Namaste: Hello.

It is said that a certain charm lingers in the attitude of a two-year-old, an endless acceptance of the uncanny. I remember an odd sensation crippling my tangible body as a familiar scent transfigured into awareness. The smell of char embedded permanence into an ever-present chuck of memory, as the smoke relaxed into my tender, sloshing, liquid – yet malleable mind. At that moment, my esprit did a cartwheel as I watched Nina burn the sandalwood for the thousandth time.

I waddled over to the doorstep and permitted my minuscule foot to press into the wet Canadian grass. The garden was packed with the luminescence of life, along with a friend who sat sedated in his stone enclosure. At that moment, the domicile Buddha winked. Then, his golden palm found sanctuary in my heart as it slithered, piercing thin air, flawlessly in space, up and over my breast. My peripheral vision witnessed an aged and crudely wrinkled finger land on my forehead and leave a tomato-coloured blob. “Namaste,” Nina whispered.

For the first time in 731 days of existence, I was kissed by an epiphany.

Yet the older you get, the less naïveté and transfixion. Unfortunately, the sleeping Buddha kept quiet in the ever-growing body of my teenage being. I was fed misinformation and given a reason to push the culture aside, prioritizing material desires over the well-being of internal mindfulness. The community around me proscribed a gnarly title to Hindu beliefs and decided that meditation was a useless tool in the progression of the educational continuum. Before long, I had all but forgotten about the beautiful sanctuary I used to call home.

I can recall a heap of middle school PE consisting of yoga, the Western form of a relaxing workout. “It’s like food for thought, but a bit more mental, I think,” the fleshy teacher instructed before pressing play on the instructional video and watching thirty or so children do the downward dog. It may be odd, to suppose that those were the moments which forced a water-bound ember to break into an undying spark.

Before long, I found myself completing a meditative practice in my living room – the vinyasa sun salutation, Surya Namaskar. Each attempt was a way to reason with the embedded mindfulness I was given at the age of two. I decided to join a youth class, where I learned the Ujjayi breath and the purpose of each inhale.

As I inhaled and permitted the synchronization of heartbeat and movement to break into a cycle of redemption – I exhaled and continued the order of Vinyasa. “A conscious thought breaks the dhyana. Take it in, process it, and let it go,” I was told at 9:30 in the morning. Practice taught me internal regulation, as well as rigorous control of the conscious and external self. Body and mind were no longer separate entities, they were an intertwined set of wooden chains threaded and enclosed in my chest.


IN PROGRESS

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“Something destabilizing”: Fidelity and Joseph in Emerald Fennell’s Adaptation of Wuthering Heights

As in a theater the eyes of men After a well-graced actor leaves the stage Are idly bent on him that enters next Thinking his prattle to be tedious — Richard II, Shakespeare  Known for her Oscar-winning debut feature, Promising Young Woman (2020), and the seductive, surrealist spectacle of Saltburn (2023), director Emerald Fennell returns to the screen with a bang: a fresh adaption of Emily Brontë’s 19th-century novel, Wuthering Heights . As the press peeled back the curtain in the months leading up to February 14th, 2026—revealing the casting of “Barbie” Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and the pale Jacob Elordi as “gipsy” Heathcliff—the audience turned anxious then cynical about Fennell’s take on the beloved classic. “Emily Brontë is rolling in her grave,” users’ commented under the trailer for the provocative, deconstructive, and orally fixated feature film. Fennell should stick to the original, they said; she’s ruining the Brontë image. “There’s an enormous amount of sadom...
Read more

BookTok is Commercializing my Hobby, and I am Sick of it

“Popular, successful, widely appealing and spicy” – that was the definition popular BookTuber Jack Edwards used to explain the characteristics of a standard BookTok novel. The first book club was founded in 1634 by Anne Hutchinson. A dozen women would gather aboard a ship on its way to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the goal of understanding the world and experiencing Biblical literature collectively. Nowadays, BookTok is the biggest book club Earth has ever seen. I wonder what Hutchinson would think of the 200 billion views #booktok has reached on TikTok – would she be proud, or apprehensive and insecure? The distillation of a lifelong experience into a palatable 300-page novel for the common person is a modern phenomenon. Low literacy rates, low wages and low levels of production rates made books, and the act of reading, inaccessible. The UK hit a record high of 669 million physical copies sold in 2022, a number inconceivable to a pressman a mere century ago. In an article for The...
Read more

Anna Karenina as Mouthpiece for Tolstoy’s Moral Vision

"The more perfect a thing is, the more susceptible to good and bad treatment it is." — Dante, Inferno According to Leo Tolstoy, high society in the 19th-century Russia perpetuated a trivial and artificial social order. Throughout his life, he remained steadfast in the belief that modern society corrupts the innate goodness of mankind, and that familial unity is a mandatory component of ethical living. The corrosive effect of the Russian aristocratic etiquette and the restorative power of familial servitude are demonstrated by the character of Daria Alexandrovna Oblonskaya (Dolly) and Alexis Alexandrovich Karenin in Tolstoy’s 1878 novel Anna Karenina . In this paper, I discuss how the eulogization of Dolly, a loyal proponent of the traditional family, and the vilification of Karenin, a simultaneously corrupt and exemplary member of high society, illuminate Tolstoy’s theory of human nature and the cause of its continuous degradation. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy rejects Anna Karen...
Read more