LIUNA Organizing Director Steve Schwartz has been meditating for eight years and says it’s saved his life. We sat with him to talk about his experience with meditation.
I started back in 2017, right after I became the Organizing Director for LIUNA. We had an administration in DC that was attacking our union all the time, and it was a really difficult period of time. My mom was also having some physical problems at the time, and I just got overwhelmed. And you know, sometimes when you get overwhelmed, you get really reactive. And the people that care about you the most tend to know it. If you’re lucky, they’ll also tell you that you’ve got to do something different with your life and that you can’t keep living so visibly with negative emotions ruling everything. These are the things that lead us down the pathways of heart disease, related to stress and all those types of things, right? My mom actually was the one that called me out and said, ‘Steve, I can tell that you’re really struggling right now. What can I do? Is it therapy? What can I do to help you?’
I’d known the word meditation and I tried different things, but it wasn’t something that I did every day by any means. I’d do deep breathing for five minutes to calm down and it was great, but I didn’t quite understand it yet. I decided it could be something that might help me though, so my mom offered to pay for a course here in DC. It was a couple hundred bucks and I knew that my mom was getting ready to retire, so it really meant something that she was putting her money into it. Because she was dedicated to helping, I was dedicated to making it work.
The course was a block away from work, so I knew that I could go do it at lunch and really had no excuse. Thinking about barriers to new behaviors, there’s convenience and financial implications. So those are two barriers that are taken down. And if you have an external motivator like someone who cares about you, even better. As overwhelmed as I felt, I took the course, which was really just a couple of hours one-on-one with an instructor to learn and a couple of hours of group work with others to reinforce the practice.
What I practice is transcendental meditation, and that’s mostly by coincidence, not because I think it’s better than any other form. It just worked for me. It’s a very simple technique that does have a formal organization and structure around it that trains people.
It seems like a simple idea, but being disciplined and intentional about it and having this weight around it when you’re learning it really affected me. So it’s 20 minutes, twice a day where you have a technique for quieting your mind. It is training our minds to calm down that chatter. I’ve heard instructors talk about turning the volume down on the radio station for example. So I set aside time every morning to meditate, usually when I get to work, and try to meditate again in the afternoon.
I started noticing my thought patterns and seeing a difference in my control after the first couple of sessions, really just three days into it. We’ve all experienced it: getting annoyed on the job or in public and thinking to yourself, ‘this guy’s an *sshole, that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about.’ That all felt real, but it was all stuff that was in my head. And once I learned to turn the volume down—just by giving myself that space every day to not think, not concentrate, not worry—that stuff quieted down. And then I learned the practice to control it, and that’s what’s put me in a better spot.
Meditation gave me an incredible sense of clarity, which helped me realize that I was out of control, I was totally overwhelmed and I was nowhere near being the best person I could be at work. As a leader, I thought it was normal to always be agitated, having a lot on your plate. Instinctively, I might jump to blame other people, or to blame myself. I’m gonna start to feel really bad about myself and maybe get angry, and then screw a few other things up, or make a few other people that I really care about mad. Those are the things that our minds have been trained to do by living in today’s world. But I realized you need to find a way to chill out if you’re going to show up for anyone else.
For a long time, I actually thought about meditation as controlling emotions, when what I was actually learning to do was understand emotions. Rather as a thing that needs to be controlled, emotions are like a signal or a warning system telling you something is wrong. And when you can hear the signal, you can stop and think instead of react. Meditation helped me do that. I was suddenly able to slow down and realize that the negative emotions that had taken over all my decisions and personality weren’t necessarily the truth. They were negative perceptions I was having—reactions.
And when I was able to chill out, I was able to make way better decisions and be more creative. Over time, it took me from an eight on the agitation scale every day to, like, a two. I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t experience that initial rise to react. It doesn’t happen. That’s because of the practice, right? It’s like lifting weights. You stay consistent with your practice and eventually the heavy weight doesn’t feel heavy anymore.
Absolutely. These are principles that you can apply everywhere. Once I learned meditation formally, I learned that I had been experiencing meditative states all the time. It could be while walking, riding a bike or a motorcycle, even pouring concrete—just any time you’re called to concentrate. One time, I was on an ultra endurance bike ride where we were on mile 150 out of 225 that day. It was getting really tough and I remember someone told me, ‘just think about your heel going for one more revolution.’ The visualization of just heel spinning and focusing on one part of my body that didn’t hurt helped me forget about the pain. In that moment, I understood that my knee and hip hurt, but I could address it later. Right then, I wasn’t gonna let that feeling stop me from finishing my ride. I have the power, and I now have the practice to get past that, and that’s what meditation does for you.
I made a decision to talk about my mental health, meditation, struggles with addiction and everything else that I’ve experienced in my life because I realized if we were going to tackle mental health and suicide in our industry, I needed to. It’s totally against the narrative that’s deep within a lot of us, especially for guys who feel like they’re supposed to keep things secret. And because of that, many of us feel a sense of isolation, you know? But we can break that down by talking about things and normalizing those conversations. And I think a lot of us are already doing this. I think people saw Laborers Rising in particular as a vehicle to start new groups to talk about this type of stuff at the Local or at the jobsite, which is so powerful.
I’ve realized however you’re coming into meditation, it’s taking it as a practice. You don’t start meditating and all of a sudden, everything gets better and is magical. That’s not how life works. Meditation is a tool and a skill. I think it’s something you really have to do daily, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes. It’s a practice like anything else, like if we’re practicing a sport or something to get better at work, or something that we love to do in our personal lives, a hobby, anything. We do it every day to get our body and mind used to it.
[Hannah Sabitoni]
