David Lynch taught me to meditate & masturbate
may he forever rest in power.
David Lynch (Jan 20, 1946-Jan 16, 2025) taught me two practices for remaining in a neutral state in the midst of chaos. These habits, meditation and masturbation, are 100% free and allow us to retain some degree of control over what we can—namely our own mental health.
In honor of his passing, I am sharing an excerpt from a previously paywalled piece about David including a recorded conversation between us about dreams, meditation, Fellini and Los Angeles.
“My mom said your dad’s a pornographer” my then-BFF dropped on me at recess. “She said I’m not allowed to go over to your house after school anymore.” I was 13 and my dad, the alleged pornographer, had taken us a few days prior to an editing room to watch a rough cut screening of a movie he was working on, Wild At Heart (1990) directed by David Lynch, starring Nicholas Cage & Laura Dern.
At the time, the MPA (Motion Picture Association) board was considering giving the film an X rating, for extreme violence and (in retrospect tame) sex, which would have made a domestic theatrical release nearly impossible outside of porn theaters. So my dad and David were reviewing a cut that could pass for an “R.”
I was used to being dragged along to adult content screenings, meetings and sets since I was a little kid. Plus my dad promised we could go to the Apple Pan for burgers after and I really liked David. He was dating Isabella Rossellini, then known to me only as the gorgeous Lancôme cosmetics model. They would come over to our house for dinner and I was enraptured—they represented the power couple I aspired to be part of —avant garde, chic and a bit too cool for Hollywood.
Even more than fangirling over David’s romantic life, his television show Twin Peaks premiered that spring and my friends and I were OBSESSED. I had no idea that David was such a big deal cult director. I hadn’t seen (or even heard of) Blue Velvet, Dune, Eraserhead or The Elephant Man until years later when I was going to art school in New York. All I knew at 13 was that David created the show with the hottest baddies that was driving all my erotic fantasies as I started experimenting with masturbation.
I drove David crazy asking questions abut the boys and girls of Twin Peaks, wanting every last detail about their costumes, makeup and especially their on and off screen hook ups. Agent Cooper, James and Bobby were total wet dreams who set a recurring theme for many unfortunate crushes in years to come, i.e. missing the glaringly obvious red flags. I had it bad for Bobby Briggs with his grunge uniform— oversized cardigans and flannels tied around his waist and sexy floppy hair falling over his eyes (there’s something about the hair that drives teen girls wild in every generation—see J. Bieber & H. Styles.)
Bobby was also a coke dealer who was two-timing his girlfriend Laura Palmer with Shelly Johnson. That said, Laura was cheating on Bobby with James Hurley and mostly using Bobby for his coke supply.
The women of Twin Peaks were even more gorgeous and complex. Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne remains a fashion icon for me— with her subtly erotic knee length plaid skirts and saddle shoes. Audrey’s perfectly arched brows are the stuff of lore. I practiced twisting a knot in a maraschino cherry with my tongue over and over again just like Audrey did at the illicit brothel and casino, One Eyed Jacks. It’s still a trick I pull out whenever I’m presented with a Shirley Temple.
At school, my friends and I passed around a dogeared copy of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer between classes to pore over the passages about sex, drugs and the occult—all of which we were already experimenting with. I got in trouble in science class for reading it under my desk.
One night at dinner I told David about the incident and he reprimanded me, saying that I was too young to be reading Laura’s diary. I suddenly was embarrassed that he knew I was thinking about masturbation and fucking Bobby and orgies at One Eyed Jacks.
After I got sent away to boarding school, I didn’t see David until a couple of decades later, when I got interested in meditation. Several close friends suggested that I check out Transcendental Meditation (T.M.) as a way in to the practice. David started the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005 with outposts in LA and New York and was offering courses to learn T.M. A friend connected me with the director of the foundation, Bob Roth. Bob became my first official meditation teacher (outside of meditating with monks in a Zen Buddhist monastery on my first trip to Japan in 2000 while working for the Japanese cosmetic company, Shiseido, but that’s a story for another time.) Bob explained TM to me as a way to go beneath the surface. He said that thoughts would come and go, but instead of judging them, I should imagine I was diving underwater and observing each intrusive thought (to do lists, anxieties, etc,) as particles floating alongside as I settled deeper towards the ocean floor.
Pretty soon I became hooked on the practice, eventually mixing a variety of methods to go within and transcend — breathing, listening to sounds, moving my body, taking a walk. You can even do the dishes in a meditative state. Any mundane task can become an opportunity to tune out the noise and focus— the running water, the way the soap bubbles, how the sponge feels in your hands. There’s no rules to how to quiet the mind, you just have to find what works best for you. I like these free short guided meditations from UCLA’s Mindfulness Education center as a starting point.
Once I was able to tap into meditation as a tool, I understood how helpful it was to access the darkest reaches of our psyche without getting lost in the sauce. I wondered if David’s imagination would been able to conjure up Twin Peaks and the sicko, violent mind of Killer Bob without a metaphoric lighthouse to return to.
Adult me got a chance to ask him directly.
In 2014, Town & Country commissioned me to guest edit their September issue. I would be the first outside editor in their 168 year history. The theme was to be my Los Angeles. Of course I had to include David, who had been living in LA since 1970. For a few years, he was even doing daily weather reports —it’s not always 72 degrees and sunny in his LA. Instead of asking childish questions at the dinner table, we had a conversation about dreams, Fellini, intuition and meditation.
A few excerpts of our conversation:
L: How many hours do you meditate a day?
DL: I mediate maybe two hours a day.
L: Do you have any vices?
