Meditations on Meditation

If you're counting down, it's officially about five weeks until our departure to Switzerland. The problem with moving--and especially this move--is that even though there are a zillion things to do, you can't do many in advance so that all the activity is crammed into, say, the final week. All you can do to prepare is stress about it or perhaps...not stress about it.

To that end, there's a popular local Roscoe Village vegetarian Indian brunch restaurant/bookstore with sari-wearing waitresses and lots of guru portraits--does that sound funky yet?--that's hosting a series of four free meditation classes. They've been running neighborhood fliers with the first class starting this week--perfect timing!-- so I decided to attend just to check things out (Stephanie left town on Wednesday to visit her folks in Minneapolis, thereby craftily avoiding a decision about joining me).

So why the interest? For one, I had an old Indian work colleague who meditated every morning and swore by it and he was a pretty even-keeled guy. And I must admit an interest in Eastern religion, which like it or not goes hand in hand with meditation because although meditation is indeed a technique for achieving focus and balance, it's all based in "spirituality". And aren't you curious what those 7 billion Buddhists and Hindus are up to? So I like to apply the 80/20 rule--hopefully spend 20% effort to attain 80% of the benefit of meditation, without wearing orange robes or going all "Sgt. Pepper" on everyone.

So the first class went pretty well; there were about a dozen participants, all of us without shoes, with a Caucasian teacher from the Chicago suburbs named Sedanta (probably not his birthname, eh?). In short, during 2-1/2 hours we breathed incense and listened to some sitar music and focused really hard on a candle and then some roses. We only truly "meditated" for 15 minutes because it apparently takes practice--like a lifetime of practice--before you're really good where your eyes roll back in your head and you can hear the Big Bang and you miss people calling you for dinner. Of course I'm joking, actually the class was pretty interesting and meditating appears to be a good way to escape for a few minutes and relieve some stress, albeit with a little practice.

So we'll see how I feel after three more classes. Class One mostly made me hungry. And I need to practice five minutes a day as homework. I tried yesterday morning but Hobbes didn't appreciate it when I started chanting my mantra; he thought I should be feeding him more breakfast instead and began nose-prodding me which ruined my concentration. Just a few more years of practice, I suppose...