by Nick Duerden
‘Now you are close to the door, and you see inside . . . the temple. There is a beautiful image of Shiva.’
I do not know who, or what, Shiva is. The name is familiar, but how am I to develop a vision if I don’t know what, or who, Shiva is? No hassle.
She says that the image of Shiva is beautiful, sitting in the lotus posture.
Lotus I know, or think I know. It’s some kind of yoga position. Something cruel to do with the ankles touching the tops of the inner thigh.
She mentions red roses in front of his statue.
His. I had imagined a her.
‘Bow down to Shiva.’
No, I find myself thinking.
‘Close your eyes, and you are feeling immense joy, immense joy.’
As she says this, ‘immense joy, immense joy’, in that beautiful voice of hers, something unexpected happens. A waterfall of pinpricks washes over me, drenching me, and where moments before I had felt heavy, now I feel light as air. The sensation is full-bodied, euphoric.
‘Now is the time to repeat your resolve. The same resolve which you did in the beginning. Do not change it, and repeat for three times, with full awareness and feeling.’
‘I have overcome fatigue; I am returning to health,’ I say to myself, and repeat it three times. The goosebumps are not fleeting. They remain.
‘You have awareness of your body, from the top of your head to the tips of the toes, and say mentally in your mind: ommmmmmmmmmmm. Once again: ommmmmmmmmmm.’
I hum and thrum. My neck, my chest, my wrists, the backs of my knees – all pulse. I can feel my heartbeat, the rising and falling of my stomach. I am aware.
‘Stretch your body, do not be in a hurry. Move your fingers and toes. Slowly sit up, and now open your eyes.’ A pause, then: ‘The practice of yoga nidra is complete.’
It is as if I have woken from the deepest, most refreshing sleep. Yoga nidra has been around for centuries, I later read. Where has it been all my life? I feel amazing, invigorated, curiously whole. Perhaps this is the key I have been looking for. I resolve, right here, now, to practise every day, twice a day, so desperate am I to revisit those sensations. And, with it, to get back onto the path towards health, and to get better.
I will go on to do yoga nidra many more times over the next few months, and though I am always calmed by it, and rested, never again will I achieve quite such a spectacular natural high.
This of course leaves me utterly bereft.
Five
The long summer changes me. I enter it one person and emerge at its conclusion quite another, life slowing down emphatically and turning me timid, afraid, a coward. I learn to view my fatigue the way David Banner did the Incredible Hulk: terrified of angering it lest it unleash its full force and rage. At home, negotiating my way slowly over three floors, I am more or less fine: tired, yes, always tired, but in a way I can cope with if I don’t think about it too much. Survival instincts kick in: as long as I am okay here, within the house, on hand to help look after the children, to cook for them and play with them, then I will settle for that. Just grant me that, I whisper to myself as if in prayer. The merest excursion outside, however, depletes me in ways I still cannot fully comprehend. The shortest of strolls is now enough to sap me of everything.
I become alert, too, to every twinge of weariness, every possible warning sign, that tingling calm before the storm. In this way patterns are being created. My brain remembers. I am putting up limitations in pursuit of self-protection, unaware of the vicious cycle I am entering into. Because the more scared I remain, the more adrenalin I produce, and the adrenalin uses up what limited reserves of energy I have left.
And so I develop an expertise in micro-management. I place myself under house arrest, and rarely leave. This is hard for many reasons, the least of which is that it’s not that nice a house, it’s not big enough, not comfortable enough, and I grow bored of my confines quickly. Every day is the same old bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen. If the sun stays out for long enough, I dare to venture into the garden, but no further.
School starts, the autumn term, and Evie enters Reception. Elena takes the girls to school in the morning, then leaves work three hours early in order to pick them up again. Her boss is not happy with this situation, and neither am I. Their arrival home is a low point. They come bounding in, discarding scooters, bearing smiles, and Elena hugs me, asks how I am feeling, then disappears upstairs to my office, her office now, to make up for time lost. To offset feelings of emasculation and shame, I busy myself with the girls, feeding them snacks, helping with homework, officiating over TV, breaking up squabbles, counting star jumps on the trampoline. They know nothing of what I am going through, and I love them for their ignorance. The more I am around them, the less time I have to feel sorry for myself.
