Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  It’s an old, familiar ritual, but by the time the second person has burnt their paper I am sobbing. I am also embarrassed. No one else is crying. Why the hell am I crying? The sobs move through me like a current, and strangely, despite the racket I’m making, I feel not sad or upset but deeply connected to not only the people in this circle but everyone on the planet. I’ve never felt like this before. I feel a profound sense of empathy and compassion for everyone, and I’m feeling it so much that the only commensurate physical response is these full, body-racking sobs.

  With a mixture of awe and shame I guess that I am having what’s called a religious experience, or some sort of spiritual awakening, which I try to hang on to because it feels so good. Better than anything I’ve ever felt. As soon as I try, it goes. The whole thing lasts maybe two or three seconds and feels like a flood.

  We walk down to a river, where there is a Balinese dude singing and the yoga instructor mixing the ashes of all our combined fears and stuff we want to let go. He throws the ash in the river, which is flowing fast. I feel a shiver of disapproval because it’s bad for the environment, but quash it because the action contains an allusion to something bigger – that this will be all of us one day, ashes in a bowl, returned to nature.

  Later on I try to explain the sensations I felt at that moment to people – but really, there are no words. Also, it sounds very similar to a drug experience, which can be really boring to hear about if you weren’t there. I try to capture the experience again with more retreats and meditation, and a lot of yoga – even ecstatic dancing – but it never makes a return visit.

  I also know in ways I cannot articulate that the experience is truthful, that there is a divine, even if it’s only to be found in nature or each other, rather than some omnipotent being. It’s there.

  *

  I return to New York to an email saying I was unsuccessful for the campaigning job. From all the interviews and the quasi-social situations, they intuited that I was ‘not a team player’ and ‘too independent’. I don’t feel too disappointed, or at least not as disappointed as I once would have been. There’s been a shift. I’m not knocked off balance so much. I’m filled with a feeling of inner calm, peace and serenity, and at the moment these qualities seem as essential as water and air. This time I want the feeling to last.

  What I discover is that if you want to get serious about serenity, then you need a daily meditation practice. There are loads of different types – mindfulness, Vipassana, Zen, Kundalini and Vedic, just to name a few. I’d meditated with some excellent teachers such as Maitreyabandhu and Aruna, tried mindfulness and Zen, and all sorts of apps on my phone that tailor meditation for various circumstances: trouble getting to sleep, anger, heartbreak, long commutes.

  But the premium, celeb-endorsed meditation is Transcendental Meditation – or TM, as its followers call it. Celebrity devotees include Katy Perry, Hugh Jackman and Madonna. I interview Heather Graham and she raves about it. ‘TM calms you down. It helps you find that peaceful place inside yourself – so whenever your life is going a bit crazy, it reminds you how to be really centred,’ she tells NBC. Jerry Seinfeld describes his twice-daily meditation practice as like ‘a phone charger for your mind’. Russell Brand credits TM with helping him stay sober. Film director David Lynch, the sort of de facto father of this wave of celebrity TM, says the practice gave him ‘effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity, and happiness deep within’. He’s taken the technique to schools and prisons, and funds scientific studies into the benefits of meditation.

  Early studies – not just Lynch’s – have shown that it can increase immune function, lower blood pressure, decrease pain and inflammation at a cellular level, improve focus, attention and your ability to regulate emotion, and increase your level of compassion.

  Although TM has been around for roughly 5000 years, it didn’t come to mainstream Western attention until the Beatles went to India, learnt the technique from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had their minds blown and wrote the White Album.

  Hollywood followed, then the business community. Yep – meditation can make you money! Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, told Reuters, ‘I think meditation has been the single biggest reason for whatever success I’ve had.’ It’s no wonder some of the biggest global companies are introducing meditation in the workplace. Bloomberg ran a story headlined, ‘To Make a Killing on Wall Street, Start Meditating’, and executive coach David Brendel wrote in the Harvard Business Review, ‘Mindfulness is close to taking on cult status in the business world.’

