The Silence beyond Self

How can we listen, if we're always the one talking?

[This is a too long and self-indulgent discussion of meditation, I won’t be offended if you don’t read it, but I’m delighted to field questions if you do!]

Once I stuck my nose out of the tent someone had stenciled “Woo” on, and engaged with other seemingly real human beings about consciousness, I realized two things:

1. Almost nobody I know and trust talks about the phenomenology (the actual perceptual feelings and sensations) of their internal experience. We all just walk around assuming everyone is some version of us.

2. Almost everyone who does talk about these kinds of things seems to be tainted by the Spiritual Industrial Complex, and either speaks in a different language, is selling something, or obviously operating from ego.

There are a few exceptions to this, the biggest of which has been candidate for the world’s most interesting person, Tom Morgan. Tom’s new community (The Leading Edge) seems like an attempt to talk about the weird-yet-very-real parts of the human experience with minimum viable woo. And in the realm of weirdness I seem currently drawn to - meditation (see previous article) - there are even fewer real discussions of the phenomenology. It’s almost a taboo.

Oh there are plenty of books and a zillion teachers, and a small but vigorous and rapidly growing body of hard-science research on specific “attainments” by lifelong meditators (if you think Meditative weirdness is made up, just check out Leigh Brassington’s fMRIs and EEGs, or recent studies of “suspended animation” consciousness-cessation events!).

But what there aren’t are a lot of simple, first hand accounts from novices figuring their stuff out. So Here’s One, with my actual in-the-moment experiences recalled with

block quotes

And, with two big caveats.

The first enormous caveat bucket is that my internal experience will be nothing like yours, that I make absolutely no claims to any attainments, that I have no interest in becoming a teacher of any of this stuff, and it’s utterly irrelevant to me if you “believe” any of this or not. Your experience of the universe is utterly unlike mine, as is everyone else’s.

“They just have a different reality tunnel, and every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we are willing to listen.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

The second enormous caveat is that Meditation is not a solution to anyone’s trauma or psychological baggage. It’s just a technique for training your brain, just like running is a technique for training your cardiovascular system. It took me a year to train up for a Marathon. It took me about a year to train up for a weekend sit, and a few years to get up to 5 days or more. People have heart attacks if the go from the couch to the 26.2 miles. People can and do go nuts on meditation retreats if they’re not honest with themselves from the get go. There are groups that can help.

Zen Mountain Monastery

This is not a travelogue, but it’s worth noting the place where I tend to go to sit and meditate (other than my house): the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, NY (recommended, obviously).

The campus of ZMM is an old Lutheran summer camp, and most of the action (such as it is) happens in the big main building which has a giant Jesus on the front of it.

I’m very much an “everyone’s grabbing a different part of the same elephant” guy when it comes to this or that version of spirituality and religion. Yes and.

“What’s the deal with JC?” I asked, on my first tour of the place some years ago. The tour guide was a delightful mid-70s monastic who had the demeanor of Gandalf-but-playful. “Old summer camp. Amazing building. And I think he’s magnificent don’t you? I think he’d be very pleased with what we do with our time here.”

While I could write 5,000 words just on the place and the people of ZMM, let me skip all that and just say why it matters. Despite the spartan discipline, this is no place of doctrine. It’s a refuge. A Soto Zen center is a container for a single activity: Zazen (which just means ‘seated meditation’) — the simplest form of meditation I’ve found: sit down. shut up. See what happens.

Everything at ZMM is in service of that container: it’s the reason the schedule is fixed, all year long, and everyone follows it. It’s the reason for the silence. The work schedule. The layout of the buildings. The bells and clappers. All the seeming ceremony and simplicity supports a single thing: sitting. Other things happen during a retreat: eating, sleeping, working, talks from teachers, one on one sessions with teachers, group-discussions, walks in the woods. But fundamentally, it’s about sitting.

Friday

First Sit: 7-9PM Friday

My ears still ring a bit from the din of dinner — thankfully most of the rest of the weekend will be in silence. And the ringing melds with the fading sound of the Rin (meditation bell), rung three times to start the sit. The Evening Sit is always on the schedule, wedged between dinner and the 9:30 lights out. There are 6 lines of cushions, in the Zendo (meditation hall) perhaps 60 of us in all between the monastics, residents and visitors like me.

