My 7-Day Mindfulness Meditation Experience

 

Image: Sanjog Shankar

I’d signed up for a Vipassana meditation retreat that would involve 7 days of doing absolutely nothing. No mobile phone, no Netflix, and worst of all, no social interaction whatsoever. Ok, I am exaggerating a little. I was going to do something while I meditated — namely, watch my breath. If my attention strayed, I would bring it back to my breath. From 7am to 9 pm every day, I would alternate between sitting meditation and walking meditation, an hour at a time each, with breaks only for meals and a brief Q&A session with Santikaro, the Buddhist monk leading the retreat. This intimidating routine was going to make me mindful, which I was told would quiet the constant chatter inside my head, switch out my negative thoughts and emotions for mostly positive ones, and allow me to sleep like a child at night instead of counting sheep in the wee hours.

Vipassana, translated as insight, is a type of mindfulness meditation that was taught by the Buddha himself 2500 years ago, and popularized worldwide in the late 20th century by the Burmese Indian teacher Satya Narayan Goenka. We’ve all heard of taking a deep breath to calm down. Vipassana takes this to a much deeper level. In practicing sitting and observing your breath and bodily sensations, you develop a new level of calm that is deep-rooted and unshakeable. Loosely, here’s how it is supposed to work:

• By learning to observe your breath and your body, you develop the “muscle” to observe your thoughts and emotions as things apart from yourself.
• By creating a distance and letting your thoughts and emotions arise and fade without getting caught up in them, you weaken their power over you.
• Your breathing becomes smoother, triggering the body’s parasympathetic or relaxation response. Your muscles loosen and unclench.
• You have more room in your head for creativity and new insights, or to resolve hidden baggage (we all have some!) that rises to the surface .
• With regular practice, these benefits become permanent.

While I was familiar with other meditation techniques that used music, visualization and concentration, this retreat would be my introduction to the art of doing almost nothing. Further, the most sitting I’d ever done at a stretch was my 45 min morning routine, epitomized more by its non-performance. At the last minute, due to a COVID case at the meditation center, the retreat would now follow a less-rigorous virtual format where we would practice from home. Nevertheless, could I sit for many hours in a day without being overwhelmed by aches, pains and restlessness? I was about to find out.

Day minus 1: In preparation for the upcoming week, I read The Equanimous Mind, an account of his first Vipassana retreat by Manish Chopra, a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company. I even sit watching my breath for two hour-long sessions, desperately fighting sleep every inch of the way. As the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy before going into battle”.

Day 0: I surprise myself by bounding out of bed at 5 am and meditating for 90 minutes before the 7 am group meditation, the first session of the retreat. With the enthusiasm of a new convert, I have clocked another three hours of meditation by the 1:30 pm Q&A session with Santikaro. When I report feeling a new found calm and clarity, he says I’ve experienced samadhi, a mind established in equanimity. I sleep like a child that night.

Day 2: I wake up at 5 am once again. I clock more hours of meditation. As my mind becomes calmer and quieter, I become aware of a tightness in the muscles of my scalp, neck and shoulders. Santikaro thinks it could be due to underlying stress or negative emotions. I’ll discover its cause in a few days, on Day 7. Once again, I sleep blissfully at night.

Day 3: At the 7 am session, Santikaro leads a guided meditation contemplating Support. With the other participants, I contemplate how the entire Universe has supported me on my journey to where I am at this moment, doing what I am doing. On this journey, I have been supported by my parents, extended family, friends, teachers, society as a whole, my workplace Microsoft, the Earth, and my own body. Even my detractors and opponents, unconsciously, have led me to being where I am now. We rarely think about this, focusing instead on the negative things in our lives. This occurred as a deep insight, not as an intellectual thought, and made me realize how much I should be grateful for.

Day 4: Things take a downturn. I wake up late and missed part of the group meditation. My efforts to sit and be mindful are lackluster. I fight the urge to sleep all day. My mind wanders in a dream-like delirium, dredging up various negative thoughts and emotions.

Day 5: I fall off the pedestal. Discouraged by the previous day, I don’t meditate at all. I have no knack for this, the first few days were a false dawn, I tell myself.

