I had ulterior motives.
For a few years, whenever I had a blood pressure check, as soon as I felt the cuff tighten, I waited for the look. Perched on the examination bed at the doctor’s office, my arm in a nurse’s hand, or on the unforgiving folding chair at the Red Cross donating center, my arm in the nurse’s hand, I saw the same look coming as soon as the device began to exhale or once the Velcro patches were ripped apart. Sometimes in mid-check they would tighten the bulb valve and pump me up again just to make sure.
“It’s a little high,” they would say.
“Yes, but not high-high. Low-high, right?”
“Sometimes just getting blood pressure checked makes a person nervous. The numbers trend higher.”
“That’s me.”
“Do you drink alcohol?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Just enough.”
My trend was clear. Low-high. And, possibly, getting less low. I promised to watch it. And I did. I was a pretty good spectator, until finally I decided I should become a participant.
Every day for a few weeks, I sat down for 10-15 minutes in a wing chair in the front room of our house. Sometimes I closed my eyes, sometimes I kept my eyes open. I tried to focus on, well, nothing. Hands resting on my thighs, palms up, palms open! Just breathing. Just concentrating on breaths inhaled and exhaled. Ignoring those little kids wearing bright yellow raincoats (and backpacks! pink and red backpacks) spilling from the bright yellow school bus onto the shiny rain-slicked street. Ignoring Wolf Blitzer droning in the next room, and John Kerry, also droneful, answering Blitzer’s questions. Refusing to think about anything, like the inch of oil in Costco-brand natural peanut butter and the maddening task of trying to mix it with that tasty salubrious sludge lying beneath it. Definitely not thinking about that. I had heard Jon Kabat-Zin talk to Krista Tippett on her radio program “On Being.” I had bought his how-to book. I was learning to practice mindfulness. Not that my life up to that time had been mindless, the unhappy implication of the term mindful.
For years I had suspected that I could become mindful. In 1970, on the ABC Movie of the Week program, I had seen Jan Michael Vincent in the movie “Tribes.” He was a pacific suntanned hippy. He had long flowing blond hair and seemed spiritual in a non-denominational way. That could be me, I thought. I wore bellbottoms. If I only could let my hair grow another five to seven inches. Drafted into the Marines, Jan Michael Vincent collides with an immovable object, a drill instructor played by Darren McGavin, who demands obedience and conformity. When Private Archer won’t bend, Sergeant Drake disciplines him. He forces him to stand in formation and hold aloft two buckets of sand, one in each hand, which Archer does, way past the point of normal human possibility, maintaining a beatific, transcendent look on his face through this whole crucifixion scene. I was moved. It was mind over matter. That could be me, I thought.
Then came college. Transcendental Meditation was a thing. Semester after semester I walked past posters advertising the course. There was a picture of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Hey, that was the Beatle guru. I played the guitar. In my mind the possibility existed, an increasingly remote possibility, I was coming to realize, that I could become if not a Beatle at least Beatle-like. “The Science of Creative Intelligence,” the signs said. The course cost $90.
One night at a party I met Leandra, a girl who had long brown hair and wore sandals and a lot of tie-dye. She had taken the course and described herself as a “devotee.”
“Why don’t you try it?” she asked.
“Well, you know,” I said, “I’ve got five classes.”
“It’s not a religion,” she said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
It wasn’t.
“It’s just a way of being,” she said.
That’s what I thought. Being sounded cool. What I wanted to know, I said, was how it worked.
“The nice thing is,” she said, “you can do it anywhere.” She closed her eyes and held a thoughtful pose for a minute. It looked like she might be slipping into a mini-meditation right there, but this wasn’t a demo. She was thinking. She shook her head and said she couldn’t tell me, I needed to come and find out for myself. (Evidently you signed a non-disclosure agreement when you took the course.) Then she sat down on the floor, crossed her legs, and slid a guitar into her lap. She said she loved Janis Joplin. She began to strum and sing a Janis-esque rendition of “Summertime,” a song every beginning guitar player played, milking the soulful A minor slide. The song went along just fine until she got to that pesky F chord; it required a degree of fingerfulness she had not yet achieved.
We met again at a friend’s house a week or so later and drank quite a lot. She prided herself in her ability to drink straight Southern Comfort. I had decided to give Mateus a try, largely because I admired the shape of the bottle. As the night progressed, we talked a little more about TM, smoking cigarettes and trading drinks from each other’s bottles. I think she was getting close to telling me her mantra when both of us had to call it a night, go home, and throw up.
I kept taking five classes. I kept walking past those posters of the Maharishi.
The rest of my life gradually happened. And gradually meditation and mindfulness lost their counter-cultural associations.
Today mindfulness is an industry. It’s in industry, all over the place, from Google to Goldman Sachs to Monsanto. Among its benefits: help with stress, heart disease, chronic pain, high blood pressure; you can improve your sleep, you can deal with substance abuse, with over-eating, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.
In one of his exercises Kabat-Zin describes a New Yorker cartoon in which two Zen monks in robes and shaved heads, one young, one old, sit side by side cross-legged on the floor. The older one is saying to the younger one, who is turned toward him: “Nothing happens next. This is it.” That’s the old paradigm. Meditation, Kabat-Zin writes, “is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.”
In the new paradigm, and the new delivery system, mindfulness is instrumental. It’s results-oriented, prompting the harshest critics to refer to the movement as the “awareness industry,” “Yoga-whoring,” and the “spiritual industrial complex.”
Sitting in that wing chair, I admit that I was not totally emptying myself of desire. I was meditating to be in the moment, yes, and to be where I already was, but I was also meditating to increase my powers of mind. I wanted results. If Yuri Geller could use his mind to bend a spoon, maybe I could use my mind to bend the upward curve of my blood pressure back down into the normal range.
Back in the folding chair, while the Red Cross lady inflated the cuff, I focused on my breathing; inhaling, exhaling; believing with all my mind that I could achieve the right number, wanting above all else to continue being glassful, forkful, bodyful.
Then, mindfulness notwithstanding, it would come—the look.
