The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (16 page)

42

The following morning, I arrive right on time for the 4:00 am meditation session which always starts the day here. We are meant to sit for an hour in silence, but I log the minutes as if they are miles— sixty brutal miles that I have to endure. By mile/minute fourteen, my nerves have started to go, my knees are breaking down and I’m overcome with exasperation. Which is understandable, given that the conversations between me and my mind during meditation generally go something like this:

Me:
OK, we’re going to meditate now. Let’s draw our attention to our breath and focus on the mantra.
Om
Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shiv
—

Mind:
I can help you out with this, you know!

Me:
OK, good, because I need your help. Let’s go.
Om
Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shi—

Mind:
I can help you think of nice meditative images. Like—hey, here’s a good one. Imagine you are a temple. A temple on an island! And the island is in the ocean!

Me:
Oh, that
is
a nice image.

Mind:
Thanks. I thought of it myself.

Me:
But what ocean are we picturing here?

Mind:
The Mediterranean. Imagine you’re one of those Greek islands, with an old Greek temple on it. No, never mind, that’s too touristy. You know what? Forget the ocean. Oceans are too dangerous. Here’s a better idea— imagine you’re an island in a
lake
, instead.

Me:
Can we meditate now, please?
Om Namah Shiv—

Mind:
Yes! Definitely! But try not to picture that the lake is covered with . . . what are those things called—

Me:
Jet Skis?

Mind:
Yes! Jet Skis! Those things consume so much fuel! They’re really a menace to the environment. Do you know what else uses a lot of fuel? Leaf blowers. You wouldn’t think so, but—

Me:
OK, but let’s MEDITATE now, please?
Om Namah—

Mind:
Right! I definitely want to help you meditate! And that’s why we’re going to skip the image of an island on a lake or an ocean, because that’s obviously not working. So let’s imagine that you’re an island in . . . a river!

Me:
Oh, you mean like Bannerman Island, in the Hudson River?

Mind:
Yes! Exactly! Perfect. Therefore, in conclusion, let’s meditate on this image—envision that you are an island in a river. All the thoughts that float by as you’re meditating, these are just the river’s natural currents and you can ignore them because you are an island.

Me:
Wait, I thought you said I was a temple.

Mind:
That’s right, sorry. You’re a temple
on
an island. In fact, you are both the temple
and
the island.

Me:
Am I also the river?

Mind:
No, the river is just the thoughts.

Me:
Stop! Please stop! YOU’RE MAKING ME CRAZY!!!

Mind (wounded):
Sorry. I was only trying to help.

Me:
Om Namah Shivaya . . . Om Namah Shivaya . . . Om
Namah Shivaya . . .

Here there is a promising eight-second pause in
thoughts. But then—

Mind:
Are you mad at me now?

—and then with a big gasp, like I am coming up for air, my mind wins, my eyes fly open and I
quit.
In tears. An Ashram is supposed to be a place where you come to deepen your meditation, but this is a disaster. The pressure is too much for me. I can’t do it. But what should I do? Run out of the temple crying after fourteen minutes, every day?

This morning, though, instead of fighting it, I just stopped. I gave up. I let myself slump against the wall behind me. My back hurt, I had no strength, my mind was quivering. My posture collapsed like a bridge crumbling down. I took the mantra off the top of my head (where it had been pressing down on me like an invisible anvil) and set it on the floor beside me. And then I said to God, “I’m really sorry, but this is the closest I could get to you today.”

The Lakota Sioux say that a child who cannot sit still is a half-developed child. And an old Sanskrit text says, “By certain signs you can tell when meditation is being rightly performed. One of them is that a bird will sit on your head, thinking you are an inert thing.” This has not exactly happened to me yet. But for the next forty minutes or so, I tried to stay as quiet as possible, trapped in that meditation hall and ensnared in my own shame and inadequacy, watching the devotees around me as they sat in their perfect postures, their perfect eyes closed, their smug faces emanating calmness as they surely transported themselves into some perfect heaven. I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to, remembering something my Guru once said—that you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.

But I didn’t feel strong. My body ached in diminished worthlessness. I wondered who is the “me” when I am conversing with my mind, and who is the “mind.” I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from
Jaws
and couldn’t help smiling:

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

43

Dinnertime. I’m sitting alone, trying to eat slowly. My Guru is always encouraging us to practice discipline when it comes to eating. She encourages us to eat in moderation and without desperate gulps, to not extinguish the sacred fires of our bodies by dumping too much food into our digestive tracts too fast. (My Guru, I’m fairly certain, has never been to Naples.) When students come to her complaining that they’re having trouble meditating, she always asks how their digestion has been lately. It only stands to reason that you’ll have trouble gliding lightly into transcendence when your guts are struggling to churn through a sausage calzone, a pound of buffalo wings and half a coconut cream pie. Which is why they don’t serve that kind of stuff here. The food at the Ashram is vegetarian, light and healthy. But still delicious. Which is why it’s difficult for me not to wolf it down like a starving orphan. Plus, meals are served buffet-style, and it never has been easy for me to resist taking a second or third turn at-bat when beautiful food is just lying out there in the open, smelling good and costing nothing.

