Get Well Soon

by Nick Duerden

  They – and I am not sure who they are; just random people, probably – they say that there are five stages to loss and grief. There is denial and anger. There is bargaining and depression. And there is acceptance.

  I have been ill a long while now, almost two years. I’m a veteran. I have experienced the loss of my health and grief for its passing, and I have gone through the subsequent denial and anger (isolation, too). I may be in the bargaining stage now, and for all I know depression looms, but greater in my field of vision at the moment, I think, is acceptance, or something like it. It has taken some time to get here, but it could hardly have arrived any quicker, if only because these things take time. The acceptance seems to be coinciding with the meditation, or perhaps the meditation is helping me with the acceptance. I could have started meditating two years ago – the offer was there – but I didn’t feel ready for it then. The fact that I do now must have something to do with this fifth stage. And so I am not entirely clear which it is that is making me feel better, calmer, more generally at peace, less fearful, and that has left me with a certain physical confidence restored. Is this the acceptance at work, or the meditation? Does it matter?

  I cannot really grasp acceptance, it is too intangible, too in the ether; but meditation is more definable, there are classes for it, apps. So I go with the meditation. And Headspace has piqued my interest. I want to do more of it, but I want now to research what else is out there, to browse the competition, the alternatives, in the hope that one appeals more than all the others, that one goes deeper, feels more thorough, is the best fit, works.

  And then, a week later, I find it, unexpectedly one breezy Thursday evening, in SE1, just off the Tower Bridge Road, a short way down from a Tesco Metro.

  Fourteen

  I am standing in silence in a living room alongside a man I have just met, Will Williams. It is meant to be a contemplative, even spiritual, silence, but I spend it trying not to envy his apartment overlooking the Thames, and failing miserably. It’s a converted warehouse space with exposed wooden beams and views of the river. We are facing the wall, in front of a framed picture of somebody called Guru Dev, one of the masters of the Vedic tradition. Will has his eyes closed, is singing something in what I later find out is Sanskrit, and is offering to Dev the gifts I have been encouraged to bring – three pieces of fruit and a bunch of thornless flowers, Tesco’s cellophane removed. As he sings in a mellifluous, sinewy voice that would never win him a recording contract, I steal a glance at him – at Will, not Dev. His eyes are closed. He looks utterly serene.

  Will Williams is more Andy Puddicombe than he is Guru Dev, the modern face of an ancient practice, with a handsome website that appeals to the curious novice like me. He wears a pale V-necked jumper and a brand of jeans I would like to own, stylish, likely expensive. He once worked in the music industry, but has left all that behind to become instead an entrepreneurial Vedic meditation master, his objective to make it everyone’s meditation of choice. He runs city courses and weekend retreats at plush country manors.

  After several more minutes of Sanskrit verse, he motions me to follow him in kneeling. This makes me a little uncomfortable, genuflecting before a spiritual icon I have never heard of alongside a total stranger. I plan potential escape routes, in case they prove necessary. Is the door locked, the key hidden? Then, so suddenly it takes me by surprise, Will turns towards me and whispers something directly in my ear, his breath hot and intimate against my skin. Though I do not know it yet, this is to be my own personal Vedic mantra, which I will say repetitively in my mind for 20 minutes twice a day, every day.

  He stops. We move to the sofa, exchange a glance and smile at one another. ‘That was the only really ceremonial bit,’ he says reassuringly. ‘Everything else is very normal, very ordinary.’

  Seated close together, a cushion separating us, he requests that I close my eyes and repeat my mantra aloud, two syllables that feel pleasant on the tongue. I do this for a full minute, after which he tells me to say it quieter, then as a whisper, and then eventually only in my head until I am sure I have it down and memorised.

