Confessions of an Amateur Meditator

As a child I remember peeking into my grandmother’s room on countless occasions, only to see her seated in bed with her eyes closed, lost in prayer for what seemed like hours.

As I grew, meditation became widely renowned as being the answer to all of the world’s worldly worries.
“Just a few minutes a day, even, is enough”, prescribed my friends, family and saints alike
“Few moments of silence”.
“Still your mind.”
“Become one with the universe. One with God”
“The mind is like a wandering butterfly. Control it, so it cannot control you.”

And over the years, I have tried….And tried hard. Screwed up my eyes shut, so tight, until I saw stars. Back erect, then relaxed, sometimes my focus on the idol of my God, sometimes on my breathing and then on my forehead to activate my mind’s inner eye.
I tried it along with yoga and I tried it alone.
But each time my ability to concentrate was a few seconds less than the previous time.

I’ve tried and tried until I felt a frustration towards religious snobbery. Anyone lost in their trance like meditation (and in India it is not an uncommon sight) automatically exuded a superior smugness and earned my envy because their meditative success reminded me of my failure at the same.

Clearly the world can be divided into  professional meditators, doers and then the are thinkers.
I was evidently the latter. My mind is a drifter. It likes to think, reason, analyze and overanalyze. It wanders, like the wayward child who forgets to inform his parents where he’s going when he strays towards the toy store window.

But surely there are worse flaws to have in this world.
If meditation means controlling your mind, well, maybe mine likes to be boss. With prolonged periods of trial and error, I’ve now realized that the key to meditation is self -acceptance.
I cannot touch my toes, I cannot not burn toast, I cannot make perfect ponytails, I cannot meditate!
I can however tie shoelaces well, brush my teeth, do a mean candle pose, walk really fast.

I know what you’re thinking. That my accomplishments sound too trivial to be worthy of mention, then why is it that we tend to over magnify our trivial shortcomings? Keep pushing and pushing to achieve that one thing that someone else can do but we can’t? I have finally decided to follow the words of my spiritual guru, Elsa from Frozen, I’m going to just ‘Let it go’!!

 Prayer I believe, is my private conversation with God.
Imagine someone telling you exactly how to sit(almost always uncomfortably) and how to accurately position your hands, while having a heart to heart conversation with your closest friend.
Imagine if you had a great secret to share that you were simply dying to tell, but having a shower was mandatory before you could pick up the phone to call.
Would it not rob the conversation of all its intensity and passion?

It’s the same when we want to communicate with our friend, our God.
The dress code of correct prayer ends up more often than not, ironically stripping the conversation of its joy, which is all there really should be when your soul wants to make a call back home.

My thoughts on prayer are best explained by borrowing from yet another one of my all time favourite songs,“it’s only words and words are all I have…..”
I have prayed to many Gods in many languages and the answer I have always received has been this.
My soul does not need a language to communicate. The answers are already there. All it needs is spiritual silence.
Silence that transcends the noise of my thinking mind.
Which is precisely why, I have most often found this silence in a very noisy room. While shopping or dancing, or doing something mechanical and mundane, like taking a shower, ironing some clothes or going for a walk. Something that requires my sense organs and my brain to function on auto-pilot. When all my faculties are otherwise occupied, satisfied that they’re being productive, it is then that my subconscious mind seems to freely wander, aimlessly at first, like a tourist smelling in the fragrance of a new city.
And before I know it my soul has found its way home. Been some place it once belonged to, spoken to someone it once knew, and calmly found its way back. And all this, while I was physically stuck in endless traffic….or listening to music….swinging on a hammock by a quiet lake in the misty mountains….or mindlessly following the zig zag movements of budding footballers in a children’s park.

But try as I might to sit in a sterile, silent room, devoid of all distractions, religious books and idols in place, my eyes solemnly closed and my thinking mind takes over. Like the nanny trying in vain to discipline that curious child.
Overanalyzing, thinking, imagining dismal scenarios that are Oscar worthy for best drama.

So prayers then are just that….Words! Words that have no special power other than the fact that they’ve been devised, not to silence the mind, nor to control it, but simply to occupy it. To keep it busy, distracted with rote-learning and repetition so that the soul is free to do its job.
No matter what the language, what the prayer, no matter if I recite Sunday-Monday-Tuesday over and over again, instead of a prayer, no matter if I am shopping, looking through racks of clothes or have a few shots of alcohol and dance to the point of exertion on a crowded dance floor, when I suddenly feel that calm exhilaration…that sudden disorientation, like for a few moments I forgot who I was, and I needed to recall what it was that I had been thinking about…..that feeling of coming back home is when I know my soul has already said its prayer.