Chapter 2: On Meditation - Who Is Wellness For?

Before my sister introduced meditation to my mother and father (they’ve both been practitioners of Swami Ramdev throughout the last decade), I learned how to meditate through my political self-exploration, which brought me (vaguely) to my roots. I knew meditation came from my people, at the least the kind of meditation that has been absurdly popular since the 1960s, and there was something embarrassing (yet quaint) about learning about my lands through white people’s interpretation. Thankfully, it was a gateway that didn’t dissuade me (back in the 1990s it was the best we had), and like Malcolm X, a hero of mine, I was trying to track my origins, I was trying to understand myself culturally, ancestrally. During this self-enunciation, in an attempt to tackle the darkness that lay underneath the seams, beyond the surface of smiles and fighting for justice, I thought about meditating. I thought about what it meant to be healed. Could it be possible? I didn’t know, but I became obsessed with the idea of stilling the mind. Though with my own mind, rapid and distinct, I was terrible at doing it.

The English word “meditation” stems from meditatum, a Latin term meaning “to ponder.” In those early days, in a desire to understand life, I tried to ponder with no attachment to thought. The pursuit of meditation seemed like wanting to be immersed in a sea of nothingness, afloat on the feeling of deep connectivity to the universe and other beings, plants, elements. And, through practice and scripture, I gathered meditation was so much more than just the act or ritual; it was a state of being, one that impacts all the ways in which we interact with other human beings.

According to a Healthline article entitled “12 Science-Based Benefits of Meditation,”^[1] meditation “enhances self-awareness,” “can generate kindness,” and “promotes emotional health.” I see meditation as an approach to one’s psychic well-being that is attained through consistent, at times grueling, work, but this in itself is a concept largely abstracted in the West—by white folk who decontextualize everything they extract. There’s something in the “looking after yourself” that wellness provides, like a shield, to declare a sense of righteous betterment. The way meditation is taught in the West is like a catch-all phrase, a buy-one-get-evolution passport that relies on nothing beyond a callous enterprise that has labeled itself something grander than it is. Capitalism will do that. Fifty ways to help meditation get you laid, the paradox is a-plenty, and it’s transparent.

Truthfully, the lineage to and of meditation is far more harrowing than detailed in the brochure for the seven-day retreat you’ve paid for. Part of the obsession of Western confluence with what it interprets as the East’s discretion is its incapacity to understand our way of life while totally pilfering it. I say “our” because I feel this in my bones, this sense of being that is deeply anti-capitalist because it relies on real enlightenment, not your Instagram kind, which is a major philosophy of the East to invest in holisticism. To pursue one’s own evolution, you have to understand it’s a concerted process that demands your regular participation. In order to meditate, you should know the history, and you should also think of why you’ve never had to think of this before.

There are various layers not taken into context when the spiritual practice of meditation is distilled for a Western audience, which is, unfortunately still, code for “white.” “People talk about decolonizing knowledge, one way to decolonize it is to return to the historical roots,” explains scholar and historian Ali A. Olomi.^[2] It’s also another way the West gets a claim on its colonies, stealing not only resources, but filling museums with looted goods, books with stolen information. These are all just methods to further (and perpetually) colonize. When I was a child, my father would always ask me, “Who declared the WTO? Who created patenting, copyright laws? Intellectual property?” He was telling me to look further at who profits from the power of claiming things as one’s own, overriding entire histories and cultures in the process.

Demonization is a part of the colonial project—it’s the only way to ensure that we never, ever resist. It’s very suspect to me that within the realm of wellness, language is also positioned to emphasize a divide between the former and “science,” as if they’re mutually exclusive, when in many cultures the two were braided into each other. The Muslim world invested in science (which is the backbone of Western science), yet as much investment was put into astrology, health, and the protection of the body. Ibn-Sina, a Muslim polymath, was known for his five-volume encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine, “which includes in its section on ‘Preservation of Health,’ information on eight types of massage techniques and their effects and techniques.” Ibn-Sina systematized the medical information gathered from dispersed ancient Greek sources and updated them with his own observations and practice.^[3] Non-Western cultures categorically invested in personal health because they understood that an individual who was well was indicative of a holistically well society. There was a larger desire to protect people, and therefore healing was accessible and for all, whether it be via medicine people, healers, shamans, or witches. I remember talking to a friend from the Ojibwe nation about what’s rarely ever talked about when we talk about colonization is the loss of our health.

