Meditate. Meditation. They told me (and tell me) that if I want to achieve some semblance of peace, and if I want to rewire my neural pathways, then meditation should help.
More than a week ago, I embarked on Deepak Chopra’s 21 Day Meditation Challenge: Creating Abundance. I committed to meditating every day. I committed to setting aside 15 minutes to listen to the recordings, to contemplate the universe in silence, and then, in the time I might otherwise make a cup of tea or post on social media, I promised I would write about my experiences.
For me as for Hamlet, time is out of joint. I wrote and have written every day since starting on my journey. Today is day 13. But life moves like quicksand: slow, slow, and then suddenly the time has gone and, it would seem, I have nothing to show for my diligence. You see, I did write quite a lot, but because of a dearth of technological knowhow and savvy, I essentially overwrote what I had written. In the wink of an eye, all the thoughts I’d dared to write down were gone.
This is my attempt at starting anew, but also giving a summary of my experiences thus far.
As I sit listening to Mr. Chopra’s extremely soothing voice, he tells me to contemplate inviting unlimited abundance into my life, and he tells me to repeat a mantra that sounds something like-, for example, sat chit ananda. In the recording, he says that “sat” means “absolute existence” or “truth;” that chit is the principle of knowing; and that “ananada” indicates a transcendent feeling or experience of joy or true fulfillment.
In truth, I have no idea what he means.
What I experience next is madness. I cannot center my thoughts. I cannot focus on my breath, and I cannot focus on the mantra. I’m confused and discontented because I do not understand whether I should breathe in on “sat chit” and breathe out on “ananda,” or if I should try to breathe in on the entire mantra and then attempt to do the same on an exhalation. I’m also concerned because I am not quite sure if I am pronouncing the sounds correctly, and as I understand it, the sounds of the mantra are key to the practice. Vibrations are key. I worry that if I create discordant sounds, I will effectively ruin my karma and the karma of all sentient beings. I’m also troubled because I have so successfully focused on the Sanskrit language that I have absolutely no idea what it is that I am actually asking the universe to grant me. Sat chit ananda might as well convey a wish for world peace as the desire to have fries and ketchup with my veggie burger.
Some time after all of this, after my 15 minute experience is over and after Mr. Chopra has told me to gently open my eyes and cheerfully go about the rest of my day, I find that I continue to be troubled and annoyed by how little I can focus. So, like anyone these days, I go to the source of all knowledge. I go to YouTube and conduct a search using the terms “monkey mind” and “meditation.” Then I clicked on this video, essentially because it seemed short (quick to watch) and because the image in the frame seemed to be that of a legitimate, real Buddhist monk. Mr. Chopra would thus probably approve of his message.
According to the monk in the video, in order to overcome the monkey mind, what I (the meditator) have to do in my practice is make friends with the monkey. The monk tells me that just giving the monkey a banana–that is, giving him some small token–won’t work. The monk insists that meditators give the monkey some valuable work to do, and that “something” is to simply watch the breath. The monk claims that the monkey will see this activity–watching the breath–as a “good idea,” and then he will begin to heed the meditator’s command.
But all of this makes me somewhat irate because, you see, I don’t have a single, lone monkey chattering in my mind. I have a colony of monkeys. They are legion, and they seem to have taken up permanent residence and begun to cultivate their own crops quite successfully. I’m not sure, but they probably also have a leader akin to King Kong from whom they take all their orders. I wonder if I have any place that is mine. Just mine.
On that note, I give up for the day. But not before considering, too, that monkeys in the wild don’t tend to eat bananas. This is misinformation popularized by television, film, and other popular media.
I wonder if Fay Wray ever meditated?
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