Mindfulness meditation may relieve chronic inflammation

Call it past lives (which I believe in due to very scientific reasons—a subject for another post) or just innate inclination; I’ve been pulled to Eastern mysticism since my engineering college days. The pull intensified during B-School and I did course then. But I’ve truly learnt meditation in the last five years, much of it during where we did multiple Vipassana courses in Italy and India, , and lived in a village high in the Himalayas for a few months pretty much in silence. What prompted the deep dive? Honestly, I was just sick of how superficial my life was. I’d go to office and try to muster up enthusiasm to gain a couple of market share points for the brands I led as a Director for a consumer products company. The stuff that occupied friends and family—houses, restaurants, kids schools etc.—felt completely insignificant to me. More importantly, I was deeply frustrated by how inconsistent I was, one moment I was reading the Upanishads and the Bhagwad Gita, the next moment I wasworried about being promoted from Director to Senior Director at work or mulling over someone who hadn’t shown me full respect at a dinner and other BS like that. Seeing my mother die from cancer and having a very visceral understanding of how short and futile life was had something to do with it or perhaps it was just living in New York. I don’t fully understand. All I know was I wanted to truly silence my chaotic mind and that’s what we set out to do in our sabbatical in 2012. Since then, I’ve meditated every day, sometimes for 30 minutes, sometime for much longer, and have had enough discernible changes in my life that I know meditation works.

Now, let’s define meditation.

How do you reconcile meditation with ambition?

I’m sold. How do I meditate?

• Posture: The only two characteristics of a good meditation pose are sthira (a pose of attention) and sukha (a pose of comfort). If you’re sitting cross-legged on the floor and your mind is screaming in agony, then it’s not a good pose for you because it’s not sukha. On the other hand, if you’re lying on the bed attempting to meditate, that’ll likely not work as well since it’s not sthira. So choose anything, sitting on a chair, sitting on the bed with your legs stretched, or sitting on a cushion on the floor, anything that allows you to be both comfortable and attentive. I’d just recommend keeping your spine erect for attentiveness and your hips at an elevation to your knees for comfort.