In a Research for All paper entitled “Decolonization of Knowledge, Epistemicide, Participatory Research and Higher Education,” Budd L. Hall, a Canadian professor, and Rajesh Tandon, an Indian practitioner of participatory research and development, explain, “What is generally understood as knowledge in the universities or our world represents a very small proportion of the global treasury of knowledge. University knowledge systems in nearly every part of the world are derivations of the Western canon, the knowledge system created some 500 to 550 years ago in Europe by white male scientists.”^[4] The West didn’t position itself as an authority by accident, it did so by destroying the playing field to ensure nobody else could compete. They wanted to present themselves as the only purveyors of esteemed knowledge, and what this required was murdering half of the world. Which they did.

This process of dispossession of other knowledge is what Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a Portuguese sociologist, has called epistemicide, or the destruction of knowledge. Colonial thought relied upon destroying or extracting knowledge from the cultures it colonized, and according to Hall and Tandon, the four epistemicides can be characterized as:

1. the conquest of Al-Andalus, and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Europe;
2. the conquest of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas started by the Spanish, continued by the French and the English and still underway today;
3. the creation of the slave trade that resulted in millions being killed in Africa and at sea, and more being totally dehumanized by enslavement in the Americas; and
4. the killing of millions of Indo-European women, mostly through burning at the stake as witches because their knowledge practices were not controlled by men.^[5]

The most egregious part about this appropriation is that within the context of appropriation for Western benefit, an aspect of colonialism that is less frequently explored is the sadistic, protracted long game of colonization. How sick do you have to be to want to murder, steal, pillage, and rape for your own benefit . . . for an eternity? Why does no one talk about the savagery of the colonizer, only the inherent existence of that in the colonized? Meditation is a perfect entry point into looking at how something becomes taken, diluted, and then decontextualized and sold back to rich white people at a steep price.

According to archaeologists’ discovery of meditation, it was first encountered in the Indus Valley, via wall art dating from approximately 5000 to 3500 BCE, with “descriptions of meditation techniques found in Indian scriptures dating back around 3,000 years ago.”^[6] Written evidence of meditation was first seen in the Vedas^* around 1500 BCE, and is seen as a spiritual exercise, as well as a religious practice, in both Hinduism and Buddhism. “Six hundred years before the birth of Christ, at the time when Buddha lived, the people of India must have had a wonderful education. Extremely free-minded they must have been. Great masses followed him. Kings gave up their thrones; queens gave up their thrones. People were able to appreciate and embrace his teaching—so revolutionary, so different from what they had been taught by the priests through the ages. Their minds must have been unusually free and broad,” wrote Swami Vivekanada, a Bengali Hindu monk, writer, and educator, because “he [Buddha] invited everyone to enter into that state of freedom which he called Nirvana.”^[7]

The history of meditation and its surfacing in India is an important and often overlooked component to the historical tradition of meditation itself. Swami Vivekananda brings up two important facets of the history of meditation. First, this practice—and honestly any form of spiritual enlightenment—was governed by caste in India, and therefore generally a requirement for those who identified as Brahmins, i.e., priests and spiritual teachers, and thus a practice that excluded lower-caste, i.e., Dalit or Adivasi folks (who are seen as unable to have the same access to God) across the subcontinent. But, with the advent of Buddhism, through the teachings of Gautama Buddha, a rarefied idea of nirvana—a state acquired through focus, detail, and precision of the mind through meditative practice—was introduced to all. In fact, the Buddha was known to be openly anti-caste. According to renowned Dalit scholar, economist, and reformer, Bhimrao Ambedkar, untouchability (Dalits were previously referred to as “untouchables”) came into Indian society around 400 CE, due to a struggle between Buddhism and Brahmanism.

In a paper titled “Buddhism and Caste” by Professor David Dale Holmes, “According to the Buddha, there are no distinguishing characteristics of genus and species among men, unlike in the case of grasses, trees, worms, moths, fishes, beasts, birds, etc. The Buddha goes on to show that the apparent divisions between men are not due to basic biological factors but are ‘conventional classifications’ (samanna). The distinctions made in respect of the differences in skin colour (vanna), hair form (kesa), the shape of the head (sìsa) or the shape of the nose (nása), etc., are not absolute categories. One is almost reminded of the statement of the scientists that ‘the concept of race is unanimously regarded by anthropologists as a classificatory device. . . .’ So when Buddhism asks us to treat all men, irrespective of race or caste, as our fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters or as one family, there seems to be a deeper truth in this statement than that of a mere ethical recommendation.”^[8] Understanding this context is important in understanding the revolutionary introduction of enlightenment for any or all—and perhaps how meditation was passed—and reached its global spread—through the Silk Road around the fifth or sixth century BCE.