There is a lot of lingo in Zen: it inherits all of the Buddhist Pali/Sanskrit regulars like Karma (all the stuff you bring to the cushion) and Dharma (collected teachings about what happens on the cushion), and then layers on hundreds of Japanese words, all of which are massively open to interpretation. Mostly, I think this does a disservice to genuine seekers. Anytime someone uses the word “spirituality” I cringe. It’s the same with most of the trappings around meditative and mystic traditions — words make it worse.

Evening is my normal sit-time, so the first session (they’re always something around 25-35 minutes) feels fairly “normal.” I am kneeling on the Zabuton (big square mat), with my butt on a small Seiza (which means “kneeling”) bench. My posture is erect, with a slight bend in the lower back. My shoulders are back, my chin pulled in, and I am staring maybe 3 feet in front of me — at the wall.

The sensations — especially sitting for the first time in a day — are comforting at this point. My ankles bend slightly off the mat, the tops of my bare toes touching the wood of the floor. My weight pushes my knees slightly into the floor, but most of my bodyweight is directly pressing into the seat of the bench. When my spine is just right, it feels like I am balancing a ball on a stick. The ball being my head.

The above sounds like no big deal, but it took me two years of yoga, stretching and weight loss to be able to sit comfortably on a bench, with good posture, with my chest open, without pain, for a few hours a day. While I have meditated in all sorts of places and postures, it turns out there’s something to 1,000s of years of advice on this: sitting erect and alert actually makes a huge difference.

Prior to meditation and yoga, I was deeply, deeply out of touch with my body. People would say things like “put your attention in your face and relax any tension” and I would think they were insane — what do you mean you can “feel” the tension in your face? I couldn’t “feel” anything internal unless it was pain, or maybe a really good stretch. Years later, once I’d developed a bit of concentration and focus on the cushion and on the Yoga Mat, I now understand it.

The “style” of meditation I tend to do while at the monastery is called “Zazen” which just means “seated meditation.” Zazen tends to come in two flavors — simple concentrated attention on the breath, or “shikantaza” which is a fancy word that means “just sitting with all the input coming in.” Both are very distinct from the western-popular “Vipassana” - or “insight” meditation. Vipassana (mine at least) involves intense, absorptive focus on an object while I interrogate three things: Is this thing me? Is it unchanging? Is it enough? (Sometimes called the “three characteristics” of reality: No-Self, Impermanence and Dissatisfaction — Buddhists LOVE their lists). Vipassana meditation — especially visual or Kasina based — has been really valuable to me, but it’s not what I’m here to do.

I sit. I wait. I work with what comes up.

The first 10-15 minutes are fairly “normal” — my mind runs through anxieties, errands, relationships. I visualize wrapping each stream of thought in a bubble and pushing it off to the side. I walk through an idea I had for Zine page, visualize it, and tell myself to remember it.

There is a difference between contemplation and meditation, but I think contemplation gets a bad wrap. While 90% of the time I spend sitting is in some form of absorptive concentration, the other 10% can be a useful time of just intentionally thinking. Usually I do this kind of internal-discussion and interior-writing work when I’m walking in the woods, but I’ve learned not to immediately dismiss “thoughts” — sometimes really good stuff happens thinking on the cushion. But I’m not here to write in my head, so I’ve learned to trust I’ll remember all those “brilliant” ideas that I can delete later.

Initial monkey-mind wrangled, I go back to the basics, and feel the flow of my breath on the hairs in my nostrils. Eyes closed, and I can feel every nuance. First broad breath tickling, then warm air from my lungs, then narrower and narrower until I can individuate each sensation — until thoughts come back in.

I open my eyes. The concentrated feeling of the sensation diminishes, but he thoughts cease. I spend most of the rest of the period sharpening this concentration. The bell rings twice.

As the second bell fades, I sit up a bit and pull the bench out so I can push myself slowly to my feet. Nothing numb, nothing sore, and I feel a touch of Ego creep in, congratulating myself on how good a meditator I am. This will be cake!

(Narrator voice: it’s never cake, and Ego always lies).

