Gandhi’s example many years earlier. Of course, a long, fast walk on a relatively small liner means going around and around and around . . . at the pace of an Olympic walker. More opportunities for amusement for my fellow passengers, who much preferred their deck chairs. After a few days of this, my reputation was assured.
Then the storm struck – and when the view started gyrating wildly between sky and sea, my stomach began to behave the same way. I made it through the first day, but the next morning I awoke with the sinking sensation that my time had come. My first impulse was to grab a brown bag and join the others draped miserably over the rails.
But my mantram had awakened too – “Rama, Rama, Rama” – without any conscious prompting. After all those years of practice, it knew when I needed help.
Clinging to the mantram as tightly as to the handrail, I managed to reach the sports deck without incident and sat down for meditation. For a while it was touch and go. But then my mind settled down, and I got absorbed in what mystics call the “sea of peace” within.
When I finished and opened my eyes, my stomach had stopped complaining. It had calmed down along with my mind. I felt on top of the world. With the ship still pitching wildly, I sauntered as best I could into the dining room and sat down to a first-rate breakfast – in solitary dignity, monarch of all I surveyed.
The purser looked on in awe. When I rose to go, he approached with new respect and asked in a conspirator’s whisper, “What tablets do you use?”
I wanted to tell him, “It’s not the stomach that needs to be settled. It’s the mind.”
STORY
Fear of Flying
Natalie, a software engineer, has been learning to calm her mind to deal with an anxiety that millions of us can relate to.
“At some point in the early nineties, as a result of seeing several scary airplane crash movies, I became very scared of flying. Not so scared that I couldn’t get on a plane to go somewhere, but scared enough to have sweaty palms, nausea, and plenty of anxious thoughts.
“This was a situation that definitely needed the mantram, but I wasn’t using one in those days and didn’t recognize that using it could help me with this massive fear.
“Now I start saying the mantram before I even arrive at the airport, during takeoff, landings, definitely when there’s turbulence (or sometimes worse – odd noises!) and even while just cruising comfortably. Using my mantram during these times of intense fear has helped to drive it deeper into my consciousness and has made it possible for me to fly with less anxiety. I still get scared, but the mantram lets me bear with the situation.
“I realize now that every time I fly, some part of me is coming face to face with my fear of death. After so many opportunities to repeat my mantram when I fly, my thinking regarding this fear has started to change. It’s shifting from, ‘God, please don’t let me die! I’m not ready to die yet’ to ‘God, may we all arrive safely at our destination today. But if for some reason we don’t, help me to keep repeating your name and go straight to you if my time is up.’ This is a huge change in my perspective. I’m not free of the fear . . . but I’m seeing how well the mantram works in dealing with it.”
– Natalie M., Washington
STORY
The Year of the Mantram
Before his heart attack, Chuck says, he had been repeating his mantram “on occasion,” such as when falling asleep. It was the pain and stress of hip surgery that drilled the mantram in. Because of that, it was there to help him two months later when the chest pains started – making this “the year the mantram moved to stage center in my life.”
“When my wife, Lynn, and I arrived at the emergency room, we rushed inside and within minutes I was diagnosed with a heart attack. They injected me with blood clot thinner and wheeled me to an area dominated by a huge overhead fluoroscope. I kept repeating my mantram and actually followed as the cardiologist worked a catheter toward the area of worst blockage – the main artery. It was 90 to 95 percent blocked. The pain was intense at this point, and I was clinging to the mantram.
“When the cardiologist dissolved the major blockage, I had a sudden wonderful sense of release. The whole knot of pain in my chest opened like a flower. To that moment, things had seemed terribly dark and bleak.
“After the clot was dissolved, they put me into a hospital bed to await surgery. I slept for one hour only. It was an exceedingly long night – long enough, it seemed to me, for the creation of the world.
“The tension preceding the surgery was monumental: if the operation went wrong, I’d simply be swept away. I have no way of knowing how many mantrams were silently spoken during those hours, but surely there were hundreds, maybe thousands.
“Early the next day, Lynn arrived in time for us to meditate together before one of the nurses started prepping me for surgery. She gave me some potent pills and by the time she wheeled me out, I was almost asleep. Just before the elevator doors closed behind the nurse and me, I heard her tell Lynn that all the operating room staff approaches heart surgery as a spiritual experience. I knew then I was in good hands.
“When I came out of anesthesia, I started the mantram again and it carried me through recovery, just as it still carries me through the tensions and turmoil of my daily life. Now, even recalling this experience reminds me of the vivid sense of joy and opportunity I felt when I came out of the anesthesia and realized I’d survived.”
– Chuck C., Oregon
A steady mind has resources for every crisis. You don’t need to analyze the causes – just learn to steady your mind.
As far as the mind is concerned, the cause of stress is not particularly important. What matters are the waves of agitation in the mind. Whether we feel anxious, panicky, angry, afraid, or simply out of control, the mind is doing the same thing: heaving up and down like the sea.
This is a precious clue. It means that we don’t have to prepare for one kind of crisis in this way and another in that way. All we have to do is learn to steady the mind.
We learn this with little challenges – the thousand and one daily irritations that upset us even when we know they aren’t worth getting upset over. Whenever someone cuts in front of you in traffic, repeat the mantram and don’t react. Whenever someone contradicts you, repeat your mantram and hold your tongue. Life graciously provides us with innumerable little incidents like this, which instead of irritants can become opportunities for gaining strength. If you go on taking advantage of them as they arise, you can gradually raise your threshold of upsettability higher and higher, until hassles take one look and run away.
Of course, there is much more to life than “small stuff.” Coping with hassles is just training. The Olympic challenges are the crises and tragedies – accidents, illness, separation, betrayal, bereavement – that are bound to come to all of us in one form or other without warning. That is when we need to know how to find strength within ourselves, for that is just when external supports are likely to fail.
The most important lesson to learn from crisis is to find your center of strength within.
If I may offer my own small example, I have been struck by very severe blows in the course of my life. But it is from those trials that I learned to go deep inside myself for strength and consolation. It was a storm of personal tragedies that caused me to turn inward and