If we don’t understand its origins, we deny the truth. We then also have a lackluster understanding of how practices, as well as humans, evolve. It’s important to note how long Indian civilization has been thinking about, and tracking, the mind. The cultural and spiritual genesis of meditation grew out of inquiry about the state of consciousness and what lay behind the guise of what we do and do not know—but also who are and how we came to be. In “Psychiatry, Colonialism and Indian Civilization: A Historical Appraisal,”^[9] academic Shridhar Sharma explains the potential philosophy behind this deep inquiry: “The ancient Indian emphasized the theory of unity of body and soul and also explained how to deal with the health and mental health problems in a psychosomatic way.” What an indelible word, psychosomatic. In Indian culture, there was an understanding of the importance of one’s wholeness, that the unification of oneself—mind, body, and spirit—was a necessity to understand how to be human. Yet, despite these tectonic discoveries, the spiritual advancement of Indian thought in a modern context has been co-opted to serve Western minds and egos. It’s absurd that capitalism—the antithesis of how Buddha came to be—should commodify his work, and it should be questioned, Who is that for? If it’s in the interest of the market, it can never be for the people. In this late stage of capitalism, that much is true.

When we examine colonization, we rarely think of the insidiousness of its impact on racial capitalism, and how it disarmed multiple civilizations by neutering them of their knowledge—and then later by profiting off the exact same cultural knowledge that was destroyed. Omer Aziz writes in the Los Angeles Book Review, “Before the British occupation, India was not a poor backwater, but a culturally and economically prosperous civilization that had existed for millennia. India was home to the oldest university in the world, had originated our numerical system, had produced countless thinkers, philosophers, poets, and scientists.”^[10] My father, Dr. Sami Hasan, in his upcoming book, gathers research from esteemed Indian scholar Dadabhai Naoroji, the founder of the “drain theory,” which suggests what Aziz eloquently synthesizes. Before colonization, India was a strong, leading civilization.

“Resource drainage due to colonial pillage created a huge economic and psychological dent among the victims.” According to Naoroji, Britain drained forty million pounds per colonized year, creating “extreme poverty, destitution, and degradation.”^[11] He also calculated that the drain possibly would have amounted to £723,900,000 in the next thirty years, concluding, “So constant and accumulating a drain, even in England, would soon impoverish her. How severe then must be its effects on India when the wage of a laborer is from two pence to three pence a day.”^[12] Naoroji lamented, bringing up an integral point: Who gets to have a good life and be well? Lord Curzon, before becoming the viceroy, asserted in the British Parliament that India “was the pivot of our Empire. If this Empire lost any other part of its dominion we could survive, but if we lost India, the sun of our Empire would be set.”

Consider all this and turn to Forbes, which declared that in 2017, 365.55 million Indians lived in multidimensional poverty. This is more than the entire population of the United States. When we unpack wellness, it’s important to name not only the commodification, repurposing, and repackaging of Indigenous cultural knowledge for a white Western audience, but also to contextualize it, because through these two actions we can actually hold the entire truth. If every colonizing nation were to pay back its reparations, the entire “Western world” would collapse. Think about that. Think about what it means to be stepped on, taken from to keep alive the countries that have to dehumanize you in order to continue to rationalize exploiting you. For what else is white supremacy?

To go back to epistemicide—which involved destroying education in the holistic sense, meaning: self-education, self-awareness, and self-sovereignty—these knowledge systems were demonized, denigrated, and thwarted because they were seen as threatening to the status quo. Let’s not forget that the ethnic cleansing of millions around the world required the backing of the Christian church. This was another way cultural and religious information (which was often one and the same thing) was further quashed, literally demonized, satanized. What we don’t talk about when we talk about colonization is Christianity. The evidence of epistemicide is proof that the entire intention behind Western colonial power was to create “third world countries” by depleting them of their own natural resources that they should be allowed to feed their own people with—whether figuratively or spiritually. Yet even that—the ability to maintain the well-being of people—was stolen to ensure generations and generations of “unwell people”—a.k.a. the developing, or third, world. Meanwhile, these nation-states, reeling from the pressure of orchestrated wars, genocide, and large-scale resource grabs (India included), accepted the narrative that the West propagated, only to be forced into paying off debt that these Western countries issued in the first place. If you think this is past tense, think about how often we interrogate everything the West has gained through plundering and stealing, still, to this day?

