Meditation: Why Bother (Part 1)

I’ve always liked to consider myself open to new ideas, which is probably something everyone likes to think about themselves. Although that might be true for trivia style facts, it’s most often not true about the larger issues in life, or something that challenges you worldview, even unconsciously. 

My first, formative experiences with “alternative” and “eastern” medicine and health practices were not positive. 

My family spent some time in India and Nepal when I was quite young, and my mother picked up quite a few esoteric habits. Although I probably only remember the more obscure ones, she was definitely into past life regression, reiki, pendulums, and bizarrely she went to see a “witch” that would “bite” her and suck out blood and grit. This witch would lay here mouth on someone’s skin, suck hard enough to make a hicky, and then spit blood, saliva and some small rock like objects into a bowl, and then identify what those small pieces meant. “This is you anxiety, this is your wheat sensitivity” or something along those lines. By sucking out these bad energy manifestations, the patient would be cured of their ill effects, for a while at least (Can’t keep a business going if you permanently cure your patients). In fact my mother became a reiki master and made a semi-successful career of painting and sculpting what she “saw” during her sessions. 

Now, I don’t want to antagonise people who do believe in these methods. Everyone can believe whatever they want as long as it doesn’t damage other people. 

However, I will assume that you will agree that among the eastern practices, the ones mentioned above do require more suspension of disbelief than others in order to work.  I would argue that other eastern imports like yoga and tai chi don’t require you to believe in prana (life energy) or qi (life force) for them to imbue at least some of their positive effects (This, in itself is probably a huge topic for discussion with heavy duty practitioners, feel free to link articles in the comments). As a child, I obviously  started out completely believing my parents, as word of law, but that belief (or trust, or faith) slowly got eroded the more often I saw them fail or not live up to the ideals they themselves prescribed. 

I remember how one holiday season, my mother drew out a 7 by 7 grid and wrote the numbers from 1 to 49 in them. She then proceeded to take out her silver and crystal pendulum and hold it over every square. She then marked down certain numbers on a lottery ticket and proclaimed that these would be the winning numbers. She let other family members fill in some of the other forms on the ticket, but probably looked down on such feeble and naïve guesswork. 

Needless to say, we did not win.

The pendulum never came out again.

Imagine being told as an 8 or 9 year old that you have great reiki potential, that you have healing hands. Imagine being told as a 10 or 11 year old that you do not… (my sister).

Now that I’ve started to reminisce, there are a bunch of childhood stories that come back to my mind, I won’t get carried away. 

I grew up without religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter when I was younger, but those were family traditions more in the spirit of Allen de Button's Atheism 2.0 than religious celebrations. When I got into my teens, these family events became more of a farce and something to endure. 

At the same time, we were living in vastly different culture where religion (Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism) was pervasive, although not strict. But there was a lot of passive acceptance of things I didn’t believe. For example, I found the Hindu reverence for cows to be slightly ridiculous, but I never made fun of it or criticized it. (There were stories of foreigners having to leave the country after hitting a cow with a car. There were stories of foreigners paying a bribe to get off hitting a child with a car. There were no stories of foreigners bribing their way out of hitting a cow.)This was just a part of the environment. 

The exposure that I got to Yoga, Ayurveda etc. was not the distilled secular version that (most of) you have probably been exposed to. We sometimes had Yoga in school, and it would always be with a genuine Guru who would bore us with metaphysics for the first lesson and thus ensure that we hated it and didn’t see the point for any subsequent lessons. Having to do things you don’t want to do will always feel like punishment.  Ironically these classes never went on for very long, and were held about once a week, so I didn’t even get more flexible. 

Ok, all of this was to say: when I left India my attitude towards yoga and specifically meditation was the same as it was to all of the “eastern medicine” disciplines. Highly prejudiced. Highly sceptical. 

Part 2: We skip forward a few years to when I try to stop smoking.