"I have a lot of stress from working hard and everyone tells me that if I do meditation it will help with stress. What is Meditation anyway?”, a newcomer asked me after her first ever yoga class last Monday. I was about to open my mouth and utter the most unoriginal few words in sanskrit that have ever been spoken by almost every yoga teacher in the world or written by some revered scientific figure, I stopped (thank God that I did).
I looked out the window and saw the furious car lights on the street that reminded me of desperately hungry eyes of a hyena pack chasing their prey. I saw a lawyers exclamatory, white toothed face on the back of a public bus; face that guaranteed us a million bucks if used his services. The best of all, I remembered that there was a rumor going around about a freak show kindergarten play called 'the presidential debate' that was supposed to air that same evening.
I smiled at her in a subtle demeaning expression as if she wouldn’t understand what I was about to tell her and I said, “Stress does not come from working too hard, driving long distance for work in traffic, watching the news, paying too many bills or dealing with hallucinating neighbors. Stress only comes when we persuade ourselves to believe that the traffic shouldn’t be there - when we take traffic personally. Stress only comes when we unknowingly believe the false to be true because we never put the time and energy into figuring out what’s not true. We put our time and energy into false ideas and believe them to be true. Meditation is the deliberate daily exercise in discriminating between the true and the false and renouncing the false.
She understood me very well and decided to redirect her time and energy to finding out what’s not true and took on a serious meditation practice.
What a brave woman! Welcome to real yoga my dear.
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