Though many of us know these things to be true, we rarely think, or consider, that Western information is propaganda sold to us as “rational, empirical knowledge,” codified then backed by universities and institutions, i.e., more white men, who categorically create supremacy among themselves. What else, pray tell, is canon? “Most historians, who depend mainly on western writers, forget that the basic purpose of any colonial administration is to exploit the local resources and to improve the economic status of the imperialist power. In no country was development a priority of the imperialist power,”^[13] Sharma adds. Once, a good friend’s dad looked me dead in the face and said, “Colonialism had its benefits.” When I asked him what they were, he told me about the railroads built in India. He was a graduate of Harvard and Yale, been a Fulbright scholar, and worked as a top litigator in a Canadian law firm.

The famous observation from Joan Didion is “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I think white people tell the story of a mythology of their own sanctity, while they dictate colonial “discovery” by murdering half the world’s population. To have a mission statement about saving, when all the impact that’s been left is war, ravage, mass poverty, and disconnection from the land and self, it makes you question whether such a society values truth and honesty.

Historical archives in India (and I’m sure most colonial outposts relate) prove that the British contributed largely to diseasing Indians. “It is a matter of record that before the arrival of the British East India Company in 1700, there were no institutions to keep the insane as family supported the individual who was sick and needed help,” Sharma writes. “The early establishment of mental hospitals in the Indian subcontinent reflected the needs and the demands of European patients in India during the period. Later, the development and growth of mental institutions reflected both the interest and neglect by the colonialists who ruled India for over 200 years.”^[14] We have to think of this also in the construction of the family unit, which in India was multigenerational. But among other things, colonizers also destroyed that, wanting insulated societies so we rely on governments to protect us, when all they show us is how little they care. If, as my friend’s dad claims, there were supposed benefits of colonialism, then, categorically, why does the history of the colonized unilaterally claim (and prove) that colonialism largely never helped? That it was, in fact, inhumane and deeply barbaric, its impact leaving a torrid and ugly remnant in our legacy as a species. He’s a lawyer who follows English law—he should know that the burden of proof for murder always rests on the prosecution.

This comes back to meditation, because the mindfulness movement in the West is a very wealthy one. The Guardian reported a few years ago, “Meditation apps monetize mindfulness; Headspace’s revenue is estimated at $50m a year and the company is valued at $250m. These enterprises cater to Big Business, with which it has had a long history. Silicon Valley has a ball producing profitable, hi-tech, marketable mindfulness apps as ‘brain hacks’ for which there is no evidence they are helpful.”^[15] Capitalism, again, proves to be more valuable than human life.

In the same Guardian piece, McMindfulness is explained: “Instead of letting go of the ego, McMindfulness promotes self-aggrandizement; its therapeutic function is to comfort, numb, adjust and accommodate the self within a neoliberal, corporatized, militarized, individualistic society based on private gain.”^[16] A few years ago, Ron Purser and David Loy’s article “Beyond McMindfulness” caused a defensive stir as they argued that a “stripped down, secular technique” of mindfulness originating in Buddhism not just failed to awaken people and organizations from “the unwholesome motivations that Buddhism highlights—greed, ill will and delusion,” but it reinforces these behaviors. Capitalism makes you complacent, we all know that, and mindfulness relinquishes meditation of its affiliations to dharma.^[17] Buddhism lite; you get all the surface without the substance.

Epistemicide happens not only with the destruction of knowledge, but also the privileging of certain schools of thought, by disguising them as precedent or, again, but in a different way, as “the way things are.” Nobody questions precedent (except, I guess, lawyers), so it’s important to pay attention in order to see the larger map of how everything is interconnected. As much as it’s been blurred, we owe it to our society to tell the truth. This is what it really comes down to, truth. “Indian psychology realized the value of concentration and looked upon it as the means for the perception of the truth.”^[18]

If you meditate, I want to ask you why you do so. Throughout this book, whoever you are, I want you to really step in and somatically sit with your body. If you feel uncomfortable, welcome, that’s important. To be uncomfortable means there’s room for growth. Bhikkhu Bodhi, an outspoken Western Buddhist monk, has warned us: “absent a sharp social critique, Buddhist practices could easily be used to justify and stabilize the status quo, becoming a reinforcement of consumer capitalism.”^[19] It’s important to question why meditation itself is being commodified and sold to people when it should be free and accessible to all.

