I taught my daughter to meditate
My daughter is 10. She is tall and blonde and has bright eyes and a quick wit. Her name is Anna, although I always call her Annie which she is starting to dislike because she's getting older. She is in the 5th grade in the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies which means that she had a lot of homework, too much homework. She bravely tries to do everything the best she can, but add a 45 minute bus ride and she's getting way too stressed. My kids all know that I meditate, and that I do pujas, and go to the Hindu Temple. There are lots of Ganeshas in my home and it is all part of their world. But I have never pushed it on them. We talk about it at times, and they know that if I don't meditate I get cranky. So when I quietly suggested to Annie that she might feel less stressed if she meditated, she said that she thought it might be a good idea. I gave her some short explanations that amounted to brief intro and second lecture during the week. Then on Sunday morning we sat down together in my puja room. The puja room is bed room sized and contains my spiritual library and 2 elaborate altars with a 3 foot stone Ganesha and a 4 foot Durga along with Vishnu, Lakshmi and other deities. I did my TM puja and felt the wonderful feeling that I enjoyed when I taught regularly in the 70's. I haven't taught much since; just a friend here and there. The great thing about the puja is that you can feel your awareness change. The feeling of connectedness to Guru Dev is real, distinct and completely different from any temple puja or yagya experience I have ever had. And at the end of the puja, when I gave Annie the mantra she repeated it a few times and then it just pulled her in and her eyes gently closed. We finished the initiation process and when she opened her eyes after her first 10 minute meditation, she smiled sweetly and said "that was really nice". I am proud of my daughter. Now she meditates during her bus ride each day. Already she is feeling less stressed, less tired, and happier. That makes me happy. There is a another side to this experience. When I was doing the puja I thought about how full of idealism I was in 1971 when I became an initiator. And today I could feel with the same certainty that I had back then, that TM was special; that MMY's devotion to Guru Dev was deserved and rightly inspirational. But what happened since then? As I sat in my puja room, I could feel all the layers of my disappointment and cynicism that accumulated over the years as the World Plan failed, there was no Perfect Health or anything else, MIU amounted to pretty mcuh nothing, and where are all the pundits, not to mention that I've done the 5-8 year plan many times over. At that time I thought about FFL. And it seems to me that we are all suffering from the same thing; a broken heart. We all believed and we all had evidence that our belief was not misplaced. After all, we're still meditating, still hoping that Maharishi is right. But not so many think so any more and FFL is a collection of people like me who have no reason to believe anything. We're heartbroken, disappointed, and disillusioned. Rightly so. But this past weekend my daughter learned to meditate. Guru Dev is alive in my heart and I'm going to hang onto that. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