I stand and stretch a bit. A wooden clapper sounds, and we all bow to the people across from each other. The clapper sounds again and we all turn to one side, and begin Kinhin (walking meditation) at “that sloth from the DMV in that movie with the animals” slow speed. Breathe in, half a step forward. Breathe out, half a step forward. I put all of my attention into the soles of my bare feet on the wooden boards. I can feel each seam in the wood, the tingling in my toes, the subtle ache in my spine where my posture wasn’t exactly right. Time passes. The clapper sounds again, and we powerwalk.

There’s a lot of bowing and shifting hand positions and prostration and so on in a Zendo when it’s not still. It’s all communication in silence. The Bow to my fellow meditators serves as a “thank you” for them sitting with me, for being still and silent, for sharing the container. It’s also an “I’m sorry” for the time 5 minutes ago I had a sneezing fit.

Walking meditation is practiced between every half hour period of sitting. Mentally, the instruction is to maintain the fully concentrated state you had a second ago on the cushion while moving through space — which is hard. Physically, it, like everything else in Zen, is included for a very specific reason — to get blood moving in your legs and to shift position. I’ve taken this lesson into my home practice — I never sit for more than 30 minutes without some kind of movement.

This is pretty much the only window in a Zendo in which one can go to the bathroom in the roughly 2 hours it takes to do 3 30 minute sits with all the various ceremony and walking.

While the average age among retreat participants is perhaps 35, those of us with a few decades more — ahem — experience, take the opportunity to step out of the rapidly moving serpentine of powerwalkers to take care of business, then re-enter the line.

The room is full of the rustle of feet and robes and yoga pants. The clapper sounds. Everyone continues walking until they stop in front of their seat. There’s more bowing. People start settling back on their mats. I quickly swap out my bench for a cushion — a ludicrously tall thing which allows me to almost sit in half-lotus without pain. The bell rings, and once again, silence descends.

Primed from the first 45 minutes or so, sitting in half lotus feels great. Physically, the position just feels stable, grounded, and connected. I return to my breath. Within a moment or two, I realize my eyes are closed, and I am lost in a daydream about my kids. Time passes.

I open my eyes, and return to staring at the wall.

My experience on the cushion often vacillates between eyes open and eyes closed, and they have very different effects on my conscious state. Eyes closed makes it much more likely I fall asleep or drift off into daydreams. The separate self that sat down to meditate — the one using the word “I” all the time and having internal discussions and identifying with what I like and don’t like — doesn’t really want to be there. It has lots of tricks to keep you attached to it, and there are no daydreams as good as the one my ego will cook up to avoid sitting, concentrating, and losing focus on ME ME ME. The longer I sit, the more vivid and ego-drenched the distractions become.

The solution for me, which took me a shockingly long time to make habit, is simply to open my eyes. I’m a very visual person, so open eyed meditation usually means distraction vs. sleepies, but each has a role.

“I know these wooden panels well,” I think to myself, feeling pleased. The demon on the other shoulder says “who’s this ‘I’ you keep talking about?” and I return to staring through the wall. After a moment or so, my concentration “hardens” and all I am really aware of is the two dark spots in my visual field.

If I stare at a wall long enough — particularly a white wall quite close to my face — I become very susceptible to the Ganzfeld Effect - a class of visual phenomenon your brain cooks up in the absence of stimulation. The first thing I tend to notice in open-eye meditation are distortions, the first of which is noticing the darker spots in my visual field from, I assume, the blind spots in my retinae.

This isn’t all that dissimilar from what happens in Kasina meditation, which uses visual perception (usually a candle and its afterimages on your retina) as a tool for focusing concentration and examining the contents of perception. But these kinds of visual practices are more common to “Vipassana” meditation than “Zazen.”

The challenge with visual objects of meditation, for me, is letting go. I get fixated and grindy about visual objects of meditation. But Big Zen Boy Dogen called Zazen (seated meditation) the “Dharma gate of ease and joy.”

After a few minutes I notice my face is scrunched up and there’s tension in my body, and my posture has fallen apart. My attention is drilling laser-like through the wall, fixated on the “in-between” visual that is in my eyes (like a floater).

I reset my body, close my eyes, take a deep breath, and shift my focus into my abdomen. My breath becomes very shallow, to the point I lose it. I become very calm. My mind rests in a ball of sensation somewhere around my navel.

… the bell rings …

Standing, stretching, a few chants, a few full prostrations which limber up the spine before we head off to bed.

