An Experiment in Meditation

I've been thinking about meditating.

My mother started meditating in the 70s and enlisted my older sisters: her guru gave them all mantras. It was the Californian answer to our modern Ridalin and Xanax I think, because while it's meant a lot to my mom since then, I think she was also looking for some way to soothe my break-neck sister. The guru said it would help.

I know it's made sense for my mom, but I remember her telling me the entire experiment was a disaster for my sisters. It's hard to get kids to sit for five minutes in front of a brownie, so I get it.

I only heard about the mantras and the guru years after it happened. We'd moved cross country, and in the years that followed, I'd grown old enough to hear stories of the life that they lived there. I was always so jealous! I wanted a guru too! Why didn't I get a guru?

I wanted to be just as alive as they were then. When they laughed and reminisced about things that were less than shadows for me, I made up stories about how I "remembered" things too. They humored me. I was eight, or maybe nine, but I knew even then that we were all in on the joke.

At some point -- I don't know when exactly, I might have been 11 when it first happened -- I think I started meditating. I don't know exactly how best to explain this, but there were moments, stretched over years, when I would very purposefully say a word over and over and over and then...

It would feel like laughter and crying all at the same time and also, in one brief moment, like I was meeting myself.

I can't explain it any better than that. I felt like I was meeting myself and it just filled me with immense happiness to be connected, for one quick second, with me. I was face to face with me and it was nothing but joy.

(I wonder if this sounds horribly narcissistic.)

From 11 to about 20, I could go there, with effort.

I have no idea what ended it, though sometimes I think that falling in love with my husband meant something. We lose ourselves when we fall in love -- in a good way. Same goes for having kids.

Now that our love affair has mellowed and my children have grown up a bit, I've started thinking about that weird magic I once had.

So, I've decided that I'm going to try it again. (And sometimes I think writing has been my lame attempt to do it without knowing...) I'm going to say that word, do that kind of mediation that I co-opted from my mom and my sisters' experience (that I was never a part of), and I'm going to see:

if magic can happen again.

Stay tuned...