Day 6: I am late again for the morning group meditation and miss Santikaro’s instructions. I remind myself that it’s the last day. The agony will end soon. I sit and attempt to put into practice the instructions from the previous day. I breathe gently, with my whole body. I bring kindness into my meditation, instead of judging myself for my lack of “progress”. Suddenly, my mind expands into boundless Awareness, with my breath at the center. My thoughts and emotions are still present, but are a tiny part of this infinite space, clustered around the breath. I can observe them with detachment, as if they belong to someone else, not me. The tightness in my scalp, neck and shoulders that has been nagging me since Day 2 eases up. Santikaro validates my experience in the afternoon’s Q&A session. I float unperturbed in an ocean of inner silence for the rest of the day. It's as if I am meeting an old friend after years, whose company I've forgotten how much I enjoyed.  I am Mindful with a capital M.

Day 7: I am up early once again, after a restful night’s sleep. The retreat ends with the morning meditation. The space and quiet in my head from the previous day continue unabated. Until 11 am. I am on a phone call with one of my doctors. The conversation turns contentious and I get worked up. I feel the muscles of my scalp, neck and shoulders seize. (Aha, this is one of the places my body stores stress!) The next four hours are a fall from grace. My mind is taken over by rumination and the phone call replays repeatedly in my head. Six days of mindfulness have evaporated in an instant and my self-esteem is at rock bottom. At 3 pm, I decide I am going to fight back. I am going to put the lessons of the past week into practice. I sit down, close my eyes and start observing my breath: in-out, in-out. It takes about a half-hour, but I manage to regain some of the sense of calm and equanimity that I felt on Day 2. The tension in my muscles eases up. Not quite the Infinite Awareness of Day 6, but I’ll take what I can get.

Post-Script: In my previous post, I’d shared the story of Jeff, who brought his hypertension under control with the daily practice of mindfulness. Herbert Benson, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has extolled the benefits of mindfulness on the human body — reduced blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety and depression — as early as 1975.In his best-selling 2011 book When the Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Maté has convincingly shown the connection between stress and diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and diabetes. Nipping stress in the bud with a daily practice of mindfulness seems to be a no-brainer in our quest for healthy mind and body.

When Life Blurs Your Vision

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever.” 

- Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (2011)

Image: Cat’s Eye Nebula, NASA Chandra, Hubble

It was on a business trip to Tokyo that Jeff learned he was at risk of losing one of his eyes. For about a week now, he’d been ignoring the strange dark curtain that had come down over the field of vision in his left eye. It’s a hair or something that has got stuck in my eye, it will eventually come out, he told himself. His teammate Kentaro wasn’t so sanguine when he casually mentioned it to him over lunch “I think you need to go to the ER right now, you may have a retinal tear.”

Two hours later, Jeff would discover that Kentaro was right on the money. As if from far away, he heard the Japanese doctor explain in a polite accent that his retina had partially detached from the back of the eyeball. He needed to be operated on right away to not lose the use of that eye permanently. And as part of the recovery process, he would have to lie face down for two months post-surgery to allow the retina to adhere back to the eyeball. No flying for another four months.

Let’s rewind a few months. A chip designer for a major semiconductor manufacturer, Jeff had just won approval for a new product that his team had proposed. He should have been breaking out the champagne. However, his management had not approved the extra heads he’d requested to fill out his team, and Jeff, a self-described Type A personality, was completely bent out of shape.

As he sat stewing over his computer that evening, he developed a throbbing headache. By midnight, the pain was unbearable and he could feel his heart palpitating under his rib cage. In addition to chronically high BP, Jeff was prone to temporary but extreme spikes in blood pressure. Worried, his wife Nicole dashed him to the ER, where his blood pressure registered at an eye popping 200/140. Jeff was administered metoprolol to bring it down and sent home. He was back in the ER at 3 am, his BP off the charts again.

Science understands the relationship between stress and blood pressure pretty well. The surge of hormones produced by your body when under stress causes your blood vessels to constrict, and your heart to beat faster. Jeff was literally driving himself up the wall.

Two visits to the ER in one night weren’t sufficient to shake Jeff up and he continued to charge hard at work. We can only speculate if his detached retina was caused by these episodes. Hypertension is considered a causative factor of retinal detachment in cats, but not humans. Temporary spikes in pressure are not known to be a factor either. While Jeff’s ayurvedic doctor believes there’s a connection, it’s not acknowledged by mainstream medicine.

Forward to New Year’s Eve, 2013, just a few days before his Tokyo trip. At a party in the exclusive Seattle suburb of Mercer Island, Jeff happened to watch a short talk by Ajahn Brahm, née Peter Betts, a graduate in theoretical physics from Cambridge University turned Theravada Buddhist monk. The Theravada school places emphasis on the practice of mindfulness — of developing mental calm (samatha), insight (vipassana) into the impermanence of all objects of desire, and compassion (metta) for all living beings.