The evening closes with a “Gatha” - a bit of poetry - hung by the meditation bell:

I always find it somewhat ironic that after a few hours of “doing nothing” we are enjoined not to waste our time. It’s very, very easy to waste time on the cushion.

Saturday

4:45: Morning bell. I stumble to the dining room and sit in silence with the other Zombies, drinking coffee, until the “Han” - a plank hit with a wooden mallet - starts it’s pattern: clack…..clack..clack. clackclacklacklackakakaka. It starts tediously slow, and builds in speed until it’s just a drumroll made of wood. It’s the call to sit, and it has some urgency to it.

I make my way into the Zendo upstairs, put my shoes in the rack, and consider the long day of sitting ahead. I opt to sit in a chair, placed in the middle of the Zabuton.

For the first few years I was sitting and coming to ZMM, I got really in my head about doing everything “the right way” and “being good at meditating” or “achieving XYZ state.” I sat across from monks (many who entered the monastery in the Reagan administration), in their perfect posture and tried to emulate them. But of course, nobody ever notices, comments, or otherwise gives much indication other sitters even exist in the Zendo, much less do they make small talk and gossip about other sitters’ form or attainments.

But try telling that to my ego in the beginning. If there was a way to “win” or “be good at” this, I was gonna try, and “real meditators” didn’t seem to sit on chars. Of course, that was stupid and a mistake and probably held me back for ages. The point of this place is supporting the individual, not indoctrination, judgement, or building a following. And so: I sit on a chair when it feels like the right thing to do, a tall bald poppy in a field of floor-seated heads.

The silence helps. I slept well and mostly dreamlessly. The initial 10 minutes of housekeeping in my head is only a minute this morning, and I “settle in” quickly into the focus in my abdomen… the bell rings.

One thing I discovered after a few months of practice was that, in seated meditation, I could feel something “new” in my belly that didn’t make immediate sense. It’s probably the sense-perception of some organ system, or nerve ganglia, or indigestion. In Japanese they call it the “Hara” which just means “lower abdomen” and there’s a LOT of woo stuff about it if you’re drawn to that kind of reading.

Mostly, it’s just a sensation I can hold on to that seems to ground me well enough to have sits like this one — where all that “happens” in half an hour is empty, sustained focus and concentration.

As I walk Kinhin I feel like I’m mostly still sitting, and that feels good, so I don’t bother taking a bathroom break. I return to my chair at the end of the walking bit. As I’m settling I am overwhelmed by a sense of calmness and rightness and clarity.

At this point — a bit before breakfast on Saturday — I’ve gotten to what I consider “access concentration.” It took me 2-3 years of pretty regular practice to feel “confident” in concentration — by which I mean that in certain circumstances (like on retreat) I can, once reached, hold on to that single-pointedness of concentration without feeling like I’m falling off a cliff, about to hit the ground. It’s not necessarily easy — many times it feels like trying to balance a marble on top of a basketball. But it’s no longer impossible or immediately fleeting.

And here we reach the enormous challenge of discussing the qualia of human experience with words. Maybe you walk around in access concentration — unflappable, indistractable, devoid of discursive thought and internal dialog — all day long. I don’t. My first experience with actual, unwavering concentration made me feel like I was a literal superhero. Which is wild, because all it really is is paying attention really well to the nature of experience.

I once had an instructor describe “access concentration” as the “psychonaut’s lobby”. By itself, its simply a mental state, like fight-or-flight, or flow. But almost everything interesting I’ve encountered the cushion starts here.

Sitting on the chair, focused, I’m drawn to the pleasantness of the sensation in my belly on which I’ve been focused. My mind lingers on the sensation and it becomes warmer and more pleasant. I seem to stop breathing. A flood of sensation moves from my lower spine, shooting up my back and landing in my forehead. It’s a bit like an electric shock, a bit like jumping into a pond that’s too cold, and it’s a bit like an orgasm. It moves in a pattern, up the back of my spine, lingers in my head, and then washes down my front back into my belly, in waves.

Depending on who you ask, what I’m describing might fit into the maps used by some Buddhists as “Jhana entry.” Jhana’s are descriptions of conscious states common to many meditative traditions, which a lot of people get hung up on as being a BIG DEAL and some kind of woo-proof of spiritual somethingorother. Most of what I know about them come from either Dan Ingram or Leigh Brassington, meditation teachers/writers who’ve documented a ton on them (including a decent amount of hard science).