Part of its commodification is that meditation came to the mainstream West through celebrities. “Transcendental Meditation (TM), which a 1975 Time story called a ‘drugless high,’ became popular among no less than The Beatles. As one way to cope with the strangeness of their global fame, they turned to TM, eventually going to India to study. Mia Farrow also went to India to meditate with the Fab Four after her divorce from Frank Sinatra, to study with Maharishi, whom Time called ‘the groovy guru.’”^[20] The cavalier way the West has portrayed India and thus Indians is a telling reminder of how the colonial project also determines stereotypes, which then become narratives we accept about ourselves and what role we then play within society. If there are determined roles for who is the aggressor and who is the aggressed, those lines are enforced by the constant, nagging domination of white supremacy. Determined, much like race itself, as a way to classify superiority versus inferiority, it requires an acceptance that the rule book is written by people who fundamentally believe white people are just better.

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Decolonizing the mind, in India and the greater South Asia, is reckoning with a deep and painful history. As I began writing this book, mass farmers’ strikes in India—against three farm acts that were considered “anti-farmer” by many—began and ended. This is just after the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which allows a direct path to Indian citizenship for refugees coming from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, was passed—but only for those who are Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, or Christian. Muslims from those countries are not allowed in. “The measure is ‘the first legal articulation that India is, you might say, a homeland for Hindus,’” Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India’s most prominent political scientists, told the Washington Post.^[21]

The dangers of any kind of nationalism, especially one based on faith, endanger anyone who doesn’t comply. “The first and foremost thing that must be recognized,” Ambedkar wrote in Annihilation of Caste in 1936, “is that Hindu society is a myth. The name Hindu is itself a foreign name. It was given by the Mohammedans to the natives [who lived east of the river Indus] for the purpose of distinguishing themselves.”^[22] Arundhati Roy, in The End of Imagination, adds, “Even today, to properly secure its idea of a Hindu Rashtra, the BJP has to persuade a majority of the Dalit population to embrace a religion that stigmatizes and humiliates them.”^[23] There are many anti-Indigenous, casteist, and Islamophobic policies in India that don’t protect those communities of their sovereignty and right to be, which is an important part of the ways in which colonization has also impacted the relationships and diversity of India itself. Another way to disarm a population is to make it turn on itself.

The emergence of a right-wing faction of Hindu nationalism in India is a postcolonial pawn by the British to divide India along religious lines, increasing a forced tension that propelled extremism on both sides. Like any group that relies on supremacy, a brotherhood is born to attract the masses. India, a vast and magical nation of cultures and faiths of varying degrees, is now being refashioned into a colonial mythology relying on division. In No Master Territories, Trinh T. Minh-ha writes: “Intimidation is part of the omni-revised strategies of power exerted in the production and legitimation of knowledge.”^[24] As a child, my father would remind me, “They conquered and settled in India, in Bengal to be exact, because they knew exactly where and how to destroy us. They knew we would be too powerful and hard to control if they didn’t.” This is why context is important, everything is connected.

Capitalism, which is really racial capitalism, is the opposite of abundant thought, because it relies on the division of labor, a role everyone must know and fall into. To destabilize civilizations and bleed them of their spiritual and cultural resources so they never properly come out from under the very large and ugly shoe of colonialism is to slowly, knowingly commit genocide. That is the legacy of colonization, legalized murder. Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first Nobel laureate, once spoke to this: “Her social ideals are already showing signs of defeat at the hands of politics, and her modern tendency seems to incline towards political gambling in which the players stake their souls to win their game. I can see her motto, taken from science, ‘Survival of the Fittest,’ writ large at the entrance of her present-day history—the motto whose meaning is, ‘Help yourself, and never heed what it costs to others’; the motto of the blind man, who only believes in what he can touch, because he cannot see. But those who can see, know that men are so closely knit, that when you strike others the blow comes back to yourself.”^[25] The next part is perhaps one of my favorite things ever written. “The moral law, which is the greatest discovery of man, is the discovery of this wonderful truth, that man becomes all the truer, the more he realises himself in others. This truth has not only a subjective value, but is manifested in every department of our life. And nations, who sedulously cultivate moral blindness as the cult of patriotism, will end their existence in a sudden and violent death.”^[26]

