Sunday Blog: A Fool With A Tool
There are some shockingly expensive meditation classes lately these days – one taught by a lawyer, with no special skills, charges $1000 for four sessions. Ouch! There are Pricey meditation studios studios are popping up around New York for fast track achievers who’ve heard about the wonders of meditation in magazines like Forbes. Meditation can help you focus, concentrate and conceivably get your work done better and faster – and wind up at the top of the heap with a corner office and a big raise!
Even though we’re not in India and have, for the most part, dislodged yoga from most of its spiritual aspects, this meditation for bucks still bothers me. Maybe some of the people who need to pay a lot to sit will actually find something useful. They’ll become kinder, gentler and realize that less, not more, was what we Americans need. But are others really going to take this ancient tradition and use it for purely mercenary purposes? It seems like some kind of wacked out fairy tale.
Maybe it wasn’t a fairy tale but an ancient Greek myth. Fast trackers really get into meditation and become incredibly successful – to get more, more, more – just like King Midas when he got his wish of turning everything he touched instantly into gold. It made him incredibly rich and happy at first. He turned his roses into gold, his household possessions, and then by mistake, Midas kills his own daughter by turning her into gold. It was a painful way to pay for his greed.
Some of these super achievers think they can use the trick of meditation to magically turn their work out faster, spinning it into the gold of today’s currency of status, wealth and achievement.
This is an ancient theme – there is always backlash to the short-sighted wish. Or as my yoga friend Nikki Meyers says, “when a fool uses a tool, it always comes back to bite them in the ass.”
-- Cynthia Kling, editor YogaCityNYC