Still, I hate that Elena has to do this and also that her boss, a woman I have never met, knows that there are now problems at home. My instinct is to tell no one about this, but as the months go by, and in the absence of extended family, Elena needs to rely from time to time on the help of friends and neighbours, as well as work colleagues. All are kind and concerned, and they talk to Elena about how I am doing behind my back. On the rare occasions we all meet, we stick to polite conversation only: house prices, sport, the weather.
Most nights, I cook dinner. If the fridge is empty, Elena stops what she is doing upstairs and goes to the shops, but everything else I make sure I do: the cooking, the washing up. Afterwards, Elena comes into the kitchen to tidy up all the things I’ve missed.
Bedtime is a high-energy ordeal, but I insist we stick to our rota: one night I do it, the next night she does. By seven in the evening, I am all but worthless, and the hour it takes to get the girls up the stairs, into the bath, onto the toilet, their teeth brushed and pyjamas retrieved from under the bed depletes me in the same way a 10-mile bike ride once did. By the time it’s done, both of them in bed and still wide awake, with still so much to tell me, I make my way down the hall into my room and collapse onto the mattress. At some point, I will make my way beneath the covers, but not yet. Elena comes to visit, her empathy a painful underlining of my helplessness, and then I sleep a dreamless sleep and awake 10 hours later if anything more tired still. I resist sleeping in the day, for that way madness lies, and instead count off the daylight hours until mid-evening, when the idea of crawling back into bed at least seems permissible.
It is the weekend that offers adventure, two days when I allow Elena to cajole me – ‘for your sanity,’ she says – out into the world. These are events that require meticulous planning in order to minimise the physical effort required. Ten footsteps from the front door to the car, a short drive to the playground that has the shortest walk from its car park. Then a bench on which to sit, rooted to my spot. If the girls want pushing on the swings, carelessly located at the far end of the playground, Elena gets up to do it. An hour later, back in the car. Rather than returning home just yet, a pit stop to Costa or Nero for coffee and cake, a little more diversion, another change of scenery. Once in a while, I am rash and daring. I see a bookshop on the way home, and ask if we might stop. Elena double-parks and I get out, on my own, suddenly walking from here to there, into the shop, breathing in its smell and luxuriating in what are to me, by now, novel surroundings in both senses, going upstairs to fiction, downstairs to biography, all the while fielding texts from Elena warning that a traffic warden is lurking and that the girls are getting restless, and so I cut short the visit and come out with a bag full of books, full of apology and the most sincere gratitude.
I pay the price for this afterwards, however: for the next few days, I am David Banner at his most remorseful, several fathoms beyond mere ordinary tiredness, and always bemused by it, shocked and distraught.
As the autumn progresses, Elena is beginning to despair on my behalf. The most restive summer of my life has not alleviated my symptoms at all. If anything, they have settled in and become habitual, the new norm. I have
tried to fight the condition – with strength and reason, and the application of coarse minerals – but this does not seem to have worked, and the fear now overrides everything. I am passive towards the condition, not active. If asked, I tell Elena I am waiting to start to feel better, then I will do more. But she argues, reasonably, that if I don’t take steps towards that myself, it might not happen.
‘You never go out any more,’ she says. ‘You’re becoming agoraphobic.’
I reel at the very suggestion, like a punch to the stomach. I cannot possibly be agoraphobic. How can I be? I simply have a fear of this all-too-real fatigue, which seems to be evoked through physical exercise alone. I can manage the level of physical exercise in here, but I cannot out there. Does this make me agoraphobic?