Long story short: if you get REALLY focused and turn that focus towards internal systems, you can in fact alter your own mental state in a desired way. The easiest of these “different states” is the first “Jhana” which other folks describe as some combo platter of bliss, joy, ecstasy, energy, excitement, and so on. From there, depending on which tradition you follow, there are various maps of consciousness that lead towards equanimity, sympathetic joy, compassion, a litany of perceptual or even physical alterations, and even “enlightenment” whatever that might mean to you.

I have found the various maps from different traditions useful, but not dispositive. They seem to describe parts of my experience, and not others.

Ego re-enters the ring with the concern that I must be writhing like a snake and distracting everyone else, and the sensations calm down. I feel an expansion across my chest, like my heart wants to jump out of my shirt and show off. I take a deliberate long slow breath, just experiencing the sense of awe and joy and peace that seems to pervade the room. Without any real effort, I am aware only of the visual field in front of me and the positive feeling tones. Every once in a while, it feels like the world “vibrates” — like the images flicker, the sounds chop up, and the steady state of warmth and pleasure in my body turns on and off, like a prank hand-buzzer. The bell rings.

The routine of the place takes over: a small and silent breakfast, an hour in the garden pulling weeds.

10AM and second sit of the day. I sit on a bench again.

My discursive voice returns, demanding attention.

• This is stupid

• I suck at this

• I’m a total imposter, not a real meditator

• All this sitting still is bad for my body

• I’m a terrible (husband, father, son, friend)

• This is stupid

The bell rings. I sit again. The bell rings. I sit again. I. Am. The. Worst.

Most meditation-related stuff I read seems to skip this twist, even though every meditator I’ve talked to has had this experience.

My experiences in meditation have been fractal. This short 24 hours of settling in, self doubt, increasing concentration, bliss, and ego-invasion has also played out in different ways over weeks, months and years. Meditation books are full of this observation, and the patterns seem almost universal. This deadspot on Saturday — when I’m sure I’m a fraud and the universe is cold and pointless — has parallels in a true “Dark Night of the Soul” played out on clock time, not calendar time. The first time it happened, I nearly ran for the exit.

It’s partially for this reason that I cringe when I read stories of Silicon Valley techbros “discovering” Jhana meditation and thinking they’ve hacked the base-code of the universe. The Jhana’s are real, and they’re achievable (maybe especially achievable for the kind of neurospicy folk who end up in finance and tech, like me, with an innate and often unhelpful tendency to hyperfocus anyway).

But there’s no fancy way to say this: These states can be very, very pleasurable, and thus rife for abuse. Trust me, I know. I’ve spent far too much time sitting there like some jacked-up wirehead from a cyberpunk novel, just reveling in my brains ability to manufacture bliss-soaked mind-states.

It always ends. Everything always ends. And like any addiction, chasing it makes it worse, and I’ve talked to fellow meditators deep in the throws of desperately trying to “get back” to those states, which of course, nearly guarantees they don’t.

Thankfully, having attended this particular rural-livestock competition before, I have the self-awareness in the moment not to grab my car keys and run away, nor spiral into frustration and depression.

In the short break after lunch, I take a walk in the woods. While I’m back in my head and all thinky, the impact of the increased concentration and focus remains, and the paths around the monastery seem supernaturally alive - each plant leaf extra green, each birdsong extra loud and beautiful.

Before returning to the cushion, two of the senior monastics give a short talk on “stuff you might find on the cushion” both good and bad. It’s very down to earth, mostly devoid of jargon, and genuinely helpful.

One of the hardest things for me about meditation is the very idea of talking about it. You know, like out loud. I read books and magazines about it. I attend the occasional talk or lecture. But even I think I sound nuts when I talk about it out loud. It’s helpful to have the monastics and teachers do it for me. They’ve been there. They get it.

Afternoon sit. Time’s already a bit of a wooly concept and its only a day in. As I make my way to the cushion, I remind myself that the middle of the first day is always the hardest.

So of course it’s not. I sit, open-eyed, quieting every part of my body that wants to adjust, to twitch, to itch. I let everything come in. Eyes soften. Birds chirp. The breeze comes through the window over my skin. I again become aware of the “flickering” nature of each sensation. The instantaneous change from sound to sight to feeling. Then there are none of those things, and there is simply… isness.

