Thought for the Week: Sanjive Mahandru finds time

‘I think Quakers will recognise this approach.’

It is thirty-two degrees centigrade in Chandigarh. Hot and humid. It is also bustling with people, life, and energy, and some essence that is individual to India (I cannot explain this essence, it’s a feeling).

According to the yogis, there is a special time for silence/meditation. They have a word for it in Sanskrit: Brahmamuhurta, a forty-eight-minute period that begins one hour and thirty-six minutes before sunrise, and ends forty-eight minutes before sunrise. Meditating at these times, I have felt the power and the difference in my mind and body. Washing the face with cold water, especially the eyes, helps you to wake up and stay awake – and being well hydrated always helps.

Over the last few months, I have been getting up to do this at four in the morning, meditating in the lotus position. I concentrate on the ‘third eye’, the middle of the forehead, where the pineal gland is based. The aim is to have a blank mind. If any thoughts come, I try – without force – to park them to one side with love. I will come back to them later. I think Quakers will recognise this approach. Friends get their power/energy from how they worship. It affects them, the energy of their buildings, and whoever they connect with. There is some universal power at play. 

‘What I have experienced is that you never lose time from meditation.’

For me, this silence is a discipline that needs to be practiced more frequently than once a week. I believe that early Quakers used to meet more often than this, and for more than an hour at a time. The spiritual paths I have studied have found that the greatest impact is when you can be silent for one or two hours every day. I know that we sometimes complain that we have no time, that we are time-poor. But what I have experienced is that you never lose time from meditation. I find I gain time. I find myself more productive in my work and my personal life, with a general feeling of wellbeing in mind and body. It works for me.

The word I use for this will also be recognisable to most Friends: discipline. Not in a hard, regimented fashion, but from a feeling place, of love.

My seva (service) is spreading, in a small way, the knowledge of Quakers, and of meditation and yoga. These last two practices are spiritually linked to India, whose original Sanskrit name is Āryāvarta, which came to mean ‘Noble Land’. In Vedic times (approximately 1750–500 BCE), yoga was done to get the body and the mind tuned for silence and meditation. There was a vibration that was seen as a science, not an exercise. 

To ground myself, I use a mantra. You might like to try it: Where have I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? And, when I leave from here, what will I take with me? 

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