  I am to do this now for a full 20 minutes, my first proper go at Vedic. It takes an age to pass. Time slows, then trickles, to what is surely a standstill, and all the while I can sense Will a foot away on the sofa. Is he staring at me? Should I look? I cannot hear him breathe, and for a moment I wonder whether he has gone, but I think I sense the warmth of his presence on me. I feel awkward at the prospect he might be watching me, voyeuristically, and I try to put it out of my mind. I fight against the impulse to scratch, to fidget. Focus. I focus on my mantra, the clean crispness that encourages metronomic repetition, and gradually I begin to drift. The silence is a vacuum, an absence, but then it begins to fill me up, like a pump, until I am full with it.

  Eventually, Will makes a noise that signals the end of the session, but he encourages me to keep my eyes closed for a further two minutes, thus facilitating a re-entry to consciousness with minimum disruption.

  When I open my eyes, I turn to see him smiling back at me beatifically. I tell him I feel as if I have woken from a particularly deep sleep, and that I feel refreshed. The sunlight somehow seems brighter.

  He beams.

  ‘When we meditate,’ he tells me, ‘we achieve deep, deep rest, and the nervous system is able to spontaneously heal itself of old pain and emotion and any negative response patterns. The more we do this, the more they will wither away. We then have the freedom to make conscious choices about how to respond to life’s circumstances. Occasionally, we may trick ourselves into responding according to our old patterns, but increasingly we find a better way to engage.’

  He nods once at me, and I nod back at him.

  ‘Good, then,’ he says. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  On the way out, he gifts me two of the three pieces of fruit I had brought for the guru, another little bit of ceremony to demonstrate the warm feelings that come when we share.

  Back out on the street, I peel and eat the orange. It tastes good.

  Vedic meditation has been around for thousands of years. It was repressed by the British in colonial times after they became suspicious of the natives indulging in quite so rum a practice, but it was subsequently revived when the British left, and has blossomed in popularity ever since. It now boasts a global following. Vedic has a close cousin in Transcendental Meditation, both requiring the repetition of personalised mantras, and consisting of two daily sessions lasting 20 minutes. Any significant difference between the two, at least for the novice, is negligible, but TM is by far the more popular, and consequently more fashionable. The American film director David Lynch runs a foundation in America that works to make TM available to as many people as possible, and as a result it is now taught in schools, the workplace, even prisons. Celebrities have dabbled, a factor that has afforded the discipline many column inches. When I contact a TM centre in the UK, explaining that I am a journalist and wondering if it might be possible to sit in on a course, the lady I speak to groans. ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘not another one.’ TM is popular enough. It doesn’t need the likes of me to promote it further.

  Vedic, then, is in its shadow. Will Williams tells me he considers it the purer form.

  It is the mantra that sets both apart from other similar practices. The mantra is a set of phonemes, or vibrations, that allow the nervous system to relax, and encourage the brain to go into a state of coherence. Ordinarily, the brain is only 30–40 per cent coherent at any one time; at all other times there is too much competing white noise. This is where the mantra comes in. As one starts to repeat it, the brain begins to slow down and moves gradually into alpha state. Alpha state is something all brains unwittingly crave, because it allows the constituent parts to move towards greater coherence. Disruptive frequencies – inhibiting thoughts, anxiety – can now settle, which balances the nervous system and all the other systems within the body that have been put out of alignment by the simple toil of daily life.


  ‘And so,’ Will explains, ‘on a physiological level, everything is now moving in the direction of going back to its default setting of optimal functionality.’

  Will stumbled onto Vedic after he became ill in 2007. He had been managing a number of bands, putting on music events, and generally living the kind of lifestyle that is commensurate to burnout. After a trip to South America, he returned home convinced he had caught some kind of tropical disease. His liver wasn’t working properly, nor his thyroid. His doctor said that he was on course for diabetes unless he quickly changed his diet, his lifestyle. He had trouble sleeping. So he stopped drinking and cleared the fridge completely of ready meals. He dabbled with reflexology, acupuncture, hypnosis; anything he could think of to help break through what was increasingly becoming a debilitating condition.