In the world of hi-tech, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, and Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, are committed proponents of vipassana meditation, actively promoting it within their organizations. It was all new to Jeff, but something in the monk’s talk resonated within him.

It was exactly a week later that Jeff found himself in a Tokyo ER with a retinal tear. After a few frantic calls to his primary care physician and an ophthalmologist friend back in the US, he was greenlit for travel. He would fly back home for the surgery and long drawn out post-operative recovery.

Lying flat on his stomach for the next few weeks, Jeff whiled away the hours devouring talks on mindfulness by Ajahn Brahm. Within weeks of resuming a normal schedule, he had enrolled in his first vipassana meditation retreat, at the Dhamma Kunja center in Onalaska, Washington, two hours south of Seattle.

Over the past seven years, Jeff has logged over 5,000 hours of mindfulness meditation, well on his way to the proverbial 10,000 hours required for mastery. His intense, hyper-competitive personality has given way to a unshakably calm and measured demeanor. As Jeff describes it, his health crises were a wake up call. With Ajahn Brahm as his muse, Jeff chose to redesign himself. “I decided not to let any situation at work get under my skin, not to sweat the small stuff”, he says, and then adds, knowing that he sounds clichéd, “it’s all small stuff.”

In that last comment of Jeff’s is perhaps the secret of how mindfulness helps reduce stress. As you sit and watch your breath and your thoughts, you are able to see your thoughts as transient phenomena playing out on the screen of your mind. Instead of being caught up in them, you see them from a little more distance. The endless internal chatter in your mind gets a little quieter. In the space that is created, you are able to more mindfully solve those problems that need solving, and let go of thoughts that don’t serve a useful purpose. Your muscles relax, your breathing becomes calmer, and your body’s “relaxation response” kicks in, activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

Jeff’s blood pressure is now back at a normal 130/80. He’s not had a spike in years. At his recent annual health check up, his PCP, perhaps not fully aware of research on the benefits of mindfulness and stress reduction, remarked “I don’t know what you are doing to keep your BP under control, but whatever it is, don’t stop doing it”.

For the record, the pioneer of scientific research on meditation, Herbert Benson, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, extolled the benefits of mindfulness on the human body — reduced blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety and depression — as early as 1975. Dr. Gabor Maté, in his best-selling 2011 book When the Body Says No has convincingly shown the connection between stress and diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and diabetes.

The uncanny timing of his stumbling upon a talk to mindfulness just a week before the events in Tokyo is not lost upon Jeff. At his moment of crisis, a set of ancient teachings from 2,500 years ago came to his rescue, helping him recover his health and recraft his relationship to both life and work. The Buddha, it would seem, had reached out across the centuries to deliver on his promise of both wisdom and compassion just when Jeff needed them most.

Post-Script: To protect confidentiality, names and some other specifics have been changed. The core details of Jeff’s experience, however, are accurate and are retold here as narrated to me by him.

A Reiki Way of Life

“People don’t take trips, trips take people.” – Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck

It was a desolate and stunningly beautiful evening at Salinas River State Beach, between Monterrey and Santa Cruz, California.   A light fog bank had moved in from the sea and a gentle glow lit up the evening sky.   With just seabirds for company, we had the seashore to ourselves.  This was John Steinbeck country, the 1962 Nobel Prize winning author having been born in the town of Salinas, just a few miles away.  In classics like The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck explored the fate of "downtrodden or everyman protagonists" and the plight of the working class during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.   

Despite the beauty of our surroundings, I was feeling quite downtrodden myself that day.  For a few months now, I'd been suffering from a mysterious pain in the hip and sacral area which had eluded explanation despite multiple scans and x-rays.  Limping at every step, I wondered how I would cope with the hikes we'd planned at Point Reyes and John Muir Woods for later that week, and if this was to be a permanent feature of my life moving forward.  The doctors back in Seattle had suggested surgery, an option that I did not have any appetite for.  It was in this despondent frame of mind I found myself as we walked back to the nearly deserted parking lot.  