I went to have a haircut the week before, preparing for the excursion via Journey Planner online, a faintly ridiculous thing to do for a two-mile round trip, but grimly necessary now. It involved taking a bus to a nearby barber’s, the bus empty save for a few elderly people on the way there, and packed on the way back with schoolchildren. It had felt good to be somewhere else, to talk to somebody other than the television screen. The young man who cut my hair had tattoos all over his arms and neck, of Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Munch’s The Scream. He told me that the world was ruled by the Illuminati, a group of elite leaders and celebrities who control all aspects of our lives. ‘Look at 9/11,’ he said in purported explanation. He told me that Barack Obama was a member, and also Kanye West, Rihanna and Beyoncé, and said that it would be obvious to anyone who had met them, who had shaken their hand. I told him I had met three of the four he had mentioned but noticed nothing untoward. The barber gawped at me, then took two clear steps back, just in case.
I arrived home feeling good. I didn’t like my haircut, of course, he had cut it too short, but it would grow back. I judged the expedition a success until, an hour later, it revealed itself a failure. By evening, my insides were ash. I had no appetite, no strength, and craved sleep. It would take five days to recover.
While waiting it out, life is happening elsewhere, without me. I am no longer actively searching for much work, I go nowhere, my social life has stopped. Elena is doing everything for me, which makes me feel guilty and ashamed. I want to take control, to fight this.
But how? I still do not know where to turn. Breaking my no-googling rule, I find myself researching Dr Dolittle a little more, only to read more bad things about him, more letters of complaint, and so he is ruled out as a potential salvation. Besides, there is a four-month waiting list for his clinic. I need help now. Now. I can see no point in returning to my GP, who will only refer me to him again. My sole option, then, is the DIY approach, to throw myself into whatever private therapies, treatments and programmes I can find. All I need is time, patience and money, none of which I currently possess in sufficient quantities.
With the post-pub disruptions from next door ongoing, which our insistent complaints do little to stem, I decide, first, to focus on my sleep. I am reading about the importance of rest, and how to do it well. Sleeping properly, not lightly, but deeply enough to release sufficient levels of dopamine, is important to everyone, but crucial to someone with depleted energy reserves. I am now mostly using yoga nidra to fall asleep to, and though Anandmurti Gurumaa had implored me to ‘stay awake’, other practitioners have less of a problem with dropping off, some even actively encouraging it. We by all accounts continue to listen on an unconscious level that never sleeps, like a light that never goes out. And so every night I fall asleep to body-rotation instruction, visualising my fingers, my toes and Shiva, whom I have since googled – undeniably a boy, but a pretty one.
To my surprise, I do not tire of yoga nidra, but rather become accustomed to, and even reliant upon, it. But I do find myself wanting to supplement it with something else, something that either goes deeper, or perhaps resonates more. You can only really throw yourself into things by employing a scattershot approach, I decide, and so the logic I employ is this: the more I try, the more enlightened I might become.
I come across an audio meditation practice called LifeFlow, the conjoining of the two words presumably designed to illustrate the effortless link that should exist within all of us in the ideal world we wish to inhabit. It promises startling results.
‘You can allow this scientifically proven audio technology to bring your whole life into perfect harmony and feel peace of mind today!’ reads the website blurb, employing, as these things do, a proliferation of exclamation marks in the hope of encouraging, or at least fostering, belief. ‘YES!’ it goes on, peremptorily, ‘please give me instant access to this breakthrough technology.’
It is hard not to read such bold and hectoring claims without arching an English eyebrow at it, not least when LifeFlow, as far as I can make out, is essentially meditation muzak. It offers a free sample, eight minutes of it, during which time ‘happy’ endorphins and anti-ageing hormones should by all accounts flow through my mind and body. I will start to feel creative, it promises, my brain will feel revitalised, and the new thoughts I shall, as a direct consequence, experience will emerge from my ‘hidden subconscious genius within’.