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I’m going to ask you again: If you meditate, why do you do it? In 2013, Purser and Loy wrote, “Unfortunately, a more ethical and socially responsible view of mindfulness is now seen by many practitioners as a tangential concern, or as an unnecessary politicizing of one’s personal journey of self-transformation.”^[27] A lot has changed in the almost decade since that piece was published—the world is in a different, shifting place, and we are in a pivotal time in our species’ history. We are facing an environmental apocalypse as we barely survive a global pandemic; the death toll, as of this reading, is over six and a half million worldwide. In America, homelessness is up, as is poverty, exhibiting the cycle of a depleting, failed society. Capitalism is not saving us, and it’s necessary now for us to look toward the future by looking back and paying homage to these traditions that conceptualized the possibilities of collective health. It’s imperative that we understand that the sign of a healthy society is how we engage and look after one another. “Take the I out of illness,” Malcolm X once said, “add W and E, and you have wellness.” Mindfulness is not a one-sum game, because who are you being mindful of, and who and what are you being mindful for, if you don’t know what you’re practicing is rooted in?

Our position has to shift in order to start thinking of wellness as something larger, more robust than just a movement for the rich and wealthy. We have to shift toward a more united care, one that is inherently without greed. Wellness is a revolution—of communal support, of liberation. But this requires a few things. In the context of mindfulness, of meditation, it’s first knowing the genesis of the very concept. It was always about healing oneself so that we could be of better service to society. But we have lost our sense of service to each other. We have forgotten what it means to owe each other. In Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein reflects on the economy of ecosystems: “In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources.” It’s important to begin to re-envision how something like mindfulness, in every action, could help create a better world. But it’s also determining: Who deserves rest and relaxation? If we say those who work the hardest jobs—such as laborers, teachers, or civil servants—that would make sense, but that’s not the reality. It’s important to understand what’s creating the gap between who is well and who is not. Then, it’s important to change that.

Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who founded the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979, was instrumental in bringing mindfulness practice—without any religious overtones—to the public attention and scientific communities worldwide, and part of the continued legacy of meditation’s distillation. A lot of this goes back to language; e.g., God should be seen as a neutral term, not tied to any creed or religion or nation. Disconnection from the land, from the elements, is a metaphor for our own disconnection from ourselves and the divine. To say something is good, better, less contradictory when it’s devoid of faith is extremely reductive. The divine is and can be many things. But decontextualizing a faith-based practice from the faith itself is a dangerous alternative.

Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, was said to credit his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and it was reported that his own mathematical knowledge was revealed to him by Namagiri Thayar, another iteration of the goddess Lakshmi. “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” We discredit the legacy of this knowledge by diluting the truth of its context and creation; by abstracting these kernels of wisdom, we are inevitably losing the entirety of its meaning.

“These contemplative practices were invented for monastics who had renounced possessions, social position, wealth, family, comfort, and work,” writes David McMahan, a professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College. Meditation was “a way of being in the world that is ultimately aimed at exiting the world, rather than a means to a happier, more fulfilling life within it.” Meditation was an acceptance of death.

Reports of disturbing experiences during meditation appear in a number of early Buddhist writings. In the Theravada tradition, from which S. N. Goenka’s system of Vipassana^* derives, meditators are said to experience “corruptions of insight” that, from the vantage of modern clinical psychology, resemble psychosomatic ailments, including manic bliss states, gastrointestinal issues, and visual hallucinations. Monks in the Zen tradition have been documented to encounter “diabolical phenomena,” which is characterized by involuntary movements and frightening mental imagery. Chinese and Japanese Zen masters are said to succumb to a “meditation sickness” in which the afflicted become disoriented and have trouble regulating their body temperatures and energy levels. Buddhist monastics in Tibet may develop “wind illness,” the symptoms of which include confusion and agitation; according to a twelfth-century Buddhist medical treatise, the disorder is caused by the “three poisons of attachment, hatred, and closed-mindedness.”^[28] To me, these symptoms are a physical manifestation of people trying to understand and comprehend their mortality. It’s a practice of the East, to strive for humility, to be genuflect toward God. But these days God itself is such a faraway and complicated figurehead that the notion itself has become isolating. And yet, contextually, it’s nonsensical to present meditation without the context of God and the divine—and without the fear of death and the tenacity of the soul for absolution. Now, with capitalism as a false God, our motivations for self-betterment are attached to outward and public validation. This is a beast wellness has bred, but it’s inevitably an unsustainable model. Without a sense of service, the sense of accepting death—which, ideally, is what the presence of having a relationship to the divine provides you with—spiritual practices like meditation are shrouded in misinformation. Death is a constant, and faith relies on the remembrance of the impermanence of life. The action of meditation is to reach a state of consciousness that’s outside your connection to mortality. It’s about the beyond.