 Salinas River State Beach Image Credits: Kris Shankar

That's when I saw the man in the pickup truck, middle-aged and vaguely Hispanic in appearance, with a broad cowboy hat on his head.  He gazed at me intently as I limped past him towards our rental car, and then as if making up his mind, spoke out "You have a problem with your sacral iliac joint, no?"  I nodded, taken aback by this precise diagnosis.  "Whatever you do, don't go in for surgery.  That will make it worse."  He consulted a pair of copper dowsing rods mounted on the dashboard in front of an icon of Mother Mary, speaking softly to himself as he did so.  They swung apart asymmetrically, as if reflecting the misalignment in my hips.  He then jumped out of his truck and spread a towel on the ground, beckoning me to sit down. "Do you mind if I take a look?"  Not knowing what to think, I obeyed.  Bhavna had walked ahead with the kids to the port-a-potty.  She was back now and watching the proceedings with increasing alarm.  

Icon and Dowsing Rods Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons

Here I was sitting cross-legged in empty parking lot with a complete stranger pushing down on my knees.  He bade me stand up on one leg, then the other, assessing my balance.  With my permission, he then placed his palm in the small of my back.  After a minute, he asked if I felt anything.  "Not a thing", I replied.  He reached back into his truck and handed me a business card.  "I perform healings for immigrant laborers in the Bay Area" he said, "If you want to come back for another healing, get in touch."  I thanked him more out of politeness than anything as Bhavna bade me hurry.  The sun was low and we had a long drive ahead of us to my cousin's apartment in San Francisco. I limped back to the car and got in, tossing the card into the glove compartment without so much looking at it.   "What were you thinking" Bhavna chided me on the drive back, "putting yourself in the hands that stranger?"

The next morning, as we prepared for our trip to Point Reyes, I noticed I wasn't in any discomfort.  I walked for about 10 hours that day.  And the next day.  And the next.  After six months or more, the pain and the limp had vanished, inexplicably.  When we cleaned out our rental car at SFO airport prior to returning it, I found the card in the glove compartment and glanced at it for the first time.  It was the calling card of a working man, the kind of man that John Steinbeck wrote about, offering "Landscaping and Yard Cleaning Services, Free Estimates".  Further down it read, "Reiki Healer, spiritual healing for injuries and pain."  In a turn of events that Carlos Castaneda would approve of, Don Ortiz - for I shall call him that - had healed me and opened me to possibilities I'd never imagined.    

Gilberto Ortiz, Reiki Healer Image Credits: Kris Shankar

Post-Script: The events described here occurred in 2008.  After we returned to Seattle, I called Senior Ortiz to thank him and mailed him a check for $120, though he never once did ask for money.  My hip bothered me again some months later and I tried his number, but it had been disconnected.  

The Jewel in the Lotus

 "Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives that I mean to make bold withal" - Act 3, Scene 1, Romeo and Juliet

Our visitor was a banker from New York, a high-flying vice president at a Wall Street firm that is a household name.  In another life, metaphorically speaking, she had been a Reiki healer.  But that was in the past, and she was now busy juggling the demands of corporate life.  When I proposed a session of deep trance and shamanic journeying on our deck that morning, she readily agreed.  Despite the bright sunshine, there was a nip in the air.  We got a blaze going in the fire pit and settled in around it.  Aided by the soothing crackle of the flames, Gita was soon in a state of deep relaxation and extraordinary lucidity.  A giant pillar of white light, her Reiki light as she called it, manifested in her field of vision.  This was a conscious energy that would guide her for the entirety of the session.  For the first hour or so, Gita was flooded with insights on work and family issues of importance to her.  We then decided that she would attempt to retrieve memories of past lives, curious to see what would emerge.   

Image Credit: sparksofthedivine.com

Upon my cue, Gita closed her eyes and merged with her inner Reiki light.  After a few minutes of deep absorption, she looked up and in a matter-of-fact manner, began reporting what she'd seen to me.  One after the other, fragments of six lives tumbled out: Memories of a Native American youth running on a hillside with his friend, weapons hanging from his side;  a fleeting glimpse of a priest, lonely but unwavering and sincere in his devotions, high up in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church somewhere in Europe; a vision of a shaman or healer wearing a leopard skin over his head in a cave in Africa; recollections of a life as a young housemaid serving in a wealthy household in renaissance-era Italy; images of a worshipper gazing at the granite statue of a Hindu goddess in Indochina.  

In popular culture, we are most familiar with past-life regression from the work of Dr. Brian Weiss, as documented in his book Many Lives, Many Masters and other best-sellers.  However, it is Dr. Samuel Sagan who has drawn from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and other ancient Indian texts to provide an explanation for this phenomenon.   

