Scenario: Saturday 6 a.m. Boston. January, 2005. Cold.
It’ll be nice to have a week off from work and to get some sun.
That was the phrase that played through my mind as I was about to head down to Florida to catch a cruise.
It was just another day though, really. I mean, I was still taking my thoughts with me, except it was now to a different location. If you asked me on a cruise whether I liked my job, what my chances of getting into medical school were, I would have still been a little depressed in thinking about these questions. I remember thinking to myself:
“Why do I feel like I’m having a mid-life crisis at 24!? I’m too young for this!”
I had graduated college that previous May and, at that time, I had finished up my senior year in which I was able to reflect a lot about life. I was writing a lot, reading a lot, and I suppose just being much more introspective. The Buddhism courses I took were phenomenal. For the first time, I started to view my mind not just as something that is fixed in terms of its tendencies, but as something more flexible and plastic. Being mindful of my thoughts was perhaps the toughest task I had ever attempted in my life. But, it was so incredible. I love to learn and so watching these thoughts offered me a chance to learn on a moment to moment basis what was really happening inside.
I remember the professor asking us: “How often do we feel like we are held captive by emotions?” I wanted to raise my hand, but I first looked around and saw that everyone else was looking around as well with their hands down. “It takes awareness to realize that we are not in control of our emotions.” This was a big realization for me in college.
And so since graduating, I had sort of fallen out of practice of reflecting on how things were going. How am I living my life right now? What are my interactions like with people? What am I learning about life on a daily basis? Starting work in Boston as a research assistant at a hospital after graduation, I found that I had not been creating that same space for myself to investigate my emotions..
Nevertheless, that early frigid Saturday morning, I boarded the plane, convincing myself that I would have a good time. I sat down and did what I always liked to do – keep myself busy. I needed something to intellectually conquer.
The man next to me also pulled out a book. The words “The Supreme Yoga” caught my eye. Then the internal dialogue began...yeah, that one yoga class I took at Boston Sports Club was pretty amazing. That’s pretty cool he’s reading a book about yoga.
So, we started to talk.
I was telling him how interested I was in Neuroscience and applying modern scientific methods to understanding techniques like yoga, meditation, and breathing, but didn’t yet have much experience with these techniques themselves. While talking to him though, I felt so uncomfortable. I was sputtering all of these words and I was in such a state of chaos! Here I was inquiring into the nature of these techniques and wishing to validate them, but yet I had no experience of them and my mind was in a state which was the exact opposite of what these techniques attempted to accomplish! What irony!
I had so much guilt and regret about past events in my life and so much anxiety and fear about the future, too. I was literally a pendulum swaying back and forth, with my mind living either in the past or the future.
The peace behind his words was so new to me. Everyone around me at work was so stressed out that it just became normal to be like that.
I wanted whatever it was that he had. I wanted that peace. I wanted his disposition.
He wrote down for me a few things on a small piece of paper which I promised to myself I wouldn’t lose. It had 3 phrases on it in neatly printed in black ink: “Art of Living course, Sudarshan Kriya, Yoga Vasistha.”
He then closed his eyes to meditate.
I couldn’t help but watch him. What was he doing? What is meditation? Was he really sleeping? Did he just close his eyes so he wouldn’t have to talk to me?
As we parted ways in Florida, I thanked him and told him I’d email him after I took the course.
On the cruise, that whole week, all I could think about was this course and my interactions with him. What timing! I had been looking for something like this!
Of course, the cruise had no internet and so the second I got back to Boston, I signed up for the course which happened to be one week later down the street at MIT. The rest is history. I emailed my friend on the plane, an Art of Living teacher from New York City, and eventually met up with him many times thereafter during courses and satsangs.
I now write this, a few years later, as an Art of Living teacher. The intervening years, the transformation contained therein, is the subject of another post. All I’ll leave you with for now is that the phrase ‘the state of your mind determines the quality of your life’ is infinitely deep because the process of investigating the mind and understanding one’s true nature is a journey that is ongoing. The more you investigate the nature of the mind, the more transformation that is possible. The more this becomes a priority, the faster the transformation!
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