“Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Love
My first meditative experience went something like this:
I bookmarked my page in Eat Pray Love and shut the novel that had just inspired me to try something a little crazy. In one of the best books I have ever read in my life, Elizabeth Gilbert describes her experience in India when she meditated amongst an assorted arrangement of spiritual followers. According to Gilbert, Yoga is translated in Sanskrit to mean “union,” and can refer to the union of our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, of a teacher and student, of an individual and God, or of the mind and the body. “The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitch of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.”
Also, Yoga is not necessarily about speaking to a God or obsessing over the discovery of a divine presence. Gilbert describes yoga as the act of listening to any God that you believe in, whether it be a spiritual leader or a spirit within your own heart. Or both. Personally, I do not believe in just one God, but I do believe in a ubiquitous Godly presence. Lately I have struggled with my own religious beliefs, but I generally lean toward practicing some kind of hybrid spirituality between Christianity and Buddhism. Maybe my state of utter confusion could be more eloquently referred to as “traveling down the path toward spiritual enlightenment." Who knows.
So after reading a whole chapter about this stuff, my thoughts had basically dwindled down to: Well, what the heck.
I've tried Yoga before. But given that about 90% of my blood is caffeinated and that yesterday I compared myself to an incessantly flapping Hummingbird, my mind cannot be easily settled. But when I couldn’t adequately answer the question of ‘why not?’ for myself after putting the book down, I decided to sit up in my bed and give yoga one more try.
The alarm was set on my new phone (actually a vintage flip-phone because I dropped my nice one down a mountain) to go off exactly ten minutes after I shut my eyes. Soon after, I started repeating the phrase “Ham-Sa,” which translates to “I am that” (I am divine, I am with God, I am not separate, I am not alone, etc) like so:
Inhale... Haaahhhmmmmm... Exhale... Sahhhhhhhh. Just like Gilbert does.
I concentrated on absolutely nothing but the chant. My focus became so fierce that I soon forgot the words that I was supposed to chant. After a while, my breathing slowed so intensely that I found it unnecessary to inhale for a freakishly long period of time.
I know — impossible. Maybe I was in a trance? But I seriously required no inhalation at one point for over a few minutes (at least it seemed like it). When I awoke from whatever state I had entered, it was 26 minutes after when I had started, but I was under the impression that it hadn’t even been 10 yet because my phone alarm had neglected me. Apparently, I set the alarm but didn’t actually turn it on.
I then fell into the deepest six-hour slumber that I’ve probably ever experienced. My body required absolutely no more sleep than that – six hours – because the quality of rest was so intense.
Meditation is said to reveal heaven on earth. Gurus and intense Yogis live in an enlightened state of bliss, while dedicated, practicing Yogis are said to achieve a similar bliss in very little time once they begin their meditation. I bring up this point not because I feel that I have discovered heaven on earth (in fact I’m very far from it), but because the first song that played when I turned on my radio in the morning was “Heaven is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle — And I’m not kidding. Not kidding at all. As I belted out the tune alone to my dogs (poor girls - dogs have sensitive ears), I experienced a delayed revelation about the irony of this coincidence. I really have no further comment on the song incident, except that I am rather superstitious and do occasionally believe in supernatural and spiritual signs if they present themselves.
The sickness that I had begun to acquire the day before (I felt that familiar sick taste in the back of my throat accompanied by drowsiness that usually leads to a week-long cold event) had totally vanished by the morning. My run early this morning was terrific; I felt like I was moving on air. Maybe all of this vigor is entirely inside my head, but I’m not really sure that I care if it is. Results don’t lie.
So to recap — I tried something I had read about, and it may or may not have had a direct causal relationship with the disappearance of a foreboding illness, a splendid night of uninterrupted sleep, and an energy that nearly levitated me as I ran five miles this morning.
I think I’ll be trying Yoga again.
No comments:
Post a Comment