Me:
Om Namah Shivaya... Om Namah Shivaya... Om Namah Shivaya...
Here there is a promising eight-second pause in thoughts. But
then—
Mind: Are you mad at me now?
—and then with a big gasp, like I am coming up for air, my mind wins, my eyes fly open
and I quit. In tears. An Ashram is supposed to be a place where you come to deepen your
meditation, but this is a disaster. The pressure is too much for me. I can’t do it. But what
should I do? Run out of the temple crying after fourteen minutes, every day?
This morning, though, instead of fighting it, I just stopped. I gave up. I let myself slump
against the wall behind me. My back hurt, I had no strength, my mind was quivering. My pos-
ture collapsed like a bridge crumbling down. I took the mantra off the top of my head (where it
had been pressing down on me like an invisible anvil) and set it on the floor beside me. And
then I said to God, “I’m really sorry, but this is the closest I could get to you today.”
The Lakota Sioux say that a child who cannot sit still is a half-developed child. And an old
Sanskrit text says, “By certain signs you can tell when meditation is being rightly performed.
One of them is that a bird will sit on your head, thinking you are an inert thing.” This has not
exactly happened to me yet. But for the next forty minutes or so, I tried to stay as quiet as
possible, trapped in that meditation hall and ensnared in my own shame and inadequacy,
watching the devotees around me as they sat in their perfect postures, their perfect eyes
closed, their smug faces emanating calmness as they surely transported themselves into
some perfect heaven. I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into
the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to, remembering something my Guru once said—that
you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a
tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.
But I didn’t feel strong. My body ached in diminished worthlessness.
I wondered who is the “me” when I am conversing with my mind, and who is the “mind.” I
thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain,
and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from
Jaws and couldn’t help smiling: