Om Mani Padme Rog

One of the positives in my life, one of the things that help my day go 'round, is the practice of meditation. Every morning and every evening, for maybe 15-20 minutes, I close my eyes and go inside myself a bit, working on quieting my mind by a variety of means: regulating my breathing(or just focusing on the in/out of your inhalation and exhalation), or using a mantra.Those are my basics, but there are many other ways to go about it.

The morning session is probably my favorite of the two, particularly on a day where I don't have to be anywhere or do anything. Always feels like a "purer" session:  having just awoken from a night's sleep, there's rarely any junk to clear out of my head. 

Meditation is not a panacea though. There are no dramatic transformations. It doesn't turn you into a Swami. I'm still the same neurotic I always was, but at least I don't worry about it anymore. What meditation does is relax you, cool you out. And being quieter inside, you're able to see more of what's going on within you and without you- as it were. You might just get an insight or two into your own behavior, your own machinations, your own life. 

 I've practiced meditation now for- oh gosh!-42 of my just-now-60 years. First learned how to meditate(actually, like I said,  there are many hows, as far as that goes)when I was 18, not long after I'd learned of it.

The form of meditation I learned was called Transcendental Meditation(or TM for short), and was under the general direction of one Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Yep, the one with the celebrity clientele which included The Beatles and The Beach Boys(and wasn't Mia Farrow in there someplace?). That Maharishi.

He was a ubiquitous figure in the media at that time, espousing his philosophy of love and peace("life need not be a painful struggle")and had schools throughout the country. Learning how to meditate was a bit of an 'academic' pursuit, in that you had a classroom session or two and then an individual session with one of the teachers. 

The individual session was where you actually learned to meditate, and they gave you a mantra which was supposed to be your very own. More of this is coming back as I think of it. You had to bring an offering(like fresh fruit)to the teacher, and you had to be drug-free for at least the two weeks prior to the session. As an 18-year-old in 1972, this was a toughie. I'd go a week, maybe a week and a half, and then screw up. What can I say? Pot was our primary spirit, available and offered(nay, encouraged--our mores in 1972)at every social gathering. Besides, I liked the stuff!

But I finally made the 14 days, and was able to join the ranks. My first experience with meditation, strangely enough, was that it was very much like a pot high as far as the heightened senses, only with more continuity and less paranoia. And I was a hell of a lot calmer. 

The teachers had said that some of us would experience more contrast than others in first learning how to meditate, depending on what we came in with in terms of basic temperament. Someone who is more naturally calm and placid might not experience much of a change, whereas a rabbity, nervous individual(like me) would feel a world of difference. Of course, this wore off with time, but it was still quite a change! Enough to show me that it was possible to quiet the mind, calm the spirit.

Another thing I experienced early on was an insight into my life thusfar. In my eighteen years, I'd already had some decidedly nice patches and some downright crummy ones, and began to see both as just part of the process. The same process. No mistakes. Something didn't necessarily go wrong in my life to cause these bad things to happen. As you start to see their interrelatedness, your designations of good and bad begin to fall away. Life just is. 

Like I said, meditation doesn't turn you into a Swami. At 18, I probably expected it to. At 60, I know that it doesn't(or maybe I just missed the Swami boat!).But it does get you calmer, quieter inside. Externally, you're still going to be the same mess you always were. I remember a conversation with someone in college, age 20 or 21. He said, "you seem real nervous on the outside, and I get talking to you and you're calm. That's weird."

No. That's meditation. Gee, that sounds like maybe it actually works!