A month after I started meditating, I went home to visit my mother. This was back in the day—only a few years after the Beatles visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, and caused a storm of mostly satirical press commentary. Meditation was still considered an activity for eccentrics and hippies, and my secular humanist mother found my insistence on sitting every morning hilarious at best. In the mornings, while I was sitting in meditation, she would walk past my closed door every few minutes and call out, “Aren’t you done yet?”
I rolled with it on Saturday. But on Sunday, when she knocked on the door for the third time in twenty minutes, I lost it. Bursting with anger, I got up from my seat, opened the door, looked at my mother and said, “Can’t you leave me alone?” And my mother smiled a ‘Gotcha!” kind of smile and said, “I knew you hadn’t become a saint.”
That was the moment when I realized that effective meditation practice is not just what you do when you’re sitting on the mat. It’s also about how you react when your loved ones (and not so loved ones) do all those things that have historically annoyed or frustrated you. It’s not that meditation will turn you into a saint overnight. (The fact that you haven’t turned into a saint is one of the best reasons to keep on meditating!) Yet, one of the gifts that meditation can give you is the ability to use certain inner skills—skills like self-inquiry, substituting a loving thought for an angry one, gentleness, and especially the insight to notice a reactive emotion before you act on it—in difficult moments.
Meditation is for living. The inner practice is meant to radiate outward until your whole life becomes an ongoing training in living from your own center. As the intrinsic alchemy of meditation works…