Meditation goes official as RBI stamps its approval

Illustration by Suneesh K.

With the Indian central bank admitting that it retreats to connect with the transcendental calm within, I am emboldened to confess that there was a time when my life too centered around meditation. Indeed, such was its hold over me that I was often mistaken for a Buddhist hen. I was then in school and the classroom served as the forum for my reverie. Though not formally trained in the magical art, meditation came naturally to me and so I could do it effortlessly and with a passion that many, including my teachers and my parents, found quite unnerving. Often this would lead to unpleasantness and even physical censuring.

It was a typical adult reaction to a precocious young person who had conquered his inner self even as they struggled with theirs.

Mostly, all it needed was the drone of a lecturing teacher to set me off on my private journey where I focused on the world beyond the classroom. Through lessons on the chemical formula for ethanol and the history of the Magna Carta, I was in a state of enhanced consciousness, the summum bonum for all meditators. That had one unfortunate fallout - a slight inability to handle the mandatory class exams. But you do have to sacrifice something for a larger good and I sacrificed academic achievements.

It was much later that I discovered that what had been such an easy ride for me was the subject of much discussion around me with figures like Mahesh Yogi dispensing his trademark transcendental meditation out of his limos to the world weary, becoming a marketing parable of the modern age.

Meditation is the vaunted “happy pill with no side effects”. You can have a new meditation du jour with names and techniques ranging from Pink Light Meditation to Twin Heart Meditation and Tantric Chakra Meditation. For good measure you can choose from a smorgasbord of nationalities: Chinese, Korean, Tibetan, Indian.

Beyond that, there is a Christian, a Buddhist and a Hindu ‘spiritual’ meditation that works for the novice who doesn't want to stray from his native faith. The japa meditation exploits the sound vibrations of chanting a mantra like Om, Mani Padme Hum or Namyo Ho Renge Kyo. The sound basically cuts off any other thought, almost like white noise, so you  are forced to empty your mind to achieve the shunyata or emptiness. A subcategory is the sound bath meditation where Tibetaan bowls are made to resonate at conducive frequencies to attune the body and mind to more peaceable states. Sound vibrations of different Hertz corresponding to frequencies of the seven chakras described in the Tantric canon also coax the mind into a serene state. YouTube is full of binaural beats that lull you into a tranquil state and slowly slide you into sleep.

Of course the closest to day dreaming and one that tickles the pleasure centres of the brain is the visualization meditation that nudges you to conjure all the paraphernalia of the mind to put you in heightened states of attention and serendipitous goal setting. The Vipassana and Samana techniques are akin to modern psychologists and believe in grappling with buried trauma and purging the mind of it by watching it flow incessantly in the mental sphere by sitting in a masochistic inert silence.

Be warned it is not for the faint hearted and is what puts many off this mindfulness technique.

The Movement meditation focuses on Aristotelian peripatetic or walking meditation, tai ichi stretching, Kundalini yogic practices and Tantric khechari mudra meditation among others.

In the midst of all these swirling varieties, meditation has also been medicalised as a therapy tool, so much so that two co-directors of SEMALabs (Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness) at the University of Arizona, Jay Sanguinetti and  Shinzen Yong, are working on an ultrasound technology to mimic the alpha meditation states of the brain without actual meditation.

Like everything else in the Age of the Internet, meditation is finally a commodity emblazoned as an app on Google Play. But for me meditation is a spritzy cooler when you step off the rollercoaster and literally catch your breath with a quick cleanse of the million things that prick your mind at all times. The human brain is a learning machine to help us survive and is happiest in 360 mode and not too at ease with meditative states of being. At a physiological level, meditation is a motherhood - just step back to cool the engine and let the parasympathetic nervous system take over, the Vagus nerve predominate, deep breath sit still and … then get right back to the whirligig.

Read more: Healing Space | Why your meditation isn’t helping you cope