Monday musings - Meditation
jupinderjit singh
The passing week I experienced meditation for the first time in my life. In few days at Osho Nisarga, at Shilla near Dharamshala under the sky-kissing Dhauladhar mountains and by the side of a slow flowing rivulet,I had a soul enriching experience and fun moments with meditation, wild laughter, gibberish talk, dancing, jumping around, screaming, making faces, enjoying moments of silence and eventually crying profusely and someone's farting. Yes, you heard the last word right. It is indeed farting- breaking wind.
Regarding Yoga, I have been confused between different techniques of Yoga in vogue. There is the Ramdev Yoga, the Shilpa Shetty Yoga, the artistic Yoga and the Fire by Breath Yoga techniques. There are many others as well. So, not knowing which is good, I made a 15 minutes capsule of select yoga exercises from all those. It gave me good results. Once after doing the course, I went in a trance for about nine minutes not knowing where I was. A fountain had erupted at the point where the neck meets the back- the sushmana nadi. When I returned to consciousness, I was scared. Though I felt light, I never tried it again.
So, with this little background, I went to the meditation camp. Hoping that a soul stirring moment awaited me. As they say, anything can happen to you. You can have a peep into the real you. You will not levitate but you will sure be feeling less gravity, less attachment to earth. I had waves of questions, feelings, emotions developing within me for some time now. At times, I felt molten lava conjuring up inside me ready to explode and then at other times, some expanding icy glaciers choked my breath. Peace, tranquility was what I aspired for.
But as has happened with me usually, I either fell just short of achieving my aim or something funny happened, that took away all depth and seriousness from the experience. God knows why but invariably I was caught in one of the most ironic situations where I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
So there I was doing the prayer meditation. It involved standing uptight with legs shoulder wide and arms raised over head; hands stretched up as if plucking the stars from the sky. One has to pull energy from stars, planets, souls or any source from the Universe, then bending on the knees, prostrate reverentially and transfer the energy to the Mother Earth. The energy or electricity passing through the body makes one the medium between the powers in the sky and the earth. As it passes through us, it cleanses us. It can trigger range of response from the body, we were fore warned.
I didn’t take the warning seriously but by the time I transferred the energy fourth time to mother earth, I suddenly had a lump building in my throat. I was surprised. And then it happened strongly at the next and eventually the flood gates opened as I continued. I just could not stop myself. I suddenly realised I was so lonely, so alone, and meaninglessness in worldly achievements that the heart cried. Tears that flowed out were so thick that the first few took eternity to flow beyond the cheeks. Some even dried there only till, it was like, the glaciers melted and streams after streams flowed out. The more I tried to weep quietly, the more I howled.
And then I heard that disgusting sound. An old guy next to me in the dark room farted at that precise moment. What the F? I thought. He did it again and again, in small and long doses, in different sounds. Yukkk, I felt. Give me a break man, I am crying here. Can't you stop it for a while. He didnt budge. Show some respect, buddy, someone is in tears, I wanted to say. He went on and on. I wondered which planet he had approached to draw that kind of energy. He was so pent up.
I laughed as I shared it later with my friends at the meditation centre! It dawned amidst laughters as an irony of life. We go about doing our stuff even if someone is in misery close by. Or that God tells us the whole futility of shedding tears in his own inimical way.
