White silk and jasper is draped around my neck. Reverence. Grace. Gratitude. Words empty of significance without the felt sense of them. Pooja chanting. Karma yoga and hands raised. Air thick with incense-saturated humidity. Everything melds and blurs. Nine months is a moment and an eternity. Everything is impermanent. Each moment a miracle.

Meditation is the bridge; practice, its gateway. On the cushion, I write entire books in my head. Off the cushion, I am self deprecating. Because, in meditation, I wasn’t actually meditating and outside meditation I haven’t written the books. I sigh and gaze out the window at the sparrows making sheet music with the electricity cables. The thoughts don’t stop; I allow them to be. The musky smell of goat drifts through the open window; flares the nostrils. I hold the tension between the two realities, waiting for Jung’s third to arise. Sensory overload is also just a state of the mind.

People often say they can’t meditate. They say they can’t get rid of their thoughts, erroneously thinking that this is the goal. When we come to the cushion, there’s nothing new that comes up but, sitting for a determined length of time in stillness and silence, there’s no longer an ability to distract ourselves from everything that has been there all along: thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions; there is no longer all the other stuff to distract from the business of the mental, physical and emotional bodies. You have to quite literally sit and brew. 

I visit hole-in-the-wall shops lined corner-to-corner and ceiling-to-floor with scented oils and perfumes. I use every centimetre of hand and wrist. Saturated, I smell like a stick of incense. Flammable. Travelling anoints me in the microbiome of everyone and everything I engage with. I am no longer who I was on arrival here … I am no longer who I was on entering the perfume shop. As names and meetings drift away, it is only the essence of people and places that remains.

The word sacrifice means to make sacred. Fifteen years ago meditation was my salvation; the primary intervention that sobered me up from alcohol and sugar abuse, and from a marriage that was doing more harm than the copious self medicating. Whatever I steep myself in colours my life and I manifest that with which I resonate. There is no right or wrong in the meditation practice, only right or wrong in the choices I make … so, in making better sacrifices, my gradual awakening continues to take me on a trajectory of synchronicity, symbology and sanctitude.

Peacocks and elephants boast human heads and vice versa; deities have multiple limbs holding tools to slay samsara; demon masks and protruding tongues; every detailed inch of temple grounds and gompas shout for attention. Monasteries and sacred travel sites usurp status from spas and beach resorts; meditation retreats and wellness courses become the shrines of my prostration.

I know people who judge harshly the symbology of religions that are not their own; they experience the images as scary—sometimes even evil. What people rarely acknowledge, however, is that every single image, advert, billboard is a symbol … every sound, smell, touch and taste. Greater than the sum of their letters, words are symbols too; every one a spell. 

The screeching wheels of a bus draw my scattered attention as it careens around the u-bend, ‘Oh god save me’ emblazoned across its front. Bombarded by imagery daily, symbology can either bolster or erode the psyche. Choose carefully what shrine of exposure you show up at because observation, both conscious and subliminal, feeds interpretation. And absorption that occurs without filters hitches to and adopts dysfunctions always there in the personal, archetypal and symbolic, albeit not recognised. Practice discernment of all that enters consciousness.

Be mindful; be aware; be present. 
And then start again … start again … start again.
One breath at a time.
We become what we practice.