Image Credit: vision8studio.com

As Sagan explains in his book Regression: Past-life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom, while your Karma* is responsible for the circumstances of your present life, it is your Samskaras** that are responsible for your subconscious fears, anxieties, biases and behavioral patterns.  When past-life memories do surface during regression, they are often samskaras, especially emotionally charged and frequently traumatic events, that were defining moments in that life.  For this reason, people often recollect the trauma of their own death or the loss of a loved one in regression sessions.  Such recollection is frequently cathartic and results in the healing of physical ailments or psychological issues in this life. It was interesting that in Gita's case, her recollections were mostly positive and empowering. 

Having tired of past-life memories, Gita decided to dive into her Reiki light for other insights.  After a few minutes we had the following exchange:

Gita: I see a giant lotus of glowing light. I am going towards it.

Me: What else do you see?  

Gita:  I see Brahma.  He is sitting cross-legged in the lotus.  He's inviting me to merge into the light...[after a pause] I am stepping into the light.

According to the Hindu myth of creation,  Brahma sits in a lotus that emerges from the navel of Vishnu, who is asleep, reclining on on his serpent Adisesha^.  As if in a dream, Vishnu watches Brahma create the entire material universe. By the very act of dreaming, Vishnu sustains the universe; for when Vishnu wakes from his dream, the current cycle of Creation must end. 

Was Gita now spectator to the very moment of Creation?

Image Credit: booksfact.com

A deep silence hung in the air.  It was a beautiful Pacific Northwest afternoon, with the sun casting a gentle warmth and puffy clouds grazing across the sky.   I gazed into the fire as it crackled and ate away at the logs, waiting for Gita to open her eyes.  

* karma [ˈkärmə] In Hinduism and Buddhism, the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences

** samskara [samˈskärə] According to various schools of Indian philosophy, samskaras are the subtle mental impressions left by emotionally charged thoughts, intentions and actions that an individual has experienced. Often likened to grooves in the mind, they can be considered as psychological or emotional imprints that contribute to the formation of behavioral patterns.

^ Adisesha is also known as Ananta and is said to represent Time without beginning or end

My Experiments with Truth

 

Drink! for you know not when you came, nor why; Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where - Rubaiyyat, Omar Khayyam, Persian poet and mathematician (1048 - 1131)

I tipped the freshly opened quarter bottle of whiskey and drained it without a pause, ignorant of the poet of Nishapur and his rhyme.  What prompted me was not existential angst, but a dare.  It was 1982 and I was at my friend Arvind's house.  I'd never had alcohol before.  As a strong-headed 15 year old, I believed that getting drunk was a sign of mental weakness, that "it was all in the mind".  So when Arvind produced a 185 ml bottle of whiskey and conspiratorially offered me a small sip that was "guaranteed to lay me low", I scoffed.  Just a sip? I  would down the entire bottle in a gulp and nothing would happen "because I would not permit it."  I steeled myself for the act to follow, much as contemporary endurance artist and illusionist David Blaine might do prior to one of his performances. 

Rubaiyyat, Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, illustrated by Willy Pogany (1920)

I spluttered and choked as the undiluted Scotch seared its way down my gullet.   I hadn't expected this, but a dare is a dare and I drained the bottle.  Arvind rushed to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of ice cubes, which I  swallowed whole in an effort to staunch the burning sensation in my throat.  He waited expectantly for me to either pass out, throw up or launch into song.  The minutes passed.  After about 10 minutes, I declared victory.  I looked at Arvind and said "See, no problem".  I walked back home in the hot Madras sun, sat down with my grandparents (with whom I lived at that time) and proceeded to down a hearty tiffin of dosas, mango chutney and curds.  There was not so much as a whiff of alcohol in my breath and it was obvious to me that my mental strength and resolve had completely neutralized the whiskey.

Years later, I would learn that extreme concentration of mind or heightened emotional states can result in a temporary manifestation of extraordinary abilities, the familiar cliché of mothers being able to lift cars of their trapped child being an example of this.  More interestingly, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and other texts refer to siddhis or yogic abilities that can spontaneously manifest when practicing dhyana, or concentration meditation:

The Five Inferior Siddhis:

You can know the future, present and past.

You are unaffected by dualities like cold and heat.

You can know the thoughts of others.

You can stop the effects of water, fire and poison.

You cannot be conquered by others.

The inferior Siddhis are relatively common. 

