The ROI on Meditation

Prologue

People often ask me, 'What do you get from meditation?'

It's a question I could answer in a million ways but at the heart of it all, I would say, 'Meditation opens me to receive and to expand beyond existing limitations. It helps me experience myself as pure light, infinite intelligence and love.'

Now that sounds so new-age and abstract doesn't it. I woke up this morning with this blog flowing through my awareness. Allow me to take you back in time, a few times.

July 2006, Mumbai, India

It is about 6:00 p.m. I am in Mumbai in a Taxi on the way to the train station. I have skipped meals in my workaholic mode and get myself a huge club sandwich which I'm gulfing down before I get to the madness of Mumbai's trains. The traffic is incredibly slow. I feel triedness creep up and ask the taxi if he will take me to my home. He agrees. I finish eating and now start calling friends on my cellphone. I can't get through to anyone. My fiance, my friends, my mum. The network is jammed. Traffic is excruciatingly beyond sluggishly slow.

Suddenly I get a call. It's from the mum of one of my students. She asks if I'm ok and where I am? I ask why? She tells me there has been a chain of bomb blasts across the city, one at the station I was headed to. She asks me where I am and tells me to come to her home. I agree. I'm petrified. My dad almost died in a bomb blast once. His story was chilling. I realize if I hadn't bought that sandwich I would have been at the station at the time of the blast.

I make it to her house. She gives me PJs. I bathe, eat and we talk. She and her husband ask their cooks to make lots of food. We will go to the train station and feed or help anyone who needs it they say. I think, how noble they are, how courageous. I say I'll go along, but really I'm in shock and very frightened. Thankfully the cops don't allow civillians there.

I had been introduced to meditation but did not have a consistent meditation practice.

August 2017, Barcelona, Spain

We are on the train from Sevilla to Barcelona. It is the day after the Las Ramblas attacks. I wasn't sure it was a good idea to go to Barcelona, given we had a 5 year old with us. My husband thought it was very safe. He said, ' It can't get safer. The higest security you will ever get. Why let this get in the way. We should go.' So I agreed.

In the train we were seated next to another family of 3. The father was a policeman. They spoke very minimal English. I spoke decent Spanish. I was translating both ways and we were talking. Both their daughter and ours knew nothing of each others languages and were playing X and O's. The tension in the train was palpable.

We got to Barcelona and to our hotel, a few streets from Las Ramblas. The tension and the aftertaste of terror was heavy. It was so familiar to me, being from Mumbai and having grown up seeing Hindu Muslim riots in the street, multiple terror attacks, two of which I missed by a hairline.

But this was differrent. I was a mother now and it was my responsibility to keep this little one safe. I noticed feeling very vigilant and afraid. As we walked the sidewalk, I kept looking at the cars passing by, watching their trajectory and worrying they were going to go off course and slam us and my little one to death.

We went back to out hotel room that night. I couldn't sleep. Something had to shift. I really wanted to enjoy Barca. Sagrada Familia, the trip to Montserrat to see the Black Virgin Mary.

The next morning I woke up, showered and sat to meditate. Out of nowhere an idea and with it peace and even excitement filled me. I had this 'vision' in meditation. I felt the hearts of the special forces and police that were keeping Barca safe now. I felt the tension of their families. (The policeman's wife on the train had given me a good taste of her life). I felt my tension that my daughter had picked on, that made her cling to me and ask to go 'home' the previous evening. I would go so far to say I even tuned in to the fear of the terrorists at being caught. It was chilling.

I felt it all and then peace came, like sunshine, like early dawn, full and fully illuminating. I saw something in a flash. I came out of meditation, picked up my phone and asked my friend who was the trade head of the Spanish Consul in Mumbai how to say ' Thank you for keeping us safe' in Catalan. He typed back. My daughter woke up. We always carried colours and papers and stickers etc when we travel with our child. I cut them into little notes. I wrote on them. She drew hearts and whatever she wanted.

We put them in our little bag and went off for our 'Barcelona Dragons and Dungeons' treasure hunt tour. I was no longer afraid. I was excited. Everytime we saw a policeman or policewoman or a group of them, Sivaanaa would go up to them and hand them the little note. Some would look suspcious. Some would look irritated. They probably hadn't slept all night. Others said they didn't have tourist information. But this little one would just look at them wide eyed and stand holding her note with outstretched hands. Almost everyone shifted.

I'll share the one embedded into my cellular memory. This big burly policeman reads her note. He has tears in his eyes. His colleagues take the note from him and read it. He looks at Sivaanaa and says 'Abraco' (hug). He looks at me because she looks at me. I smile. He gets down on his knees and gives my little girl a hug. Its long and sweet and simple. We all have tears. We thank them and keep on.

At 4 point something, my daughter is now more interested in handing notes, than the dragons and dungeons treasure hunt I scoured the internet for hours to find.

Look at her smile at the security forces. Thanks to my husband for always taking photos and capturing moments I'm lost in.

The tour guide and the small group we are with also get into this. Everyone finds reason to smile.

Epilogue

I could tell you meditation changed my neurochemistry and brain regions that were activated. I could tell you the hugs increased coherence and oxytocin. But you see it is something way beyond that. Meditation allows me to access Consciousness, the field of all possibility. Without effort or choice that 'idea' came to me in nano seconds and life changed after that.

At this time I had been meditating daily or almost daily for almost 8 years.

When I started, meditation was the my worst nightmare. My biggest failure. (I was a top of my class student who didn't understand failure). It was excruciating. Somehow in the stubbornness of not wanting to fail and hating the incessant depleting thoughts in my head, I persisted.

It is 2025 now. Last night I had dinner with a journalist who has been in war torn areas writing humanitarian stories. A few days ago India went to war with Pakistan. She asked me how I'm feeling. I said I am aware but not overwhelmed. She said how does it not affect you? I quoted the words of the Dalai Llama, 'I feel it all, but the peace is more.' That is the ROI of meditation. I Beyond anything you can get from financial investing. Ofcourse, my experience may be different if I'm in the thick of things, so I'm not claiming any enlightenment. I haven't arrived anywhere. Meditation gives me access to 'the peace that surpasseth all understanding' and I'm not special. That peace is for all of us.

I'm remembering today, another gift of meditation. A call to record Yoga Nidra in English and Hindi, a few months before Covid hit. We went to India and a beautiful angel called Gurdeep gave me her professional studio and sound guys and her time to record both nidra's. Following guidance in meditation, I put them on business cards, as QR codes and handed a few thousand out. Here's a picture of my daughter handing one to an army solider at Delhi Airport. We had a whole conversation about PTSD. He wrote me later to thank me for the nidra. It was helping him sleep.

Stay open hearted and your mind will be open and you will find meditation or whatever is needed for you to 'serve'. Because the truth is, its not service, you receive way way way more than you give. There is no ego, only humility beyond the idea of it should look or feel like. When you realise what you have access to, what you are, what we all are....infinite intelligence, love expressing itself in the form of a human with a name...everything changes.