Rest for the Soul

“Meditation is the sharp tool to dig out the great treasure hidden within everybody's inner personality.” - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

The last two years have been a certain reminder of the fragility of humankind. I am not the type of person to make New Years resolutions, in fact, I don’t think I have ever made one. It just so happens that the hidden workings of life have seen fit to conjure some up for me in a timely fashion. I think for certain people like me; one must be hard on oneself, to be gentle to oneself in the long-run. These people, like myself, need to be reminded that shortcuts to happiness and escapes from reality are like credit card debt, one eventually has to pay up.

Towards the beginning of this year, at the age of twenty three, I fell out with a group of friends that I had been living with and moved in to a tiny, squarish studio apartment. This was my first experience living alone, but then again my childhood years were a training in abandonment and isolation, so I thought I would be ok. This turned out to be pure hubris. Within a month I had lost my job, was friendless, disconnected from my family and in the middle of a lockdown which, in Australia, left the streets largely empty; the people hiding away and distant behind their doors or masks. A deep hopelessness and loneliness had begun to set in and in a state of indifference and self-abandon I gave into the alluring, artificial solace of illicit substances, amphetamines specifically. This began my year-long vacation from the world.

Despite its recency, the year I spent in my dark hermitude is a haze. I exchanged the real world for one of virtuality (a refuge of my childhood) and I made a sanctuary of all the banal and destitute pleasures that were available to a young and spoilt antisocial:

Drugs, video games, pornography and TV shows.

It’s amazing how the human being can eventually become so numbed and adapted to the sordidness and desolation of their given circumstances. I lived in this vacuum for the better part of a year, sometimes I would not sleep for days at a time. My life was out of joint with the rest of the world, the sun would rise and set and it did not matter. In this way, time continued on, each day an attempt to cover over how I felt by that fact with empty hedonism.

On the 6th of December, I checked into the Emergency Department of a local hospital suffering from heroin withdrawals. Yes, in my COVID-cave I became addicted to one of the most addictive substances on earth. This 'phase' which had now become a flirtation with death, had reached its conclusion. I am glad to say that living by oneself with the nightly concern that your breathing would slow to a still, combined with the fear that you might not be sober enough to care, does compel one towards some amount of sanity. From there my admission to this hospital, I was granted a stay in a detox clinic where I began my first willing yet shaky steps towards sobriety.

It was in this detox facility where I made the commitment to do two things:

1. Meditate twice a day and schedule my day around this state of profound rest

2. Draw closer to those around me with an intention of kindness and well-wishing

I had learnt how to meditate a long time ago but did not keep the habit. This type of meditation was called Transcendental Meditation (TM) which involved twenty minutes of mantra meditation twice a day. With the wisdom and fear that comes from knowing the furthest extent of how badly one can mess up, I began to cling to the practice of meditation in desperate determination to redirect the course of my life.

As the New Year slowly enters into its next phase of “The Rest of the Year,” these two commitments have served me well. They were not simply New Year commitments, they were life commitments. As a fellow wounded soul had said in detox, “Recovery is about how to live life, not about counting the days one is sober.”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the leader of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement and master of catchy and profound sayings once stated:

“TM in the a.m. and the p.m... twenty minutes in the bank, all day in the market place.”

Twenty minutes of rest, in the morning and evening, far more profound and dynamic than sleep. Through this treasure of a daily practice, I find myself with more energy and hope for the day. It has allowed me to effortlessly – or in some cases given me the energy and motivation to put effort into – the mundane yet wonderful commitments of daily sober life. This interplay between deep rest and intentional action sustains my days and keeps me away from any thought of despair and its close friend: drugs.

Nowadays, I find myself a kindlier, gentler person than I ever thought was possible and my relationships have begun to flourish. I have reconnected and now live with my best friend, a good friend who I had become distant from during my time in self-exile. I have a stable job with people who value me and a girlfriend who I am learning to love and appreciate more each day that passes. It is this practice of meditation, along with an overarching intention and purpose for my day to be rooted in otherness and community which has made hope and joy a daily experience.

The COVID pandemic has had its destructive influence on our global family, whether indirect or direct, subtle or gross. In my case, the destruction and desolation of isolation and the opportunity to recede from necessary hardships of life was one that I accepted willingly. It is that very destruction which broke me so that I could be put back together; an experience which taught me the reality of vulnerability and how one must have compassion for oneself and by extension all others.

At the end of the day, I believe that every human being yearns for the same thing, rest of the soul and that every human being suffers horribly for lack of that. I wish in the coming year, that all the broken-hearted, broken-willed and wounded find that true rest, however that may manifest itself, and experience that flourishing and great joy that is only possible by virtue of that.