  In 2015 the New Yorker examined the cross-pollination of corporate America and meditation: ‘Meditation, like yoga before it, has been fully assimilated into corporate America. Aetna, General Mills and Goldman Sachs all offer their employees free in-office meditation training.’

  The titans of the tech world are also enthusiastic meditators. The late Steve Jobs was an early adopter. And one of the Silicon Valley success stories is Headspace – a mindfulness app that has brought meditation to the masses. Downloads of the app had reached 5 million in 150 countries by 2016, according to the LA Times.

  My colleague Mustafa, who I work with in a Melbourne newsroom, meditates before we start our shifts at 6am. This means he has to get up at 4am. He never complains about the early starts and always comes into work looking as fresh as a daisy (so fresh that he works part-time as a male model). The early starts and meditation seem to give him more energy, not less. He encourages me to give it a go.

  But once I locate some TM teachers my jaw hits the floor. It’s around $1500 to learn the technique. I don’t have that type of cash right now.

  A few months later I change jobs and cities – again. I love my new job – features editor at Guardian Australia, back in Sydney. But it’s a broad remit and I feel overwhelmed almost immediately.

  I start on Monday and two days later I have tightness in my chest. By Friday I’m in the doctor’s surgery hooked up to a cardiogram, certain I’m about to have a heart attack. Nothing shows up. The doctor suggests that perhaps I was having an anxiety attack. I leave the surgery shaken. I need desperately to chill out. In other words my stress is causing me stress. I start looking for a meditation teacher in Sydney immediately.

  Vedic is a similar technique to TM, but teacher Matt Ringrose charges $750, instead of thousands. It’s still a lot of money but includes a week of tuition and an open door to his house every Monday night for group meditation. Every Monday night for the rest of my life, if I want it.

  I attend an information session to see if it’s for me. Matt teaches meditation from his home in Bondi, just a short walk from where I live. Upstairs, the meditation room is like an interiors catalogue – couches in pastel colours, some on-trend soft furnishings and then the balcony, which faces the sea.

  At the information session there are four of us, including a woman so stressed and busy that she needs her PA to schedule toilet breaks in her diary. Her eyes are focused on the middle distance, she talks staccato and her foot whirrs with agitation. I have lived in a lot of cities, but this is yet another reminder of how, beneath the sun and the fun, Sydney is one of the most stressed of them all. At the end of the session, I sign up to learn Vedic meditation and, after raiding my savings, the next week I’m doing the course.

  The first night is one on one. You have to bring an odd assortment of things – a white linen handkerchief, a fresh bunch of flowers and three pieces of sweet fruit. All are easy to come by except for the handkerchief, which no one seems to sell any more because it’s not 1981. After I present the offerings I get my mantra – which I am told to keep secret – and then, without much further ado, we are meditating.

  After the first meditation a very subtle but undeniable feeling comes over me – I feel slightly buzzed, grinning and happy. Maybe the meditation has released some sort of endorphins. It’s not unlike the feeling after a really good work-out. Each meditation I do with Matt that week is subtly d
ifferent. Sometimes all goes smoothly and I achieve that elusive ‘blank’ feeling that I had a taste of when meditating with Aruna; sometimes I get bored, and time crawls; other times my mind is agitated and racing. The trick is just to repeat the mantra – a sort of mental white noise – and dispassionately observe what’s coming up. Matt says the agitated and noisy meditations are nothing to be alarmed about: ‘It’s just the brain processing stress. It’s all part of the process.’

  After a week of meditating I feel a definite effect. My sleep becomes deep and unbroken – the sort of sleep that, when you come out of it, feels like you’re surfacing from an anaesthetic. I would then groggily haul myself into a seated position (on my bed, covers off, back against the wall) for twenty minutes’ meditation. During the week of the course, the anxious feelings immediately stop and my concentration improves. I don’t feel as overwhelmed by my new job or the email load that has gone from around a dozen a day to more than a hundred a day.

