The day before flying to India, I discovered Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. This was just as transformational as the initial spell of mindfulness meditation. Without completely reading the book (until things started getting more spiritual than I was prepared for), Eckhart convinced me that the present moment is always this neutral place where life happens. All our worries and anxieties stem from the past or the future.

This understanding took days/months to dawn and grow on me. But it was deep. This was the foundation of the next big steps in my life. Think of sky diving. You feel scared, you feel those butterflies in your belly until you jump off. But once you are free falling, you are completely in the moment. This is thrill. This is why some people like to live their life on the edge. Life happens in the moment.

Present moment is the only reality. Rest is manifestations of your mind. These manifestations have a place, but when they start getting in the way of you experiencing the present moment, you are living the life in an imaginary world. You are living a life of shoulds, seeking approval, and the real you is hidden underneath the stress and anxiety you are holding on to.

I soon extended this to everything I did. Pay attention to something in the present moment, doesn’t have to be your breath. Stage fright becomes less and less. Spontaneity grows. Conversations become natural. Sex becomes more subtle, food tastes more subtle, you can read people way better.  Compassion becomes more natural as you get out of your head and notice what is really out there.

Seeking approval becomes history, as you become a natural who does things because you instinctively want to do it. The mind still has a place but it is not the center stage.

I come back to Seattle in love with life.  And I discover a whole series of things to do. I meet this girl, who was into MMA (Mixed Martial Arts). She was just as high on “Power of Now” as me. We talk about consciousness. We talk about animals. I discover my fondness for ‘Jaguar’ the big cat. We debate why Jaguar is the way it is. Monk in the cat world?!

And then April and early summer happens. I feel more anxiety. I can’t understand how are people so outgoing in summer. How are they so happy? My body thought of heat and resulting stress as something to be worried about.  Going out becomes harder for me. I become jealous of all those folks who could handle themselves well in the heat.

I hear the word mindfulness from my cousin. Google search and I could gather mindfulness is intentionally paying attention to the present moment non-judgmentally. I really didn’t understand this. Analytical as I was, I tried to break the sentence into pieces and tried to understand more. How do you pay attention to the present? What is present? How do you do it non-judgmentally? I spent hours thinking about this. Read blogs trying to understand, but there was a shell that wouldn’t crack.

And then I found Mindfulness in plain english by Henepola Gunaratana. There is something about the way monks speak and write that leads to calmness even before you understand what they are saying. Imagine walking into a beautiful, calm monastery. It is easy on you. So quiet that you can hear the drops of water.

Mindfulness and concentration are the two key concepts in meditation, the book said. With concentration you gather all the rays of the sun on a piece of paper, and with mindfulness you notice distractions. Ah. I got fixated on bare awareness. As if saying the word bare awareness in my head would make me more mindful.

When a really cute girl looked at me and blushed and I felt pleasure and ease in my body, I realized I had landed on to something. Interactions with the opposite sex became the highlight of this phase of my journey. I had never before experienced pleasure in the moment without any physical contact. It was as if you do a dance with the person you are attracted to without explicit physical contact. They feel it, you feel it, and you both carry this state of mind to a happy day. My previous experiences with sex were plain mechanical, none of these beautiful sensations and never two individuals doing an instinctive dance together.

There was this sudden joy in existence. It slowly extended to enjoying food more, enjoying physical sensations of running and the runners high afterwards, and I started enjoying listening to people without interrupting them with my story. I planned a trip to Canada and discovered the joys of using Airbnb to find a place to stay. I thought I had found a traveler in me. I wanted to travel. To Iceland next. Spain. This was happiness like never before.

But with all great experiences comes a road block.  Global events. Paris. My sense of positivity soon dissolved into deep anxiety. Instead of looking for new experiences, I wanted to find a place I feel at home. I planned my trip to India to visit my family. This visit to India was amazing. I noticed details, I wouldn’t notice otherwise. I observed how people across the world are fundamentally not that different. If you remove culture, and notice the vibes, and basics of communication, it is the same thing. Regardless of what mind (ego) makes us believe, deep down all we want is to feel connected.

I was sitting alone on a hot July afternoon in my apartment. This was 4^th of July. I wasn’t sure what to do. It was too hot for comfort inside. I had recently chanced on a blog online about Meditation. There was even a link to a youtube video, where Jon Kabat-Zinn gave a mindfulness talk at Google. I didn’t understand Mindfulness yet. In fact, I was not very interested when watching the video. This is how I was back then.

But I still wanted to meditate. This was a stage in my life where I was lost. Yes, I had a job, and I lived in a comfy apartment, but I was too afraid to take chances. Too little motivation, too many mental obstacles. Social anxiety was all over. In fact, this was a culmination of years of a lifestyle of living shut in, inside my head, shy, dull, no passion. But I was smart. Intelligent. I knew how to analyze.

Anyways, the blog struck me. There were some links to the science of meditation, which I didn’t bother to understand. But the blog said meditation practice helped the writer find intuitive solutions to several problems in life. Find confidence and live an authentic and healthy life. This was too blatant to ignore. Seriously what is out there which helps you in all areas of your life. I could have tackled specific problems in my life one at a time, but I didn’t have patience. This attitude, as I later on learned, is exactly what meditation gets rid of. But I was in need, and meditation without much clarification was the only solution to my life. I didn’t know how, but it didn’t require me to step out of my home. On this hot afternoon, I finally had a passion. Although I was still shut in alone, clueless, I had light.

And bam, I found answers to all problems in life! No, not back then. Patience. Strangely complete hopelessness was not a bad way to get started on this path. When you have nothing, you are open to new things.

And this is how I understood meditation back then. Breathe. Sit still. Something happens. Something magical happens. My back hurt, my legs went numb, and breathing was not easy. I tortured myself to sit in a cross legged position for half an hour, may be 45 minutes. It hurt but felt good. Was it placebo? I didn’t know whether I was doing it right. I didn’t have the social confidence to go out and ask.

One of the things I read in the blog was to relax with every breath, and so I did. It felt good. I felt lighter. I cried. Thoughts about life came, and I felt weak in my knees. I didn’t understand it back then. There was a feeling that this is good, even though I was crying.

Several days went by and my meditation practice was still raw. But I did it everyday. I had no confidence but I had passion.

This is my personal experience stepping out of the routine life of a modern human being to discover what lies beyond. This is a world that doesn’t require you to step out of your home, go anywhere. But it is a whole bigger world than we experience in our modern lives. I am not an expert and this is an honest account of a journey that is still in progress.

While this is my experience, and every person’s experience is unique, there are inspirations and learnings that can be drawn by anyone. I am always looking to hear authentic life experiences from people. You don’t have to have a similar life as me, similar personality type, similar ethnic background, or anything. In fact sit back, relax and enjoy this read.