I keep returning to something my friend Amber Khan, a Tarotist and astrologer, once said to me: that when the British first sent an envoy to scope the lands of India, the soldier in charge saw sadhus levitating and walking on water. I’m slowly beginning to see that the depletion of the mythology of our worlds, the worlds my people come from, was meant to rob us of our inbuilt magic, our power, our connection to ourselves. What capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy want you to believe is that you don’t have a responsibility to think deeply about your existence. It encourages listlessness, severing from instinct, and exaggerates a devotion to self that is based on accumulation of material gain with no focus on the spiritual. It prioritizes self-optimization at the expense of community wellness.

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Michael Yellow Bird, a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes, which include the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations, is a dean and professor at the University of Manitoba, where he studies and teaches Indigenous mindfulness and neurodecolonization, which he describes as “combining mindfulness approaches with traditional and contemporary secular and sacred contemplative practices to replace negative patterns of thought, emotion and behavior with healthy, productive ones.”^[29] In a paper entitled “Decolonizing the Mind: Using Mindfulness Research and Traditional Indigenous Ceremonies to Delete the Neural Networks of Colonialism,” Yellow Bird writes: “The effectiveness of mindfulness has groups as diverse as Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. Marines, Police, and Adult and juvenile prisons offering formal mindfulness instruction to members of their organizations.”^[30] In the same paper, he shows graphs of the mind in sacred prayer, which is a similar state to meditation, and the results are evident. When we gather all the bits we deleted and strayed from, the parts of us that our ancestors were killed for and were forced to forget, the parts we purposely discarded as an act of survival—with thoughtful consideration, mindfulness and meditation become a reckoning of those parts, too. It’s not about not using these practices, it’s about not profiting off of them for individual gain.

Language matters; science, wellness, and spirituality once were deeply rooted to and connected with one another and used to benefit larger society from the dark perils of the human experience. There is time for us to return to ourselves, and we need to understand that this is a collective fight. Meditation for the masses. In his 1907 speech “The Spirit of Japan,” Tagore spoke with prescience, about moving away from capital and greed, to return to a sense of the ideals around community and a sense of greater service: “For when this conflagration consumes itself and dies down, leaving its memorial in ashes, the eternal light will again shine in the East—the East which has been the birth-place of the morning sun of man’s history. And I offer, as did my ancestor rishis, my salutation to that sunrise of the East, which is destined once again to illumine the whole world.”^[31]

For me, as a child of the East and West, as someone who has heavily been involved in decolonization for almost two decades, it’s important to track these histories. The ones that have largely never been told. By doing this I’m not only beginning to understand the cultural lineage of my people, and how that has impacted my life through epigenetics and the phenomena of processing trauma, but I’m also understanding my parents and their failures. The mind is a strange and tenuous place, but is it really as mysterious as we make it out to be?

As a child, maybe due to my Venus Aquarius in the eighth house, I was obsessed with deeper inquiry. I always wanted to know more; now I’m following the trail. I think it’s a collective responsibility to do this now, to look deeper into our minds and at the very least acknowledge what they are telling us so we don’t have to keep gaslighting ourselves or the people around us. In some ways, meditation is about that, too. Accountability is accepting death, because it’s accepting that you’re fallible. Meditation is allowing you to come to this state with zero judgment yet full responsibility. You can’t diminish such a sacred offering and expect it to capitulate to capitalism.

Footnotes

* “The Vedas are a large body of religious texts. There are four Vedas: the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda, and the Atharvaveda. Each Veda has four subdivisions–the Samhitas (mantras and benedictions), the Aranyakas (text on rituals, ceremonies, sacrifices and symbolic-sacrifices), the Brahmanas (commentaries on rituals, ceremonies and sacrifices), and the Upanishads (texts discussing meditation, philosophy, and spiritual knowledge).” “Vedas.” Wikipedia, accessed October 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas.

* Vipassana, translating to “super seeing,” is an ancient Buddhist meditation and mindfulness technique that focuses on regulating emotions through sensations of the body.