DL: No. I mean, I love to smoke cigarettes and I love to drink red wine and I don’t know if those are vices but some people might consider cigarette smoking a vice. But in the long list of vices and problems, I think cigarettes are not so, so bad. I love tobacco.
L: What’s your brand?
DL: American Spirits.
L: Oh that’s kind of healthy, right?
DL: Yeah. They’re healthy cigarettes.
L: [Laughter]
DL: They’re pure tobacco, like my grandfather smoked. I think I always just wanted to live the art life. And for me the art life was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
L: Very Beatnik.
DL: Maybe it’s a Beat thing. Yeah
L: Do you ever write your dreams down?
DL: At one point in my life I was doing that. I’ve never really gotten ideas from nighttime dreams. Only a couple of times and those have been critical times. I get ideas from other things, and one of those other things is daydreaming.
L: Daydreaming with your eyes opened or closed?
DL: They can be open sometimes, but sometimes they will close. It’s very important that we human beings have time in the day to sit quietly and think…and dream.
L: I agree. I think the saying is attributed to Shakespeare— that intervals of idleness are essential to creativity.
DL: Oh boy, are they ever.
L: [Laughter] I was asking dreams not so much for ideas—where you get ideas—but I had given my father who loves Fellini—I think you do as well—a book…
DL: Love, love, love.
L: Have you seen the book that he has done where he has drawn his dreams everyday?
DL: No I haven’t ever seen that.
L: It’s an amazing book. Sometimes he would dream when he was in production—he would dream specific things—but usually they were unrelated to anything, but he would draw and sketch his dreams everyday, and they are really beautiful. You should check them out.
DL: Yeah, fantastic. I am very proud to say that I was born on the same day of the month as Fellini.
L: You were? When’s your birthday?
DL: January 20th.
L: So you are a Capricorn?
DL: Yes, but I share qualities with Aquarius.
L: I am a Capricorn too: Christmas day.
DL: Christmas day!
L… [Laughter] did you ever meet Fellini?
DL: Twice.
L: You did? In Italy?
DL: Both times in Italy. The first time I met him - do you want to hear this story?
L: Yes!
DL: So I was with Isabella Rossellini. Isabella was in a film called Dark Eyes…also in the film were Marcello Mastroianni and Silvana Mangano.
L: Wow.
DL: And one night Marcello Mastroianni, Silvana Mangano, Isabella Rossellini, and I had dinner together, and it was a time of the year just in the South of Rome in a most magical area with these giant palazzos, with terraces and all built on different levels of hillsides and mushrooms were in season so the entire dinner was different themes of mushrooms, and the main course was a mushroom steak, and during the dinner we were talking and Marcello, you know, soon realized how much I loved Fellini. Next morning a car was outside my hotel with a driver—it was Marcello who organized it—and the car was told to have me spend the entire day with Fellini.
L: Oh wow.
DL: …So I spent the whole day with Fellini; it was just, you know, I was in seventh heaven. Then some years went by and I was shooting a Barilla pasta commercial for a French company but we were shooting it in Rome….When we were shooting they got word that Fellini, who was in a hospital in Northern Italy, was being moved to a hospital in Rome. And I asked, do you think it would be possible for me to say hello to him if he was moved down here to Rome? So Friday night we finished shooting that day, and there was a beautiful sunset— it was still sunny, the sun wasn’t setting, it was still sunny, but an evening sun in the summer. We went to this hospital and….here’s Fellini sitting in a kind of a wheelchair kinda rig between two beds and a little table in front of him….He took my hand and he held my hand and we talked for half an hour. And then left and said, you know the whole world is waiting for your next film and he smiled, and he was in good shape and I left. And two days later he, for who knows really what reasons, went into a coma and never came out.
L: How does being in LA give you any more freedom to go into all these different worlds?
DL: I love the light and the feeling of freedom.
L: Yeah.
DL: LA is a place that makes me feel free and owning the field of all possibilities.
L: How much of that is, is due to the environment of LA, the physical landscape?
DL: LA is not a tall city; it is a spread out city. And there’s lots and lots of light, and so it’s, it’s, it gives this feeling of, of soaring into freedom.
L: I like that. What are some of your favorite landmarks in LA? That you first fell in love with when you moved to the city?
DL: Well, I like the feel of it. I always say [laughter] the same thing too but LA it seems like a huge sameness when you first come to LA. It did to me. Then the more I was here, the more I discovered different areas and each area had its own feel. And there are some areas that I discovered that I could feel the golden age of Hollywood. And I would like to go through those areas and and especially when you smell night blooming jasmine at night…
L: Yes.
DL…going through some areas you can look over and see Gary Cooper driving his Duesenberg. It’s just, it’s so beautiful.
L: What about the Ambassador Hotel? Did you ever get a chance to go there before they tore it down?
DL: Yeah. I’ve been to the Ambassador Hotel. Yeah. Yeah.
L: I wish they hadn’t torn that down.
DL: Maharishi went to the Ambassador Hotel when he first came to Los Angeles.
L: Really?
DL: His first press conference was there. And it was at one of those press conferences that he said, “I will fill the world with love.” ….Maharishi said…the full potential of the human being is enlightenment….every human being has consciousness, but not every single human being has the same amount. You give them the technique of meditation and they will start expanding whatever consciousness that they had to begin with.
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I was disconsolate when I saw the news. Then as I read this I realized what a fantastic, deeply creative life he had. Praise be to all the joy and weirdness.
He touched our hearts and excited our minds, understanding that darkness and mystery were not forces to be conquered, but rather integrated into the flow of life. Rest in Power, sir.