The road back to meditation

Published 1:30 am Thursday, August 13, 2026

I’ve been down this road before. I am checking out SHIRe, a self-healing and integration retreat on San Juan Island, where the Sakya Buddhist retreat center had been. Years ago, I got lost looking for it. But the monks have moved on now, having been called back to the Sakya Monastery of Tibetan Buddhism in Seattle. And I am looking for SHIRe, a new retreat. Once again, even my GPS suffers some confusion on Bullfrog Road.

“Arrived,” it said. But where?

Oh, there it is. Up a ways, standing before me, a Tibetan structure striking in its splendid colors against the browns and greens of the forest. A Stupa shrine stands before it. Inside, I meet Tony Held, the young man who purchased the 20-acre property and started the “spirituality through experiential learning” nonprofit, Living Wisdom Project.

Here at Sunday’s Open Meditation, everyone in the community is invited to practice any form of meditation they desire in a large, bright room with a sky-blue ceiling. We’ll call it Himalayan blue. The idea is that it is more powerful to meditate in a group than singularly. In physics, this is called constructive interference: when two waves meet, they create a bigger wave.

For years now, I have been wanting to start up the Transcendental Meditation practice I had learned, and loved, when I was a college student in the ‘60s. Somewhere along the line, I dropped it. I was concerned I did not remember my mantra correctly and that I would have to be officially retrained. But after a few minutes with Tony Held, I realized how wrong I was.

There is no mantra police and no one to hear.

“Let’s do it,” he said, and we meditated together, Held, in his way, and me, my way. Seems it was in me all this time. Even my mantra, as it’s the repetition, most likely, that matters. Right or wrong, it opened the door. I felt it again, the effortlessness, the bliss beyond thought or words, really, and I’ve been practicing it on my own every day since.

If I hadn’t been out scouting a topic for this column, I never would have found it. On certain days, certain encounters are auspicious. And the more I think about it, today is much like the ‘60s. In a tumultuous, troubled time with an ever-widening war once again, we turn to meditation, music, art, literature and the like. For all the inner peace we can find, and not be overrun.