  The only issue is getting up early enough to meditate (although Matt reckons twenty minutes of meditation is worth several hours’ sleep) – and finding somewhere to meditate in the afternoons.

  It’s not always practical to meditate in the mid-afternoon – as I find out when I walk around Flemington Racecourse, stepping over drunk people on Melbourne Cup Day, trying to find somewhere quiet to meditate. Every day I think I’m too busy to meditate twice a day, but Matt says that if you think you are too busy to meditate, then you need to meditate.

  So I keep going, doing it twice a day, because I quite like it. My brain starts to crave these regular mini-breaks. As one meditator puts it in GQ: it ‘taps an inner calm we all have, a calm that gives the brain a chance to settle and repair its frazzled neurons’.

  My boss is sceptical: ‘My father did TM – I don’t think it works. You’ll give it up soon enough. You’re always doing these things then after one month dropping them. You have to do forty minutes a day, don’t you? That’s a lot of sitting. What’s your mantra anyway?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ I say, vaguely shocked she would ask. One of the things that’s drummed into us in the course is that our mantra must be a secret.

  ‘I bet there’s one mantra,’ says my boss. ‘And they tell you to keep it a secret so that you don’t find out that there’s just one that they give out to everyone.’

  ‘It’s vacuum,’ I say. ‘Vacuum, vacuum, vacuum.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  *

  If the wellness industry were to be depicted in a food pyramid form, it’s meditation that is the base that holds everything up. Which makes sense, doesn’t it? There’s no point rocking a hot body and having a clean liver and being able to backbend like a sabre if you are unable to control or at least deal with the blows, the bad moods, the existential angst, the disappointments and just general all-round sadness that is sure to come your way. Of course, meditation doesn’t promise to rid you of these things, but what it does do is give you mental space – and perhaps the ability to hold the line as the waves crash over you.

  Of all the wellness things I have tried for this book, it is meditation that there is the most love for. Adam Whiting, my Bondi yoga teacher, kept telling the class that even if we could not make a yoga class, we had to keep meditating. It also – for me – finally sticks. Matt has taught me how to integrate the Vedic method into my everyday life. There are no excuses. Finally, I become a meditator.

  Even though I didn’t get that human rights campaigning job I went for in New York, I am working on my own projects. One thing I have been working on for a few years is a clemency campaign for two Australians on death row in Bali – Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. A few other death-penalty activists and I have been plugging away at a website and petition in a fairly low-key way for a while. The two men have been on death row for almost ten years, and the Indonesian government don’t seem to be in any hurry to start executing prisoners.

  Then in December of 2014 I am at work at the Guardian office in Sydney when an alert flashes on the wire service.

  During a public lecture the newly elected Indonesian president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has emphasised that his government would not be merciful in dealing with narcotics-related crime. He advised he would reject requests for clemency for sixty-four drug traffickers currently on death row.

  Things in life move fast and slow, and so it is with this. Over the next four months, our small campaign explodes into a worldwide movement.

  In those early days of 2015 we are locked in a furious cycle of hope, despair, anxiety, sleeplessness, elation, depression and fear. On it goes. The men are transferred to the Nusa Kambangan prison – and execution site. Will the seventy-two-hour notice period be triggered now? Or is Jokowi playing chicken? There are vigils and press conferences and public pleas. Artist Ben Quilty organises the Music for Mercy concert, and more appeals are filed. We gather 250,000 signatures on the Mercy Campaign petition to stop the executions. But nothing – the petition, the exhaustion of all legal and diplomatic avenues, the appeals of various high-profile religious and political leaders – makes one jot of difference. At midnight on Tuesday 28 April Andrew and Myuran are killed by firing squad.

  Andrew is buried in south-west Sydney on Friday.

  Myuran just down the road on Saturday.

  On Monday I fly to northern Queensland to do a five-day hike.

  I am so heavy with sadness that I cry when I’m packing my bag, I cry on the plane, I cry as I strap on the pack before we get on a small boat to take us to the remote island where we are hiking.

