Sure, it's fun to be young and gay and fabulous, but sooner or later -- and that could be age 12 or 25 or 50 -- you start to realize the advantages of having an inner life. With the demands of everyday life and work and family and advertising constantly pulling at you, it's easy to forget who you are. Spirituality provides a navigational system through the mysteries of existence -- what is my purpose here? What was I born to do? What is my connection to other people, to nature, to the universe? What is the meaning of suffering? How can I live all of who I am? It's about living deeper. It's about happiness that can't be found in things. It's about knowing yourself.

But where to begin?

Part of me is highly resistant to being told what to do, and therefore I resist telling others what to do, especially in the realm of spirituality, which is so personal and where there is a long history of shepherds leading the flock astray. But then I think it's about simple sharing of knowledge. If you don't have the first clue how to make a vegetable frittata, and I make it all the time, is it better for me to let you fumble around in the kitchen by yourself or should I just give you the fucking recipe? You'll adapt it to your own purposes and pantry anyway. So here's how it works for me.

I think I was always a spiritual kid. I was raised Catholic and served as an altar boy, but not because I believed any of the dogma -- I was in it for the theater, mostly. I wanted to be part of the show, not sit in the audience. Still, I was curious about spirituality and precociously read William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Bhagavad-Gita when I was 12 or 13. I was probably influenced by the Beatles and other rock groups who went to India and studied meditation (when they weren't blowing their minds on pot and acid). I used to burn incense and sit cross-legged and adopt a pose of meditation, which allowed me to think of myself as a hippie fellow traveler instead of a nerdy crew-cutted military dependent living on an Air Force base in San Antonio.

All that fell away as adolescence set in. College had its own absorptions, including coming out as a gay man. And then my twenties were all about working and getting ahead and building a career and making a name for myself. They say that most people don't really start developing a serious inner life, whether that means therapy or spiritual practice or philosophical inquiry, until around age 35, by which time life has knocked some of the youthful cockiness and sense of immortality out of you.

Learning, Sitting, Reading...

For me, it happened like clockwork. Four days after I turned 35, my best friend died of AIDS. I'd been the primary organizer of his health care, especially in the last couple of months when he developed a brain tumor and lost the ability to walk, talk, or feed himself. His parents were freaked out and complete basket cases, so it was left to me to attend to him and them and the home care nurses and hospitals and funeral arrangements. It was a heart-wrenching experience, and yet I discovered something about myself in the process: that I had some reservoir of inner strength and love that the rest of my life wasn't using, and it came in handy taking care of my sick friend. After he was gone, I was left to ponder what all that was about.

That led me to do some of the things I'd recommend to you: have a daily practice (such as meditation), read, take a class.

Learning to meditate is all about getting quiet and going inside to see who's home. It really helps to start your day with a structured way of slowing down and remembering who you are, before the world starts making its daily demands. Meditation is an essential spiritual practice. Having a daily practice is so important. It can look any number of ways -- it might mean burning incense and sitting cross-legged and emptying your mind and looking beatific, but it doesn't have to look like that. Whatever it is, it helps to do it every day. It's not an easy habit to form, but it's like playing a sport or a musical instrument -- it's about practice, not about instant mastery.

Some people can learn to meditate from reading books or listening to audiotapes, and there are some good ones. My favorite teacher is Jack Kornfield, who is one of the foremost teachers of the Buddhist practice known as vipassana, or mindfulness meditation. He has a great book called A Path with Heart that I would recommend to anyone starting out on a spiritual journey. He is associated with the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California (spiritrock.org), and he has a bunch of audio courses on meditation that you can order from soundstrue.com.

But I sampled a lot of different things before I ended up with Jack Kornfield and vipassana. I read a lot of books, because I'm a reader. Spiritual memoirs were especially intriguing to me. Some that really spoke to me were: Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (a classic in this genre, though it takes about 50 pages to get used to the long Sanskrit names -- just ignore them and keep plowing), Christopher Isherwood's My Guru and His Disciple (excellent tale of a gay Quaker's initiation into the Vedanta branch of Hinduism), and Andrew Harvey's A Journey in Ladakh (mystic travels to Tibet).

When it came time to get serious about having a practice, I started by taking a correspondence course with the Self-Realization Fellowship (yogananda-srf.org), an organization in California set up to continue the teachings of Yogananda. But after a while, all this reading was just too heady for me. I needed presence, direct transmission of teaching. So I took an introductory meditation class at the Integral Yoga center in New York. It was a really simple class, and the instructions were really simple, and they serve me to this day:

Create an altar for yourself as a focus for reverence (it can be a tiny tabletop somewhere in your house), light a candle, put something beautiful next to it or a picture of somebody you love, and start small by sitting for five minutes. Use a kitchen timer, and sit no more than five minutes. When the timer goes ding, get up and go about your day. Do the same thing every day for a week. After that, add one minute to your routine, and sit for six minutes a day. Do that for a week. Add a minute each week until you get to the length of time that feels right for you. Mine is about 20 minutes. Some people have time and leisure enough to sit for 45 minutes every day. You may only have 12 minutes. Do it every day. It'll change your life.

© 2004 Nightcharm, Inc. & Don Shewey. Author photograph © 2004 by Laurie Anderson. All rights reserved. No part or portion may be republished or reprinted in electronic or any other form, in any language, translation, or version, without express permission from Nightcharm, Inc., except brief passages which may be quoted in a review.