Musing on Meditation

“Meditation?” I asked, with eyebrows raised as though she’d suggested I tattoo a portrait of Ashton Kutcher on my bicep.  Her own eyebrows went up as she said, “Well, it might be good to give your brain a break occasionally.”

The eyebrows had a point. Stalked by a vague worry that there were not enough hours to discover the infinite interesting things about the world, I felt like a girl sprinting from shell to shell on a shore that stretched into the horizon.  I listened to documentaries during my dawn jog and read whenever possible – swaying on the bus, queuing for coffee, sometimes even while negotiating a crush of pedestrians at an intersection.  It was, I admitted, all quite tiring.

The prospect of rest proved enticing enough to lure me to a meditation session run by a nun.  She looked nothing Whoopi Goldberg and did not wear a habit or tease rosary beads with her fingers.  Her little face was enveloped in a nest of downy, white hair and her smile made me feel as though I’d eaten warm gingerbread while lying on silk sheets in a king sized bed.  Like a Caucasian grandmother I’d never had, the nun was redolent of Irish breakfast tea, sponge cake, and crocheting in the afternoon sun. 

She embraced me, her frame as light as an origami crane, and held my hands with hers.  “Welcome”, she beamed.

I settled into the meditation circle. The chanting on the CD faded out and I uncrossed my feet in preparation for twenty minutes of quiet.  I focussed on silently repeating my chosen word for the first minute.  In the second minute, a train of thought thundered through my head:  I wondered how jacarandas know when to bloom in summer and resolved to ask a clever friend the next day.  I replayed a conversation with my boss, worrying I might have mispronounced ‘vehemence’.  I listed other ‘v’ words – volatile, vomiting, vindictive.  I tried to remember what Voltaire wrote.  I planned my outfit for work.  I thought again about jacarandas and imagined diving into a mountain of purple flowers.  I worried about a letter I hadn’t finished before I left the office.

Then I waited for the next 18 minutes to tick over. 

My mind kept straying from my meditation word like a Labrador puppy walking with a leash for the first time.  After an age of fidgeting, stressing about snoring and hearing a continuous loop of the ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ theme song, I began to wonder if there had been a technical glitch with the meditation CD.  I peeked to see if someone would point out that the CD was broken, after which we would laugh heartily at how we had unknowingly meditated for 2 hours instead of 20 minutes.  Everyone else had faces relaxed in expressions of transcendent peace.  I sighed and shut my eyes.

Finally, at long last, when my legs began to twitch involuntarily, the chanting seeped softly into the silence.  We stretched our arms.  The nun asked me what I’d thought of the session and I admitted to the group that I might have fallen asleep.  Although they were an eclectic mix of people, they were unanimously emphatic in reassuring me that it didn’t matter.  Meditation, they urged, was not about succeeding or failing, performing or giving up, achieving or falling short. 

I’ve returned to the meditation group a few times and am yet to experience that elusive tranquillity.  Nevertheless, I am grateful to have found a place where I can sit quietly with people who demand nothing from me and who only chuckle kindly when I tell them how bad I am at meditating.