Eat, Pray, Love

silence and listen... well, that’s a different story. When I ask my mind to rest in stillness, it is
astonishing how quickly it will turn (1) bored, (2) angry, (3) depressed, (4) anxious or (5) all of
the above.
Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the “monkey mind”—the
thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.
From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching
on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a
problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy
thoughts make me happy, but—whoop!—how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry,
blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot
and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feel-
ing sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your
emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never
where you are. You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you
rest in this moment. It’s something like the habit of my dear friend Susan, who—whenever
she sees a beautiful place—exclaims in near panic, “It’s so beautiful here! I want to come
back here someday!” and it takes all of my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she
is already here. If you’re looking for union with the divine, this kind of forward/backward whirl-
ing is a problem. There’s a reason they call God a presence—because God is right here, right
now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
But to stay in the present moment requires dedicated one-pointed focus. Different medita-
tion techniques teach one-pointedness in different ways—for instance, by focusing your eyes
on a single point of light, or by observing the rise and fall of your breath. My Guru teaches
meditation with the help of a mantra, sacred words or syllables to be repeated in a focused
manner. Mantra has a dual function. For one thing, it gives the mind something to do. It’s as if
you’ve given the monkey a pile of 10,000 buttons and said, “Move these buttons, one at time,
into a new pile.” This is a considerably easier task for the monkey than if you just plopped him
in a corner and asked him not to move. The other purpose of mantra is to transport you to an-
other state, rowboatlike, through the choppy waves of the mind. Whenever your attention gets
pulled into a cross-current of thought, just return to the mantra, climb back into the boat and
keep going. The great Sanskrit mantras are said to contain unimaginable powers, the ability
to row you, if you can stay with one, all the way to the shorelines of divinity.
Among my many, many problems with meditation is that the mantra I have been giv-
en—Om Namah Shivaya—doesn’t sit comfortably in my head. I love the sound of it and I love
the meaning of it, but it does not glide me into meditation. It never has, not in the two years