BLUE EYED HINDUS
Last summer I saw Heather Graham on the cover of Time magazine. She was there because apparently when it comes to meditating, she is the total shit. The article had a lot to say about the psychological and health benefits of meditating. Coincidentally, around the same time I saw the Time cover I had been thinking about starting daily meditation myself. But I had thought that meditation wasn’t really for me. Part of me was afraid of becoming a humorless, boring blank-canvas personality. I’m not a vegan; I don’t own any drawstring pants. I eat meat and love caffeine. (I am probably enjoying both as you read this!) I like GAP ads and the drug-use montages on the “E! True Hollywood Story.” I am part of the problem. My brain has been soaked in the brine of pop culture and I have acquired ADD. I am scattered and have to cop to not paying attention to you when you talk to me. But I felt it was time for a change and thought meditating would help me simplify. I could “ohm” away the idiocy of modern living I’d latched onto. I started by sitting in silence on my floor for ten minutes a day, but then decided to also go out in the field and learn more.
My first stop was the Self Realization Fellowship on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. It was hard deciding what to wear because I was meeting people for drinks afterwards. Getting dressed to go out in LA is tough enough as it is. You have to look cool but like you don’t care. The standby for me has become this funky retro T-shirt but my Rolling Stones’ tongue-logo seemed inappropriate for a holy place. I finally settled on something more conservative and went to the SRF shrine on Sunset Blvd., which stuck out like a shrine on Sunset Blvd.
The valet asked me if I was going to stay for the full three hours. I felt cornered. “Uh… no.” Come on, of course not. “Then park behind those cars,” he said, shaming me by pointing to cars whose owners were staying the full three hours and it would be okay to block.
I got out of my car and walked to a garden where people were preparing. Their spastic motions had a “tai-chi in the psych ward” quality. I was leery of seeming like an outsider so I attempted to do what they were, acting out a mélange of yoga, tai-chi and tae-bo moves. I felt like a fraud. I noticed people entering the shrine and followed them. A woman on a sitar sounding vaguely Joni Mitchell-esque warbled some new age lyrics and Quietfest kicked off. It was brutal. After half an hour my mind was completely anxious and rebelling. No thought was too trivial to obsess on. I left after the first hour and am still amazed that people stayed there to meditate for three full hours. I wouldn’t have been more impressed if they had started doing trapeze aerials.
The following week, I went to see Amma, an Indian guru people in India travel for hours just to be hugged by. Fortunately I only had to travel 20 minutes up the 101 freeway to the Woodland Hills Marriot where she was hugging people and leading a group meditation. When I got there, I encountered a lot of pretty people in white linen – what I call the “Blue Eyed Hindus.” They’re the people whose life-changing spiritual epiphanies coincide with Madonna’s. I met up with my friend who had invited me and we compared the numbers they’d given us at the door. “With these numbers we’ll be lucky to be hugged by her by 3 A.M.,” he said. It was only 7:45. I tried to get into it, but after a while (thirty minutes) I stopped kidding myself and left. I felt sort of defeated by my hasty departure, but later on, reading “Autobiography of a Yogi,” I learned the word “swami” literally means “at one with self.” By owning my fidgetiness and total disinterest rather than pretending to find the night’s proceedings so profound, wasn’t that in fact swami-like? Maybe the “self” I need to be at one with isn’t some idealized, ethereal person floating out there but the awful person I’ve always been.
I still meditate for ten minutes every day. While I still can’t completely stop thinking in my addled way, almost every time I sit down on my carpet to center myself, there is a split second where I “drop the mind” and feel a flickering high - free of worry, stress, other people’s crap and my own. My friend has a small Buddha statue where Buddha is drinking cappuccino and talking on his cell phone. It’s sort of like that.
My first stop was the Self Realization Fellowship on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. It was hard deciding what to wear because I was meeting people for drinks afterwards. Getting dressed to go out in LA is tough enough as it is. You have to look cool but like you don’t care. The standby for me has become this funky retro T-shirt but my Rolling Stones’ tongue-logo seemed inappropriate for a holy place. I finally settled on something more conservative and went to the SRF shrine on Sunset Blvd., which stuck out like a shrine on Sunset Blvd.
The valet asked me if I was going to stay for the full three hours. I felt cornered. “Uh… no.” Come on, of course not. “Then park behind those cars,” he said, shaming me by pointing to cars whose owners were staying the full three hours and it would be okay to block.
I got out of my car and walked to a garden where people were preparing. Their spastic motions had a “tai-chi in the psych ward” quality. I was leery of seeming like an outsider so I attempted to do what they were, acting out a mélange of yoga, tai-chi and tae-bo moves. I felt like a fraud. I noticed people entering the shrine and followed them. A woman on a sitar sounding vaguely Joni Mitchell-esque warbled some new age lyrics and Quietfest kicked off. It was brutal. After half an hour my mind was completely anxious and rebelling. No thought was too trivial to obsess on. I left after the first hour and am still amazed that people stayed there to meditate for three full hours. I wouldn’t have been more impressed if they had started doing trapeze aerials.
The following week, I went to see Amma, an Indian guru people in India travel for hours just to be hugged by. Fortunately I only had to travel 20 minutes up the 101 freeway to the Woodland Hills Marriot where she was hugging people and leading a group meditation. When I got there, I encountered a lot of pretty people in white linen – what I call the “Blue Eyed Hindus.” They’re the people whose life-changing spiritual epiphanies coincide with Madonna’s. I met up with my friend who had invited me and we compared the numbers they’d given us at the door. “With these numbers we’ll be lucky to be hugged by her by 3 A.M.,” he said. It was only 7:45. I tried to get into it, but after a while (thirty minutes) I stopped kidding myself and left. I felt sort of defeated by my hasty departure, but later on, reading “Autobiography of a Yogi,” I learned the word “swami” literally means “at one with self.” By owning my fidgetiness and total disinterest rather than pretending to find the night’s proceedings so profound, wasn’t that in fact swami-like? Maybe the “self” I need to be at one with isn’t some idealized, ethereal person floating out there but the awful person I’ve always been.
I still meditate for ten minutes every day. While I still can’t completely stop thinking in my addled way, almost every time I sit down on my carpet to center myself, there is a split second where I “drop the mind” and feel a flickering high - free of worry, stress, other people’s crap and my own. My friend has a small Buddha statue where Buddha is drinking cappuccino and talking on his cell phone. It’s sort of like that.