I had not previously given much thought to my subconscious genius within. I hadn’t even known I possessed one. All I wanted was for my sleep to be deep and restorative. The first downloadable CD, which comprises 40 minutes of meditation soundtrack, retails at $67. This, I learn, is merely an introductory soundtrack. There is more. The complete 10-CD boxset goes for $977. But I am lucky, because I happen to be visiting the website at a time when they have an offer on, and so it is currently $777, and comes with a one-year money-back guarantee. By signing up to this, I will also qualify for further CDs on things called Optimal Learning, Creative Flow and Discover Meditation as FREE GIFTS (their capitals), which, it is claimed, have a retail value, despite not being available in the shops, of $331.
It is here that I hesitate and take a step out of myself to observe things objectively. I am walking a narrow line that divides being desperate to get better and merely being desperate. I am not the latter kind, not yet, and so I find it hard to believe that $777 will buy me not just renewed health but also on-tap creativity and intelligence, even though I would love to believe it because, frankly, I could do with a bit of both. But I do listen to the ‘8 Minute Wonder’ sample, and I like it, a babbling brook busy with the sounds of rapidly running water, chirping crickets and windchime effects. Through earphones, the sounds bouncing from one bud to the other and pouring directly into my brain with such urgency they temporarily render all exterior thought impossible, I find I am transported into another world that is vivid and bright and alive. I revisit the ‘8 Minute Wonder’ several times over the next few days in pursuit of meditative top-ups.
It is during my prevarication that the emails begin.
‘How about that LifeFlow demo track? Awesome, isn’t it?’ it reads by way of introduction. A lot of bold print follows. It wants to know how it made me feel, whether I became soothed and relaxed. Most people do, it assures. But the email reveals a little anxiety, too. It worries that I might not have listened to it yet, and if this is the case, then ‘you absolutely must’. It promises me that I won’t regret it, that I’ll be converted, and swiftly – so much so that I will want to upgrade, at the previously mentioned cost, for something called the ‘Industrial Strength’ version.’
The email is signed, in an inky scrawl, ‘Michael’. This is Michael Mackenzie, the man behind Project Meditation, a Scot who has lived in America for the past 30 years. He is, as I will come to find, terribly persuasive.
For legal reasons, I should perhaps state that I’m not suggesting Michael Mackenzie is a huckster. In fact, there is strong suggestion online of the effective science behind his efforts. There is corroborated argument that LifeFlow does decrease binaural carrier frequency, which places a temporary stress on the brain, which in turn causes it to grow, much like a muscle would. Many people who ha
ve signed up, I read on other websites, rave about its properties; as is the way with these things, others do not.
The next day, inky Michael emails again. His written approach is not a million miles from that of a used-car salesman convinced that the likely customer merely needs the bolstering effect of his italicised enthusiasm. He writes that, while he may not know me personally, he knows that I am someone seeking peace, less stress. I want to meditate, he knows I do, but I’ve encountered hurdles. I might have tried other meditation courses before, and come away disappointed. But this one, he says, is better. I alight on two words, in capital letters: ‘JET FUEL’. He writes about the science of his methods again, and of the ‘immediate and lasting rewards’.
‘The next day, another email, this one telling me that doctors around the world were using the programme. He quotes two of them, extolling the meditation’s myriad virtues. The tacit suggestion here is that if it’s good enough for medical practitioners, it’s good enough for us, too.’
After the flood, the deluge.
More emails, more bold type, more caps lock. FACTS and RESULTS always win over claims, he suggests. I choose not to read the FACTS and RESULTS he goes on to list, because life is short and I need the loo, and there are only so many bold and capital letters you can read on screen without feeling headachey. I click away.
Still more follow, each wheedling and cajoling and coaxing, Michael dangling his carrot, pinching and prodding, beckoning me ever closer, or at least trying to. It is when an email arrives asking whether I ever feel like I am alone, that I’ve no one to talk to, that no one can relate to my situation, or cares enough, that I feel the snap. This is the last straw, the camel, the broken back and everything else. If I had ever felt inclined to transfer him my $67, or even my $777, then this email ensures I will never do so now. Michael Mackenzie is becoming an email pest. Go away, I want to say to him.