Sit-In Settles Conflict

The West Australian, Monday February 15 1999

Maneesha James

Hippies did it first, now straitlaced mums and dads do it. Maneesha James meditates on the rise and rise of meditation. 

Funny, looking back, how positively fringe meditation was once thought to be. Thirty years ago it was regarded by the general population as just one of several anti-social affectations – together with long hair, unlimited hash and free love. The fact that it was an Eastern import and that young people were turning to an entirely different culture for answers was clearly an 'up yours' to the establishment. It was thought to be a cop-out from everyday reality. You were required to tangle yourself up in strange positions, gaze at your belly button or mindlessly drone strange-sound-ing words.

Understandable, then, if people did not see meditation as a way of living in everyday reality more consciously, more totally. Way back then, it was anathema to a society whose message was: "Don't just sit there – do something!" 

Thirty years ago, meditation was the last thing on my mind – me, such an obsessive doer! – when I decided to hotfoot it to London to pursue a post-graduate course in psychiatric nursing. After that, in rapid success-ion, I found myself beating pillows in encounter groups, watching my breath at a Buddhist retreat in Scotland, opening my heart at a Sufi commune in Sussex, and trying to figure out my 'chief characteristic' at a Gurdjieff group on Haverstock Hill. Clearly, with no idea of settling down like my siblings, who had done the right thing' and were married with children, I had established myself as the black sheep of the family. "When are you going to stop all this soul-searching and come back?" letters from home had pleaded. But by this time I had discovered meditation and, in a way that was hard to explain, I felt I actually had come home. That I spent the next 19 years in India, under the guidance of a meditation master, put the parental seal on my being plumb crazy (though my mother did concede: "At least you are happy").

Fast forward 24 years. Back in the West, I find a lot of water has gone down the Swan River. The 'M' word no longer tends to elicit an 'oh-god-when-are-you-going-to-get-up-to-speed?' sort of sigh from friends and relatives. In fact, perfectly respectable people are passionately embracing a practice that was once the domain of hirsute dropouts and deranged daughters. Why? 

Last year, on a plane to New York I found an article in the New York Times explaining that, for the wealthy elite in the US, the status symbol is no longer how many holiday homes or yachts they might have, or where their kids go to college, but the development of their inner qualities. Religious retreats are big in the US right now. Business executives want nothing more of a weekend than to escape to a monastery: not to immerse themselves in religious rites and rituals but to 'go inside' themselves. To meditate. Temporarily freed from their various roles and the demands that go with them – mobile phones are verboten – they are willing to suffer the austerities of monastic life for the luxury of just being.

As the new millennium approaches, traditional religion is just not delivering the goods. Old beliefs and dogmas do not fit in a world that values direct, individual experience. Perhaps in a last-ditch bid to salvage themselves, some clergy are openly incorporating meditation into their ministrations. Supermodel Christy Turlington, who vows, "my goal is to be self-realised," describes herself as a Catholic but is also a regular meditator. For others, the appeal of meditation is purely secular, a means to material success. Some eight years ago the German magazine, Capital, ran an article that read: " 'Meditation will play a far bigger role in the future,' state 60% of Germany's top leaders. The future management does not need new strategies but a better consciousness. Consciousness will be the strongest factor of success: if the con-sciousness is wrong, even the best of strategies won't do." Since then, businesses throughout the US, Europe and Australia are, in the name of stress management, having their employees learn how to turn on, tune in and drop the lot.

Meditation's health benefits are well documented – an improved immune system functioning, lowered blood pressure and better pain management, for starters. Californian cardiologist Dean Ornish's regimen for his cardiac disease patients includes meditation. Researchers conclude his methods do significantly reduce arterial blockage without the need for drugs. The art of going in is being offered in worlds as far apart as the Pentagon and fashion. Sportsmen are on to the act, too: add awareness to it and tennis reincarnates as 'Zennis.' One of Australia's Airwalk advertisements features a saffron-robed, cropped-haired Buddhist monk in sports shoes.

Tampax offers its users 'inner peace', for "unlike yoga, you don't have to be a contortionist to find the correct position." Wearing a white bathrobe and a towel wrapped turban-like around his head, the occupant of a plush hotel room sits closed-eyed and cross-legged on his bed. "Come to rest at the Hotel Conrad Hong Kong," runs the text. "You will find it a transcendental experience."

Meditation has clearly come into its own. But is it here to stay? As long as stress is – and no one is saying that that's about to disappear. 

For example, look at global changes in work habits. Downsizing, rapid job changes, the self-employment trend, the need to stay flexible, to be comfortable with change and ambiguity, to be committed, to stay up to date with information about one's field of specialization – the demands on us on every level are only increasing. And with Y2K not too far away, we are walking towards what is being dubbed the greatest organizational crisis mankind has ever known. As the carpet slowly disappears from under our feet, now more than ever we need to know how to contact our unchanging 'ground of being,  to have the security of the 'inner anchor' of meditation as our touchstone of sanity.

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