Forty Years of Meditation

Meditating on the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

Forty years ago today I found myself walking up a forest path from my home in Wellington, New Zealand, headed for the Ananda Marga meditation center. I was about to take initiation on the path of tantric meditation. Not the weird erotic cult kind, (sorry if that disappoints you) but the genuine ancient path of tantric mysticism or spiritual yoga.

I’d been practicing other forms of meditation for several months and had enjoyed some inspiring experiences and insights. But that day, when I learned this new technique, I felt like I’d found the Ferrari model of meditation! 😅

This practice has transformed my life. I quickly adopted the lifestyle of a yogi and since then have abstained from intoxicants and meat, spent several hours a day practicing meditation, chanting and yoga, and devoted my life to service and the propagation of spiritual teachings and practices. This has brought me a level of happiness and satisfaction I cannot put into words. I really can’t imagine a better and more useful way to spend a lifetime. And I have a pretty vivid imagination.

My eldest niece, Becka, is a psychologist. Dr Stafford to you. She is very smart and is a delight. She started calling me her Munkle, so now she can get away with a lot. Naturally as a curious psychologist she interrogated my family to find out what I was like as a young man. She shared with me the rather unpleasant truth. Apparently I was very self centered and really didn’t show a lot of promise as a world savior. That sounds about right. I was also ambitious, with my fair share of worldly desires.

This seems like a weak starting point for a monk-construction project. Worldliness and self obsession are hardly what comes to mind when we imagine a monk. We are supposed to be detached from material desires and be free of egotism and all that impossible stuff. Given me, God sure had His work cut out for Him!

That was a while ago. Still a work in progress, to be sure, but my generous niece attests that I have made surprising progress. Phew! Providence sure has been kinder to me than I deserve!

Fate also turns out to be remarkably cunning. It appears that she used my own desires to lure me onto a path I never sought. Rather than punishing me for my flaws she tempted me with blissful spiritual experiences, and through my inborn obsession with wresting the best from life, guided me to make a series of very difficult choices. I felt compelled by destiny to leave my university, my beautiful homeland, my family, my friends and my dreams and pursue a course hard enough to mold me into a better version of that flawed young man.

So in spite of that shaky start, my extraordinary spiritual master, hand in hand with ingenious fate, guided me to become a real yogi and a spiritual teacher. A less likely outcome seems hard to imagine.

It wasn’t easy, but I seriously have nothing to complain about. It’s not as though I suffered a deprived childhood, far from it. Growing up in New Zealand in an upper middle class, progressive minded family was a crazy privilege. I grew up in a smallish mansion with our own forest. We holidayed in the paradise of the Bay of Islands in our yacht. Our private library featured gorgeously bound sets of all the works of Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw and all the other greats of English literature. My three older brothers never bullied me, and acted as protectors or tolerant mentors to the families youngest. I was even blessed with wonderful friends and a dog who loved me unconditionally.

But I wanted more. I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to be a renowned author, and, here’s where it gets a little tricky, I wanted to be James Bond.

My wish list included a few things that my parents didn’t endorse or want to pay for. Notably, skiing and scuba diving. Skiing was considered too bourgeous (somehow sailing holidays in our yacht at our cottage by the water in the Bay of Islands was appropriately socialist!) and scuba diving was judged a little too likely to result in my early death. That last was actually quite reasonable.

Oh, and I also wanted to become a wizard.

By twenty three, after fighting my destiny for three years I finally mustered the courage to give it all up and go to India to become a monk. That was by far the hardest and best decision of my life.

But here’s the weirdest part for me. In very strange ways, almost all of the things I thought I was giving up have come into my life, as if by magic. The hand of fate found a way to fulfill my childhood dreams.

Here’s what I mean.

Over the years, as a monk, I learned to scuba dive in New Guinea and explored coral reefs across the Pacific, I led ‘skiing meditation retreats’ in the Swiss Alps for eight years. I even got to enjoy my allotted fifteen minutes of fame (thanks Andy Warhol) as a musician, performing on stage for thousands of people in Australia and Brazil and recording several albums with world class artists.

Plus a bunch of other impressive sounding stuff: Publishing a popular book on meditation, writing a comic fantasy novel (this was actually cool – I got to create my very own wizard. Plus a vegetarian dragon!), meeting and interviewing prominent writers, musicians and thought leaders, speaking and performing in more than forty countries and most recently teaching meditation and creative thinking at some of most innovative companies in the world.

Fortunately I never did act out the James Bond fantasy. Evidently even providence couldn’t figure out how to include all that alcohol, gambling, womanizing and shooting baddies in a monk’s lifestyle. But she did thrown in a great deal of travel and adventure!

Observing this, my inimitable mother pronounced one day, “you’re not a proper monk, you’re a kind of yuppy monk!”

What can I say? I’m not fool enough to argue with my own mother. 💛💛💛

Yet today, reflecting and feeling so grateful for my four decades as a yogi, the magic moments that stand out don’t have much to do with all that fancy sounding stuff. The moments I cherish are the ones I’ve spent with people I love, or teaching my students, or in deep meditation, or enjoying the bliss of chanting. Or crafting a song, or a story, something beautiful to remind myself, and anyone who’s listening, that in the end life is a love story with the Divine.