So I’m sitting at the dinner table all by myself, making an effort to restrain my fork, when I see a man walk over with his dinner tray, looking for an open chair. I nod to him that he is welcome to join me. I haven’t seen this guy around here yet. He must be a new arrival. The stranger’s got a cool, ain’t-no-big-hurry kind of walk, and he moves with the authority of a border town sheriff, or maybe a lifelong high-rolling poker player. He looks like he’s in his fifties, but walks like he’s lived a few centuries longer than that. He’s got white hair and a white beard and a plaid flannel shirt. Wide shoulders and giant hands that look like they could do some damage, but a totally relaxed face.

He sits down across from me and drawls, “Man, they got mosquitoes ’round this place big enough to rape a chicken.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Richard from Texas has arrived.

44

Among the many jobs that Richard from Texas has held in his life— and I know I’m leaving a lot of them out—are oil-field worker; eighteen-wheeler truck driver; the first authorized dealer of Birkenstocks in the Dakotas; sack-shaker in a midwestern landfill (I’m sorry, but I really don’t have time to explain what a “sack-shaker” is); highway construction worker; used-car salesman; soldier in Vietnam; “commodities broker” (that commodity generally being Mexican narcotics); junkie and alcoholic (if you can call this a profession); then reformed junkie and alcoholic (a much more respectable profession); hippie farmer on a commune; radio voiceover announcer; and, finally, successful dealer in high-end medical equipment (until his marriage fell apart and he gave the whole business to his ex and got left “scratchin’ my broke white ass again”). Now he renovates old houses in Austin.

“Never did have much of a career path,” he says. “Never could do anything but the hustle.”

Richard from Texas is not a guy who worries about a lot of stuff. I wouldn’t call him a neurotic person, no sir. But I am a bit neurotic, and that’s why I’ve come to adore him. Richard’s presence at this Ashram becomes my great and amusing sense of security. His giant ambling confidence hushes down all my inherent nervousness and reminds me that everything really is going to be OK. (And if not OK, then at least comic.) Remember the cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn? Well, Richard is kind of like that, and I become his chatty little sidekick, the Chickenhawk. In Richard’s own words: “Me and Groceries, we steady be laughin’ the whole damn time.”

Groceries.

That’s the nickname Richard has given me. He bestowed it upon me the first night we met, when he noticed how much I could eat. I tried to defend myself (“I was purposefully eating with discipline and intention!”) but the name stuck.

Maybe Richard from Texas doesn’t seem like a typical Yogi. Though my time in India has cautioned me against deciding what a typical Yogi is. (Don’t get me started on the dairy farmer from rural Ireland I met here the other day, or the former nun from South Africa.) Richard came to this Yoga through an ex-girlfriend, who drove him up from Texas to the Ashram in New York to hear the Guru speak. Richard says, “I thought the Ashram was the weirdest thing I ever saw, and I was wondering where the room was where you have to give ’em all your money and turn over the deed to your house and car, but that never did happen . . .”

After that experience, which was about ten years ago, Richard found himself praying all the time. His prayer was always the same. He kept begging God, “Please, please, please open my heart.” That was all he wanted—an open heart. And he would always finish the prayer for an open heart by asking God, “And please send me a sign when the event has occurred.” Now he says, recollecting that time, “Be careful what you pray for, Groceries, cuz you just might get it.” After a few months of praying constantly for an open heart, what do you think Richard got? That’s right—emergency open-heart surgery. His chest was literally cracked open, his ribs cleaved away from each other to allow some daylight to finally reach into his heart, as though God were saying, “How’s
that
for a sign?” So now Richard is always cautious with his prayers, he tells me. “Whenever I pray for anything these days, I always wrap it up by saying, ‘Oh, and God? Please be gentle with me, OK?’”

“What should I do about my meditation practice?” I ask Richard one day, as he’s watching me scrub the temple floors. (He’s lucky— he works in the kitchen, doesn’t even have to show up there until an hour before dinner. But he likes watching me scrub the temple floors. He thinks it’s funny.)

