Meditation and me

Meditation and me

Meditation and Me – By Purva Mehta

The virtues of meditation. I read about them everywhere. All the time. The benefits are countless. They help your mind, body and soul. The beauty is that anybody can do it. Anywhere.  Its peace giving and calming. Soothing and relaxing.

(Am I the only living soul for whom it did just the opposite?)

No hang on, let me explain. I did try it. And yes it was a real, sincere effort. Only it backfired. Yes it did. Spectacularly. Because the minute I sat down and closed my eyes, took a deep breath and tried to empty my mind of everything….boom! The floodgates opened and that calming feeling I had been anticipating blew up right into my face. Actually it started with a trickle …exam time. My daughter’s boards. The dreaded boards. I began to wonder how they would go….and soon the wondering turned into fretting and the inner calm I was searching for turned into a whirlwind of thoughts. I could feel myself frowning.

With great effort I cleared my mind (and my forehead) of that and got back to concentrating on the inner me……except that the repair work going on at the farm house was a growing point of worry. The monsoons were going to arrive in no time and that portion near the staircase, where the roof leaked due to a faulty pipe in the corner on the east side of the back of the lower balcony still hadn’t been repaired. Despair hit me….how was I ever going to manage doing so much work in so little time?? Inwardly I felt totally dejected. That little whirlwind inside my head had now picked up pace and turned into a tiny storm. Outwardly I could feel my shoulders drooping miserably.

This meditation thing just wasn’t working for me. Nothing was going according to plan. May be I really needed to do this right. I straightened my shoulders, took a deep breath and began again….Om….except it kept trickling in. Had Shantanu managed the tickets for Saturday’s film? What of the tragedy of my great aunt’s niece’s lost puppy? My prized roses that had failed to bloom this year? And the Goa trip pictures that I had misplaced? The feeling was awful. There was a buzzing noise in my head as the trickle became a gush and the gush became a flood turning me into an agitated, nerve ridden, nail biting mass of anxiety.

Oh yes this had to stop. This meditation thing was over hyped, I can tell you. So I took my own advice. I took my new found gigantic cloud of worries to the movies. (Shantanu had managed to get the tickets after all). I bought a giant bag of buttered popcorn and offloaded all of it watching a movie ironically titled, Tornado. And never again can you extol the virtues of meditation to me. I’d pick tornado over meditation any day. Amen, or in my case, Om to that.

~ PURVA MEHTA