I always thought it was hyperbole when someone said “words can’t describe …” or when Jodie Foster says “they should have sent a poet.” It’s not that I haven’t had some pretty amazing, indescribable experiences — we all have.

But words fail to describe the loss of … everything … that occurs in meditation — and often off the cushion if my practice is in good shape. Sometimes, it feels like “me” is a layer of thin paint on a glass table, and concentration is like a stream of water, dissolving the paint until only clear glass remains. Sometimes I experience the “loss of my head” — a phrase coined by Douglas Harding in his brilliant work on perception and non-duality.

The bell rings. Sitting continues. There are people walking. “Bell” and “Sit” and “Walk” have no emotion or thought connected to them. There is simply — abiding. The walkers around me make me smile, as I no longer sense them so much as feel them move through the air around me. The quality of light shifts with passing moments. The bell rings again, and it is time to get ready for dinner.

I have no idea whether what I am doing that day is “right” or not… but it at least rhymes with the experiences I have heard others describe — the sense of the barrier between self and other disappearing until the distinction seems meaningless. The utter calm and rightness. The silence beyond silence. The silence beyond self.

I keep my eyes down, my concentration maintained, during dinner. There are some chants — thanks for the food mostly, some incense is lit. We bow to an altar.

I think of the chanting, bowing, and offerings of Zen liturgy as a kind of Buddhist Internal Family Systems work: acknowledging the parts inside all of us that work and eat, that strive and rest, that exhibit compassion and energy. Generally, each part is associated with a Bodhisattva — a historical or mythological figure who embodied a particular aspect of the human experience which dwells in all of us. Avalokiteshvara is a big one — the Bodhisattva of compassion — who reminds us to be kind to ourselves, especially. She shows up in a lot of chants.

The Han begins its cascade of “clack… clack… clackclakclack…” and we return the Zendo. We sit as the light fades from sunset to darkness. The experience is simply there, my attention soft, never landing on any one sound or feeling for more than a flicker, always returning to simply being everything all at once. I remain seated an extra half hour after the final bell, until the lights dim. Sometime in the evening dark, I return to my bed.

The second Evening Sit is often where I feel like I have “settled in,” and if I was staying for longer, the “work” would be maintaining this sense of open awareness with high-focus and loss of self for a few days straight. But I leave tomorrow.

Sunday

As I wake on Sunday to the late (6AM) bell, thoughts return before I’ve brushed my teeth. Sundays are harder for me. There is no early sit, just breakfast and a short work period to prepare for services.

While nothing compared to the liturgy of High-Church Episcopalians, there is a weekly service of some chanting and reading and two periods of meditation each Sunday. A few dozen folks from the local community will arrive to sit, and immediately after sitting, there is a big loud community lunch. It’s lovely and celebratory and joyous and I hate it.

The morning sit returns to the relative ease and familiarity of my home practice — a simple focus on my breath, the cessation of thought. Peace. But every so often I realize that Lunch is coming and I’m all up in my head again. After the periods of meditation, we remain seated for a talk from a senior monastic on dealing with suffering. There is more chanting and a few bows, some bells and clappers.

And we’re done. I go to my dorm room and change into street clothes. I have a quick lunch in the now far-too-loud and far-too-crowded dining call, and return to my car to drive home.

Why?

All told, I spent just 48 hours actually on-site - the norm when I head to the Monastery for an occasional weekend retreat, but a fraction of a “real” week-long retreat most hardcore meditators take a few times a year. In those 48 hours I slept a few hours less a night, ate perhaps half calories I normally would, and got almost no exercise. Most of it was in silence.

Sometimes it’s very hard. The hours sitting in despair and distraction are legit. The physical pain from sitting (especially in the first few years) can be really, really challenging. The lack of stimulation and the silence can lead to runaway trains of thought that are difficult to wrangle.

But… there are times when it is beyond words. Those times — which I can now at least remember, foggily, and anticipate — are “worth it.” Not “worth it” in the sense that “pleasure overrides pain” but in the sense that “reality overrides delusion.” In the silence beyond the sense of self lies… well… everything.

It feels right. It feels true. It feels like taking out the trash or cleaning the garage. Maybe not “fun” in each moment, but it washes away the cruft and leaves me feeling like I’m standing on fresh grass.

A better place to start.