“Why do you have to do anything about it, Groceries?”

“Because it stinks.”

“Says who?”

“I can’t get my mind to sit still.”

“Remember what the Guru teaches us—if you sit down with the pure intention to meditate, whatever happens next is none of your business. So why are you judging your experience?”

“Because what’s happening in my meditations
cannot
be the point of this Yoga.”

“Groceries, baby—you got no
idea
what’s happening in there.”

“I never see visions, I never have transcendent experiences—”

“You wanna see pretty colors? Or you wanna know the truth about yourself? What’s your intention?”

“All I seem to do is argue with myself when I try to meditate.”

“That’s just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what your ego
does.
It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you’re flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.”

“But how does that serve me?”

“It
doesn’t
serve you. Your ego’s job isn’t to serve you. Its only job is to keep itself in power. And right now, your ego’s scared to death cuz it’s about to get downsized. You keep up this spiritual path, baby, and that bad boy’s days are numbered. Pretty soon your ego will be out of work, and your heart’ll be making all the decisions. So your ego’s fighting for its life, playing with your mind, trying to assert its authority, trying to keep you cornered off in a holding pen away from the rest of the universe. Don’t listen to it.”

“How do you not listen to it?”

“Ever try to take a toy away from a toddler? They don’t like that, do they? They start kicking and screaming. Best way to take a toy away from a toddler is distract the kid, give him something else to play with. Divert his attention. Instead of trying to forcefully take thoughts out of your mind, give your mind something better to play with. Something healthier.”

“Like what?”

“Like love, Groceries. Like pure divine love.”

45

Going into that meditation cave every day is supposed to be this time of divine communion, but I’ve been walking in there lately flinching the way my dog used to flinch when she walked into the vet’s office (knowing that no matter how friendly everybody might be acting now, this whole thing was going to end with a sharp poke with a medical instrument). But after my last conversation with Richard from Texas, I’m trying a new approach this morning. I sit down to meditate and I say to my mind, “Listen—I understand you’re a little frightened. But I promise, I’m not trying to annihilate you. I’m just trying to give you a place to rest. I love you.”

The other day a monk told me, “The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That’s where you need to go.”

I’m trying a different mantra, too. It’s one I’ve had luck with in the past. It’s simple, just two syllables:

Ham-sa.

In Sanskrit it means “I am That.”

The Yogis say that
Ham-sa
is the most natural mantra, the one we are all given by God before birth. It is the sound of our own breath.
Ham
on the inhale,
sa
on the exhale. (
Ham
, by the way, is pronounced softly, openly, like
hahhhm
, not like the meat you put on a sandwich. And
sa
rhymes with “Ahhhh . . .”) As long as we live, every time we breathe in or out, we are repeating this mantra. I am That. I am divine, I am with God, I am an expression of God, I am not separate, I am not alone, I am not this limited illusion of an individual. I’ve always found
Ham-sa
easy and relaxing. Easier to meditate with than
Om Namah Shivaya
, the—how would you say this—“official” mantra of this Yoga. But I was talking to this monk the other day and he told me to go ahead and use
Ham-sa
if it helped my meditation. He said, “Meditate on whatever causes a revolution in your mind.”

So I’ll sit with it here today.

Ham-sa.

I am That.

Thoughts come, but I don’t pay much attention to them, other than to say to them in an almost motherly manner, “Oh, I know
you
jokers . . . go outside and play now . . . Mommy’s listening to God.”
Ham-sa.

I am That.

I fall asleep for a while. (Or whatever. In meditation, you can never really be sure if what you think is sleep is actually sleep; sometimes it’s just another level of consciousness.) When I awake, or whatever, I can feel this soft blue electrical energy pulsing through my body, in waves. It’s a little alarming, but also amazing. I don’t know what to do, so I just speak internally to this energy. I say to it, “I believe in you,” and it magnifies, volumizes, in response. It’s frighteningly powerful now, like a kidnapping of the senses. It’s humming up from the base of my spine. My neck feels like it wants to stretch and twist, so I let it, and then I’m sitting there in the strangest position—perched upright like a good Yogi, but with my left ear pressed hard against my left shoulder. I don’t know why my head and neck want to do this, but I’m not going to argue with them; they are insistent. The pounding blue energy keeps pitching through my body, and I can hear a sort of thrumming sound in my ears, and it’s so mighty now that I actually can’t deal with it anymore. It scares me so much that I say to it, “I’m not ready yet!” and snap open my eyes. It all goes away. I’m back in a room again, back in my surroundings. I look at my watch. I’ve been here—or somewhere—for almost an hour.

I am panting, literally panting.