Many people can use one or more of them.

Another thing I didn't know was this admonition:

Attaining and using psychic powers is a huge trap. You must devote time and energy to getting the power. Then, when you have your power, using it grows your pride and ego.

It turns out this warning applies equally to smug teenagers and arrogant yogis, and pride, as the saying goes, cometh before the fall.  A few weeks later, the neighborhood gang had gathered after lunch at my friend Sunil's house.  His parents were away for the day.  A large 750 ml bottle of whiskey was produced, and eager to show off my new found talent, I proclaimed I would down the entire bottle, "neat".  I'll skip the gory details, but suffice it to say I nearly died of alcohol poisoning that afternoon.  I drank, I blacked out, I woke up puking over the bed, and then continued to throw up all over Sunil's house (which probably saved my life).  I left Sunil with the unenviable task of explaining the empty bottle and trashed house to his parents.

The story has a deliciously ironic ending.   My grandparents were going to see the movie "Gandhi" at 4 pm that afternoon.  I was supposed to mind the house while they were away.  It was only around 4:15 pm that I could muster enough strength to wobble back home and collapse on a chair in the verandah.  I was still soaking wet from having been given a shower (fully clothed!) in Sunil's house in an effort to sober me up.  My grandparents gave me a quizzical look or two, not knowing what to make of my condition, and then dashed off to watch Gandhi take the moral high ground in India's fight against British colonialism.  On my part, I foreswore further Experiments with Truth and cannot so much as take a sip of whiskey to this day.  

My Experiments with Truth, An Autobiography, MK Gandhi

Post Script: It goes without saying that treating alcohol or any other drug with disrespect can kill you at any age, whether your goal is to show off to your friends or develop advanced yogic abilities.  Don't do it. 

A Dagger to the Heart

It was 2006 and we were vacationing in the Yucatan Peninsula in the south of Mexico, with time and more to spare for the end of the world foretold by the Mayan Calendar on Dec 21, 2012.  Jokes aside, the Mayan calendar is still in use today and so precise that their 365 day Haab calendar has an error of only 1 day in 6729 years, while our “modern” calendar has an error of 1 day in 3236 years.   One of the highlights of our trip was Chichen Itza, which dates back to 600 A.D. and was one of the largest cities of the Mayan Empire and includes architectural wonders like the 100 ft high Temple of Kukulcán.  This stepped pyramid, marvel of new world engineering has a dark and gruesome side.  It was the site of human sacrifice carried out in ceremonies of colossal scale, at which upwards of 20,000 victims were sacrificed at a time in bloody offerings to the gods.  In these many day-long rituals, the still-beating heart of the victim would be cut out with a sacrificial knife made of flint and offered to the deity.  

Temple of Kukulcán or El Castillo, Chichen Itza, Mexico

Despite this terrifying history, Chichen Itza is considered to be an "energy vortex" and attracts new-agers in droves for its supposed powers of healing and rejuvenation.  When told about this by the local guides, I rolled my eyes in skepticism.  We spent the rest of the day taking in the sights and returned to our nearby motel for a well-earned night's rest.  

Mayan Obsidian Dagger

At the time, I had the habit of doing 20 minutes of yogic breathing or pranayama prior to bedtime, and had been bothered for over a year by a tight and painful catch at the base of my sternum that prevented full expansion of my lungs.  I would frequently play with this spot with my fingers trying to massage out the soreness, to no avail.  That night, pranayama complete, I nodded off to sleep.  The vivid and hyper-realistic dream that that I experienced later in the night was out of a new age playbook.  In it, I was lying on my back with my chest bared.  A bald headed female Buddhist monk in saffron robes stood next to me holding an obsidian dagger.  She gazed into my eyes intently, yet kindly, in a Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One kinda way.  "I am going to press the dagger into your chest and it will hurt", she said "but the tightness you've been experiencing will go away".  I nodded my consent.  An intense, searing pain tore through me as she pressed the blade into me just under the ribcage.  

Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One, Dr. Strange (2016)

I sat bolt upright in bed with a gasp, panting heavily.  It was pitch dark and Bhavna and Meghna were fast asleep.  What.  Was.  That.  I wondered.  I felt the spot at the base of my ribs and the tightness was gone.  In the following days and weeks, my pranayama was smooth and effortless, with not a hint of discomfort.  In disbelief, I kept waiting for the tightness to return, but it never did.   I am no more a believer in energy vortices today than I was before, but this incident from 2006 has left me a little warier of Chichen Itza, a place where the priests imposed a reign of terror and rivers of blood flowed copiously.  