  A friend suggested he try meditating. Will had grown up in East Grinstead, the cult capital of Europe, and the UK HQ for Scientologists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses (it has a lot of ley lines). Growing up in such an environment had left him with an ingrained suspicion for anything even vaguely alternative, and he had already found the reflexology, the acupuncture and the hypnosis a stretch. But he was desperate, and decided to give it a go.

  It worked.

  ‘The more I meditated, the more my consciousness felt like it was expanding,’ he tells me. Intrigued, he started to look into the ancient Vedic knowledge, and began reading books on the subject. ‘It was blowing me away, opening up all the mysteries of the universe to me.’

  As he began to feel better, the prospect of returning to his day job suddenly seemed vacuous, a waste of precious time. ‘I no longer wanted to do something simply for the sake of paying the bills; that just felt irrelevant. I thought it was time to start growing personally.’

  He studied Vedic for two years in the UK, but then, craving more, went to India to train with the masters. He returned, not in a robe, but convinced that what he had learned was special enough to now impart to as many people as possible, albeit in ways amenable to the Western mindset. In conversation, Will can come across as evangelical about his discoveries. His eyes shine when he talks, and he has the kind of smile you would expect of Scrabble players who have a triple word score looming. But he has dialled down the cult sensibilities, the incense whiff of overt spirituality, and there is really nothing otherworldly about him at all. The modern guru is a necessary chameleon.

  ‘I want to teach it in a way to fully convey its benefits for people over here,’ he says. ‘And for me, that means: don’t make it dogmatic, doctrinal. I don’t want to sit here and tell people what to do and how to do it. Instead, I want to give them the tools to start accessing their most divine natures, their deepest, most expanded selves. Because once you start familiarising yourself with that at an experiential level, then maybe you’ll become as connected to it as I did, and you’ll want to share the richness as well. It is such a simple technique. You don’t need to be told what the rules are, because you will tune into the rules yourself, and work it out for yourself. The best thing to do is to go out and experience it yourself, because once you have, there will be no more doubt in your mind as to its benefits.’

  An introductory course in Vedic meditation costs several hundred pounds and takes place over four consecutive days. After my initial introduction, I return again on Friday evening, this time alongside seven other beginners. Most are in their 30s or 40s, one is a little younger, another much older. I am sitting next to a man with a shaved head, a lot of bulk, and tattoos on his forearms that his Stone Island shirt fails to conceal. He looks like he knows about anger, and how to wield it, and his faltering smile does nothing to minimise the aura of menace. But he proves, over time, to be a sweet man, and intensely vulnerable. At least once every session, seemingly unprompted, he begins to sweat profusely and to tremble, the mild tremors of a panic attack. It is at this point that he no longer looks capable of great violence, but rather like he is about to burst into copious tears.

  On the other side of me is a woman, a yoga teacher. She tells us she has a hole in her heart, and that she recently had a stroke. Doctors have told her to expect another one soon. She used to love to paint, but is unable to now. Another woman, the oldest here and originally from the Caribbean, tells us that she has been living with pain for many years. ‘I’m sick of being sick,’ she says, and the smile she summons is purely heartbreaking. And then there is the ebullient actress, who, once she starts talking, finds she cannot stop, offering meandering explanations, then apologies for them, then falls into a self-conscious giggle and an all-enveloping laugh. She is in her mid-40s, she has multiple sclerosis, and is currently between relationships, flat-sharing with someone she doesn’t like. She talks on, entertaining everyone, until Will gently clears his throat. He explains that during each meditation session, we will be expelling all sorts of toxins. This might send some of us plummeting in an emotional freeall, but if it does, do not worry. It’s temporary.

