Divine delusions
For over a decade, my mornings unfolded in a gentle, if utterly predictable manner: My alarm would go off at 5:45 a.m., and I would rouse myself from sleep, sit upright in bed, plug my ears to block off any sound, close my eyes, and repeat my personal mantra over and over in my head until I am lulled into a state of transcendence for the next 20 minutes.
I began transcendental meditation (TM) upon the relentless urging of a, um, situationship in New York—before the word “situationship” was even coined to describe the nebulous relationship I was in at the time. He said TM brought him clarity. I was still in the midst of a stifling joint custody arrangement whilst finalizing my eventual move with my daughters to Manila; clarity was something I direly needed.
Clarity made things clear
At my first TM class at the Houghton TM Centre in Johannesburg, we were asked what had made us decide to sign up. We were a motley group of would-be meditators, each one, it would seem, with deeply personal reasons for joining. Among them was a woman seeking solace for her grief at the recent loss of her mother; a cancer patient recovering from chemotherapy; a white man grappling with cultural issues following his marriage to a Zulu woman.
There was a shocking amount of oversharing. I dreaded what I would say when my turn came. As tempting as it was to the inner rebel in me, I couldn’t very well say, “Well, there’s this guy I’m seeing…” so instead, I offered a tepid, “I’m experiencing a creative block, and I don’t know how to get out of it,” as my reason for being there.
While TM became a shared interest that seemed to tie me and my situationship closer to each other—whenever I’d be in NYC, we’d go to the very calming yet unexpectedly energizing group meditation sessions together in the TM Center in the Financial District—the clarity I sought soon made it abundantly clear that this essentially long-distance non-relationship with a younger, aggressive but insecure trader was a waste of my time.
Not a quick fix
“Can TM un-asshole an asshole?” I recall asking the TM guide after one group meditation session. Her reply was appropriate, albeit hardly edifying: TM can only do what you allow it to do, or something to that effect.
In other words, TM is merely a technique, not an instrument of morality. Although derived from ancient Vedic traditions, it’s essentially a modern invention by a young scientist from the Himalayas who, in 1955, formulated his own method of meditation that flowed from silence into a state of transcendence. He then became known as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, maharishi being a title bestowed upon him, Sanskrit for “great visionary.”
Maharishi became something of a spiritual celebrity, a personal guru to the likes of The Beatles in the Sixties, pre-dating today’s current crop of feel-good self-help personalities (some would say charlatans) such as Deepak Chopra and Jay Shetty.
Thus, a 20-minute TM meditation twice a day became the rhythm of my life, no matter the country or time zone I happened to be in. And then, one morning in Barcelona, I woke up to the news of Hamas fighters breaching the gates of Gaza to lawfully resist an illegal and inhumane occupation, and that same occupation’s army brutally unleashing a genocidal war on two million Palestinians who have been displaced, abused, and trapped in what amounts to an open-air prison for close to 60 years.
I have not been able to still my mind long enough to allow my mantra to transport me towards a transcendent state since October 2023. My mind cannot unsee the children with dismembered limbs, the men shackled and stripped naked, beaten and bloodied, the young boys sheltering in tents engulfed in flames, the mothers carrying what’s left of their missile-struck sons and daughters in plastic bags, the babies wasting away from malnutrition.
My heart cannot turn away from this horror for 20 minutes for the sake of “inner peace.”
Center the self or self-centered
The thing with “inner peace” and “enlightenment,” or even “transcendence”—not to mention the brazen hijacking of these Eastern/ancient wellness concepts by the West, with the collusion of wily new age self-styled gurus eyeing a lucrative financial payday—is that they center the self in the most self-centered way.
It’s the whole sort-yourself-out-first approach, which only works when you’re on an airplane that’s about to crash. In daily life, however, all this focus on finding the answers within yourself can create a false, even smug, sense of wholeness—”improve yourself and everything else will fall into place”—at the cost of community, ignoring the real systemic issues that keep people disconnected from each other and disempowered.
Putting the “sham” in shaman
What use is meditation, transcendental or otherwise, when you’re a teenage girl raped and tortured on the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s island? Even if these poor girls had thought to do TM twice a day, would they have escaped their gruesome and undeserved fate when the system clearly protects the wealthy, powerful men who abused them repeatedly?
Even Deepak Chopra, that overhyped author and proponent of the “divine feminine” who credited TM and the Maharishi himself for transforming his life, had no qualms about maintaining a friendship with Epstein. “God is a construct,” he philosophized in one email. “Cute girls are real.”
Seriously, if there’s one thing TM taught me, no amount of meditation can ever un-asshole an asshole.
Also, never trust a man who claims he can help you reclaim your divine feminine. White women, I swear. Can’t they just do the world a favor and stop falling for these sham shamans every single time?