  I feel like I haven’t stopped moving in months. Mystics and saints walked to find serenity. It is a sort of moving meditation, where stillness and nature combine. The hike will not be another gruelling task to complete, but rather a contemplative walk. I’m in a bad way – I’d never worked so hard, on something so incredibly unusual, difficult and high stakes, wanted something so fervently, and in the end failed in the endeavour.

  I need the reality of the executions to settle somewhere, somehow, even though some part of me will never accept what has happened. I have to come down to some quiet place, where I can walk and not talk and let beautiful, wild nature start to work its healing magic.

  Before I start the hike along the Thorsborne Trail on Hinchinbrook Island, I fit in a couple of small practice walks while the Mercy Campaign is in full swing. I trudge with a small pack and new boots on the stretch of car-heavy road that takes me from my home in Bellevue Hill to my office in Surry Hills. I carry a few heavy novels in my daypack.

  As I will find out, this practice is woefully inadequate.

  There are around ten of us doing the hike, travel journalists from around the world, many of whom have trekked some of the greatest and most difficult trails in the world. We walk along the beach on a bright, 30-degree autumn day, sand firm beneath our feet. Day one’s walk is only 6.5 kilometres – nothing, right? I can do that in an hour or two, just like walking along the cliffs from Bondi to Bronte and back, or from La Trobe Street to the MCG.

  My pack feels weird, though – a lot heavier than the practice pack I took along Oxford Street. In this pack I carry a tent, a sleeping bag, a mat, enough food for five days, clothes (including really bulky socks), toilet paper, two torches, a phone, a couple of chargers (including a battery one), lollies, snacks and three litres of water that comes from a weird bladder/hose thing that I keep in the top of my backpack to suck while walking. With its tube and bag, it looks alarmingly like something you’d wake up attached to after major surgery.

  The other thing about my pack is that it is not actually my pack. It belongs to Patrick, who is taller than me, with broader shoulders. As we walk along that first sandy stretch it becomes apparent that, as well as being heavy, the pack is going to be a real irritant. The right shoulder strap keeps slipping off, unbalancing me, and the fidgeting and adjusting, the leaning forward and shifting of weight never really stops until I take the pack off – a pleasure so sublime
that I actually moan with joy every time the load falls from my shoulders.

  But before I can take the pack off, I have to walk. And after ten minutes of flat sand we get to the boulders – huge things that look like they’ve been hurled onto the beach by an angry god. Apart from swimming around them, the only way through is to climb over them, which doesn’t seem right, as this is a hike, not a climb.

  The others – those seasoned hiking journalists – leap from boulder to boulder before disappearing from sight. It’s hours before I see them again.

  I am slow. My legs aren’t long enough and my arms aren’t strong enough to negotiate the boulders with ease. To make matters worse, when I launch myself onto the next boulder and try to haul myself up it (grazing the insides of my arms), the weight of the pack and the loose straps pull me backwards, leading to the sensation that I am about to lose my grip, fall back and dash my head on the rocks below. When I am not trying to drag myself up the rocks, I am frozen in fear.

  A couple of times I manage to take my pack off and hurl it up the rocks, so I don’t tip backwards. Seeing I am struggling, the rangers we are travelling with position themselves above and below me. The one below grasps the back of my pack and shoves it forward, giving me upwards momentum. The other ranger, on the boulder above, grabs my hand and pulls me up.

  This continues for another half-a-dozen boulders, until we get to an area that doesn’t involve climbing; instead it involves walking across rocks of different sizes, surface areas and degrees of slipperiness.

  Before the hike, I’d been warned by many that it wasn’t the snakes or the crocodiles I needed to worry about, it was the small things – the twisted ankle, for example, caused by slipping in between the rocks. There is a lot on my mind during this hike but, walking over those rocks, everything becomes narrowed to a laser point. I am too focused on looking down to see the scenery, too focused on each step to think about anything else. It is like the purest form of meditation – but horrible.