  Will sits at the far end of the room, with us gathered in front of him in a semi-circle. Behind him are two large windows that open onto a balcony which overlooks a small inlet of river and, beyond that, another grand warehouse building converted into apartments. Our view is of dozens of floor-to-ceiling windows offering views into dozens of separate lives. At 7.30 in the evening, it proves better than watching television, people arriving home from work as one by one the darkened windows suddenly flood with light. As Will explains that, via regular practice, we will begin to feel more energised, invigorated, confident and playful, I watch a man over his left shoulder, in his bedroom, wearing nothing but a very tight pair of bright red briefs, begin his yoga routine. Even from this distance, his abs are clearly defined. I sneak a look at the actress; she is watching him, too.

  A light in the next apartment goes on. A couple, dressed in suits. She carelessly discards her handbag, he his newspaper, and the actress and I watch as they move into the curtainless bedroom and get undressed. They let their clothes fall where they stand, then reach for T-shirts and sweatpants. Back in the other room, the woman opens the large fridge and takes out two or three boxes, last night’s takeaway perhaps, which she hands to him, before turning back for cutlery and a bottle of wine, a pair of wine glasses. Together they sit on the sofa, the backs of their heads to us, and eat while watching TV.

  ‘. . . So let’s do that now,’ Will is saying. ‘Ready? Close your eyes.’

  I am grateful for the distraction, and for the next 20 minutes we meditate in an eerie collective silence, the very fact of being surrounded by other people doing exactly what I am doing lending the practice an atmosphere so physical I feel I could reach out and touch it.

  We meet again just 12 hours later, early – arguably too early – on Saturday morning, and then again on Sunday. During the sessions, each of which lasts three hours, Will gives us a very thorough overview of the practice’s origins and of the myriad benefits of becoming a practitioner ourselves. Each of these benefits he backs up, at length, with reference to scientific corroboration. He speaks of the infinite reservoirs of energy, vitality, creativity and wisdom that run in all of us, and how all we need to do to become our optimal selves is to learn how to access them. Meditation promotes increased activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is where we experience our high-level thinking. If we meditate regularly, then we will enter further into the realms of pure consciousness.

  ‘If you are able to de-excite your nervous system to such a profound level that it can then tune into the underlying field of consciousness, then you are able to tune into all sorts of different layers, and go deep,’ he says.

  He tells us that, after years of practice, he himself has reached higher states of consciousness. I ask him what it was like.

  ‘Wow,’ is his reply, eyes like saucers.

  Occasionally over the weekend, one of us will forget our personalised mantra, at which point Will, falling into ceremony again, leads us into another room to re-whisper it in
our ears. I read later, online, that such privacy is to preserve the original effectiveness and purity of the technique. If the mantras are not carefully safeguarded, shrouded in their mystical secrecy, then that purity might become diluted, their effectiveness lost. That at least is the claim.

  It’s one way to keep TM teachers in business.

  We complete the daily sessions with our 20 minutes of collective silence, each of us mentally intoning our mantras, not a sound in the room save for the percussive rumblings of stomachs, because when one rumbles, another inevitably follows, like yawns. At the end of each, Will brings us back into the here and now, his apartment with its exposed beams and river views, a benevolent smile on his face as he offers us more herbal tea.

  ‘You will all see a lot of changes over the next few months,’ he predicts. ‘Keep in touch, let me know how you get on.’

  The yoga teacher, the woman with the hole in her heart, has questions. She drills him on the finer points of the science of it, and there is much discussion of the toxin release. Will she, she wants to know, shout at her husband again, like she did last night?

  ‘If you do, it’s natural, it’s normal,’ Will assures her. ‘And don’t worry, it will pass.’

  And this is how it finishes. I have found it fascinating and invigorating, and I have enjoyed it more than I might have expected. Will is a persuasive teacher. I do wonder how much of it I have really taken in, but this doesn’t matter because what I am left with – that there is ample scientific proof that meditation is no mere fad or gimmick but something that actually works, and has worked for millions of people over thousands of years – resonates powerfully. And I like doing it, I like the idea of two sessions per day, the prolonged, almost taunting silence it requires from an individual, the concentration, a certain mettle, even. I want to do this – more than mindfulness, more than yoga nidra – again.