forgetting ... the words won't come out.

How do you beat that? By accepting the turmoil. To quote the title of Zen specialist and medical professor Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, you must embrace "full-catastrophe living." Mom's spaghetti and all.

2. The inner voices of past and future are always there.

Once the head-bobbing beat kicks in, we "snap back to reality." But do we really? "Gravity" just disappeared, which suggests we're actually in a state of unreality. Or rather, it's the kind of reality where you get so caught up in your head, your emotion has you in such turmoil (Rabbit is "so mad" at his rap battle failure), that you stop paying attention to the present.

The only hope to restore himself is to "capture the moment," which leads us into the chorus — which repeats like a mantra, a much-needed break from the monkey mind's endless chatter.

In the next verses, though, that chatter comes back. It will always come back. Eminem perfectly replicates how we get our past embarrassment and future worries tangled up in our heads, over and over. He dwells on his abject failure and how shitty his trailer park life is. But then, when his "soul's escaping" to a future fantasy of superstardom, anxiety meets him there too: it's "close to post-mortem, only grows harder." He's a bad dad, his fans ditch him, and he ends up as "cold product" because "they moved on to the next schmoe who flows."

No matter. He is but one tiny ego, and music as a whole is what matters. There, as in life, the beat goes on, with him or without him. Da-da-dom, da-dom.

3. It isn't 'get lost,' it's 'lose your ego.'

Perhaps the only imperfect part of 'Lose Yourself,' from a mindfulness perspective, is the title. A listener who wants to replicate the feeling it evokes could easily imagine it to mean that you're supposed to mentally float off somewhere else, somewhere away, a common misconception of what mindfulness is.

But you're not "losing yourself" in the sense of slipping off into some drug-induced dream. You're not getting lost the way Little Red Riding Hood did, or indeed the way we all did every now and again pre-Google Maps. You're losing your self. Your ego. That endless chatter of voices in the verses.

In fact, it's the voice of your ego that has taken you on an unreal druggy dream. It's your ego that has made you think you're something else, apart from your fellow humans, apart from the universe. Meanwhile, popular music has long known the truth of the matter: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are altogether.

The ego likes to up your drama levels using two statements: "I rock" and "I suck". They take turns, your mood bouncing back and forth into unhappiness and beyond. Fame is no protection from them, as the elder Eminem, now something of a self-parody, has proved. The only proven way to escape that angel and that devil on the shoulder is to

lose yourself in the music, the moment, you own it

Shake your ego off, and the music — or whatever else floats your boat — still remains. You remember what you loved about music, and how you loved it with complete selflessness. Pay deep and persistent attention to it, and you enter a very special state of mind, one of absolute awareness and knowledge., a.k.a. mindfulness.

With practice, this is the state of mind where what is to be done isn't even a question. You just do. As Eminem just did, when he wrote 'Lose Yourself' on the set of 8 Mile, literally on the torn pieces of paper you see Rabbit clutching on the bus in the movie.

When it came to recording, Eminem tossed the verses off in one take each. He wasn't focused on how this was going to be the greatest goddamn track of his career; genre-defining, era-defining, Oscar-winning, an early candidate for best song of the 21st century. Nor was he focused on all the pitfalls if he fucked the song up. He just wrote it and performed it and put it out there.

Or rather, if you go a step deeper, he took those endlessly chattering inner voices debating whether the song was good enough, and spun that doubt into verses. It's not that we suffer for our art; we suffer anyway, and some people are mindful enough, every now and again, to turn it into art. Heck, if your anxieties are going to live in your head rent-free, you might as well put them to work making music.

Eminem was not, as it turns out, a bodhisattva (person on the road to Buddhahood). But he certainly captured one moment that inspired many of us to put ourselves on the road to mindfulness.