Post Script:  I want to stress that many, many nations and cultures have a bloody past, not just the Mayans.  The Spanish Inquisition was cruel and vast in its scale.  Slavery and genocide were part and parcel of the colonization of North America, and its legacy lingers on.  Nazi Germany needs no introduction.  The caste system in India continuous to oppress large segments of the population.  So on and so forth.  

A Cry at Midnight

The following incident, worthy of a 1970’s supernatural thriller, occurred when I was a child.  I present it below as narrated to me by my mother. 

"When you were about two years old, you required corrective surgery on your feet for a tendon related problem.  We lived in New Delhi at this time, and the procedure was to be performed at the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).  Leading up to the surgery, a plaster cast was applied to your feet for a few weeks to stretch the tendons out.  By questioning whether the plaster cast had been applied correctly, I earned the wrath of the junior doctor – let’s call him Dr. J - who performed this procedure. 

 All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi

The surgery itself was eventually scheduled for early 1969 and since the senior doctor – let’s call him Dr. S - was planning to travel in April of that year, your grandparents and I didn’t go through with the usual process of looking up the almanac for an auspicious day for the surgery.  In fact, the date set by the hospital was inauspicious per traditional reckoning, but neither your grandparents nor I raised any objections given Dr. S’s calendar constraints. 

A few days prior to the procedure, I had a vivid and disturbing dream, in which Dr. S came out of the operating theater calling out in alarm “Mrs. Krishnan, Mrs. Krishnan... where is Mrs. Krishnan...?”  A voice in the dream announced, “a vein has been cut and there is bleeding….”.  I ignored this dream, putting it down to my own nervousness.  The day before the surgery, we went to a temple to seek blessings.  As the priest walked up to us with the Aarthi or divine flame, it suddenly blew out as though by a sudden gust of wind.  I dismissed this omen also. 

         

The Fault in Our Stars

The next day, we were admitted into a general ward in AIIMS, a dormitory-like space that we shared with multiple other patients.  In the evening, who should come on his rounds but our old “friend” Dr. J.  You beamed at him, upon which he remarked “Now he's smiling at me. He doesn't know that tomorrow, I'm going to be the devil in the theater.”  I ignored even this chilling comment, putting it down to a tasteless attempt at humor. 

As evening came, you started crying for no particular reason and wouldn’t stop.  The patients around us tried to cheer you up, but to no avail. Eventually, night arrived and we both fell asleep, with you sandwiched between me and the wall against which our bed was set.  Suddenly, in the middle of the night, you woke the entire ward up with a piercing scream.  The lights came on and what should everyone see, but a copious amount of blood splattered all over the front of my white sari.  I examined you closely, but you showed no sign of pain and no trace of any injury, not even so much as a scratch.  There was simply no explanation for your scream and all this blood. 

Surgery preparations would start by 8 a.m. At 7 a.m., I met Dr. S in his office, shared the incident of previous the night to him, and said I wanted to call off the surgery.   He was very understanding and readily agreed.  We drove home and the family, grandparents included, were all relieved that the surgery had been put on hold.  Now home, you played around as though nothing had happened.   We eventually had the procedure done in Madras at a different hospital."

We pride ourselves on living in scientific and rational times, but this would have been one omen too many for most folks.  And you, dear reader, can credit this post that you are reading to a series of portents from more than a half-century ago.

Spirits in the Material World

I know a lawyer who sees dead people - all the time - just like the character played by Haley Joel Osment in the 1999 M Night Shyamalan thriller, The Sixth Sense.  What makes it a little surprising is that he's not a person given to esoteric interests.  Another lawyer friend in Seattle saw a man and his dog walk through her apartment in the early hours of the morning.  The dog even put its paws on her bed hoping to receive a pat.  After they disappeared into the thin air, she sat in bed wondering what it was that she'd just seen.  While there's a certain satisfaction in knowing that lawyers are haunted by spectral apparitions, such experiences are relatively common and upwards of one in five people worldwide have a similar story to share. 

Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense (1999)

When I was about 11 years old, I saw not one but two spirits.  At the time, I used to live with my grandparents, uncle, aunt and cousins in Poes Garden in the city of Madras.  At night, my grandmother, cousin and I would sleep on mattresses on the floor of the living room.  It was my habit to wake up every night around 1 am, make a trip to the bathroom, and then lie wide awake in the dark for close to an hour before falling back asleep.  Some nights I would walk up to the mottai madi, the open terrace at the top of the house, and enjoy the cool air and stillness for some time before coming back down to bed.  Most such nights were uneventful, except this one.  I woke up in the middle of the night to see two figures of light standing at the foot of my mattress, looking at me.  They were both the size of children, vaguely but definitely human in outline, but otherwise featureless.  Inexplicably, I felt no fear.  After perhaps 20 seconds or so, the two spirits started gliding (not walking!) towards the dining room and disappeared into the darkness towards the kitchen.  Bursting with curiosity, I got up and followed them into the dining room, but they were not to be seen.  I searched the kitchen, the pantry room behind it and the closed verandah to the side of the house, but no luck.  They had vanished into the thin air.  

What my ghostly visitors looked like, minus the arms

I never thought to share this experience with anyone until many years later.  I was now 27 and living in Oakhurst, California.  Amma was visiting from India.  Appa and my brother Raghu were due to arrive a few days later.  "You know", I said, "I saw ghosts one night as a kid in Poes Garden".  I described the entire incident to her.  Amma rolled her eyes.  "It must have been the play of light and shadow from the street lights" she scoffed, "or maybe your overactive imagination".  We let it got at that.  When Appa and Raghu arrived, I opened with the same line.  Raghu immediately interjected "Me too" he said, "I also remember seeing ghosts there one night".  This was now getting interesting.  Without sharing any further details of my experience, I asked him to describe what he saw.  He'd come over for a sleepover one night to our grandparents', and was duly allocated a mattress on the floor of the living room for the night.  He'd woken up in the middle of the night, and seen not two but three figures of light standing at the foot of the mattress.  After a few seconds, the three figures glided towards the front of the house, passed right through the two inch thick teak wood of the locked door, and disappeared.  Like me, it had not occurred to Raghu to share this event with anyone till now.

Lyrics from Spirits in the Material World, The Police (1981)

Needless to say, this unexpected corroboration of details almost two decades after the original events did nothing to quell Amma's skepticism.  A good ghost story is perhaps meant to be enjoyed, not believed. While I have not had a similar experience since, I can't help believing that we live among spirits in this material world, each going about our business for the most part unaware of each other.  Unless you are like my lawyer friend, which is a whole another story.

Post Script:  While it tells well as a ghost story, in hindsight, I think what Raghu and I really saw was astral bodies engaged in a nightly out-of-body (OBE) adventure, as described by Robert Monroe.  I saw my cousins; Raghu saw my cousins and me.  As Indian spiritual guru Sri M describes it in his book Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master: A Yogi's Autobiography, all humans and even animals engage in this activity nightly, mostly without a recollection of it the next morning.  

Nootropic Journey

I was soaring over city streets, free as a bird, dodging light poles and oncoming trucks.  I wondered at my own miraculous ability to fly.  How is it, thought I, do I possess this ability?  Is this for real?  I felt a surge of energy course upwards from my toes into my upper torso.  Aha, that's where this power arises, I thought to myself.  Wait a minute, interjected another voice in my head - you're dreaming.  This is all a dream experience and that's why you are able to fly, realistic as it might seem.  The realization dawned in a flash that I was in bed, asleep and dreaming.  However, I was now awake within the dream.  

[Picture credit and "how to" tips: How To Have Lucid Dreams]

Excited by the prospect of actively controlling my dream from here on, I "took charge" of my flight trajectory and started exploring my environment consciously.  Unfortunately, I was perhaps too awake, and could not sustain the lucid dream state - in a few seconds, the dream world collapsed and I found myself in bed, eyes open, with the early dawn light making its appearance outside.  

Prior to falling asleep the previous night, I'd been thinking about lucid dreaming and if there was a way to induce the state.  As with my prior and only other lucid dream experience (see Bali Ha'i: Awake within the Dream), some subconscious mechanism appears to have triggered the experience in response to my wanting it.   It is also possible that the Tulsi, Kava and Ashwagandha nootropic supplements I took prior to bedtime may have contributed to the state of relaxed alertness that is conducive to lucid dreaming.  See Ashwagandha and lucid dreaming and Kava and Dreaming.  Enjoy your own flights, of fancy or otherwise, and be sure to let me know if you awaken in the dream!

P.S.: Children have the ability to lucid dream at will.  We all did.  We just lose this ability as we “grow up”.