My first encounter with an ocean storm came on my passage from India to the U.S. on the Fulbright exchange program. I sailed from Bombay on an ancient P&O liner that had been in service before the First World War. There were no luxuries, but I enjoyed the trip because of the variety of passengers – from empire builders to scholars from the Far East – and the ever-changing beauty of the sea.
But July in the Arabian Sea is monsoon season, and three or four days out our little ship began to be tossed like a toy by winds and rain.
A storm is a great equalizer. All distinctions of class and color were swept away. Empire builders hung at the railings side by side with Asian academics, clutching identical brown bags. All of us cheered with relief when the weather passed and we were obliged to put in at Aden for repairs.
Sailing from Cherbourg to New York on H.M.S. Queen Mary was an utterly different experience. The Queen Mary too was nearing retirement age. But she was fast, and positively luxurious by comparison with that P&O vessel. When we hit rough seas on the Atlantic, we sailed through majestically without a roll.
“Why aren’t we being tossed about?” I asked an officer. “Is it because of the ship’s size?”
“No,” he said proudly, “it’s the stabilizers. We installed them a couple of years ago. Now rough waters don’t bother her at all.”
I often recall those two journeys to illustrate one of the most important truths I have ever learned. Like a storm, life is a great equalizer. It does bring sunny days, but it is sure to bring storms as well. And regardless of class, color, status, birth, or wealth, some of us sail through surely and some flounder and even go under.
Few human beings are born with the ability to weather storm and stress with grace. But everyone can learn. We can’t control the weather outside, but we can control how we respond. Like the Queen Mary, we can install stabilizers where we need them – not outside ourselves, of course, but in the mind.
For it is in the mind that the storms of life really blow. What matters is not so much the turmoil outside us as the weather within. To a person with an agitated mind, something as minor as a rude driver can cause enough stress to ruin a day. By contrast I think of Mahatma Gandhi, who gave himself away when he confessed, “I love storms.” Gandhi began life as a timid child, but he learned to keep his mind so steady that he could face tremendous crises with courage, compassion, wisdom, and even a sense of humor.
This steadiness of mind is one of the most practical of skills. Without it, no one can face the storm and stress of life without breaking. And life today is storm and stress. We live in the midst of conflicts – within ourselves, at home, in the community, even nationally and internationally. This is an age of conflict, which makes it an age of anxiety as well. Nothing is more vital than learning to face this turmoil with clarity, confidence, and grace.
Fortunately, we don’t have to develop these capacities. We already have them. The problem is that we need a calm mind to draw on them. When the mind is agitated or confused, they’re simply locked up inside. That is the practical importance of a calm mind. “I know how to meditate!”
Here I’d like to tell another story about that first voyage.
By the time I left India, I had been meditating for many years and never missed a day. So the first thing I did on boarding ship was to find a place for morning meditation where I would not be disturbed. Since my cabin was impossible – too cramped and crowded – I prowled about until I discovered the sports deck. No one ventured there until the crew showed up with mops and pails.
On the first morning I made my way to the sports deck in the early hours and settled down for deep meditation. When I finished and opened my eyes, I found myself surrounded by a number of young Australians making cracks at my expense. I didn’t mind. If I could provide some entertainment on a boring voyage, I thought, so much the better.
The next couple of days began the same way. But when the monsoon struck and the view started gyrating wildly between sky and sea, my stomach began to follow. I made it through the 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 majority draped over the railings.
But then a second thought popped in. “Wait, you know how to meditate!”
Somehow 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 opened my eyes a couple of hours later, 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 say, “Not medication. Meditation.”
Even a child can
After that, quite a number of the passengers got interested in my “Indian thing.” But only one or two wanted to hear the instructions. Meditation is simple and powerful, but it’s not easy. It requires a certain daring to attempt to steady the mind day in and day out. In the Bhagavad Gita, in fact, the challenge is compared with trying to tame the wind.
But there is a skill that everyone can learn easily, even a child: repetition of the mantram, or “prayer word” as it is called in some circles in the West. You can think of the mantram as a handrail for the mind. It gives your mind something to hold on to, so that you can steady yourself in confusing circumstances until your thoughts become clear.
Repeating the mantram is like calling God collect. If you are averse to religious language, think of it as calling for help from within. Either way, it is an emergency call for deeper resources that are always present but seem invisible in times of trouble. “This is beyond me,” we are saying. “I need strength I can’t find – I can’t even pay for this call. Please send help, and pick up the bill too.”
You can draw on the power of the mantram like this at any time, wherever you happen to be, whatever you happen to be doing. But if you want the mantram to come to your rescue when you need it, if you want it to steady your mind in times of turmoil, you need to practice, practice, practice in calm weather. Whenever you get even a moment free, unless you are doing something that requires attention, repeat your mantram silently to yourself – while waiting, walking, washing dishes, and especially when falling asleep at night. Constant repetition drives the mantram deep into consciousness, so that agitation on the surface cannot shake it loose when you need to hold on.
I must have said this a million times, but it can never be repeated too often. Throughout my life, no matter how assiduously I practiced this skill, I have always been able to find more time, additional opportunities. This is how we gradually extend sovereignty over the mind.
The storms are not outside
Fascinatingly enough, so far as the mind is concerned, the cause of stress is not important. What matters are the waves of agitation in the mind. Whether we are 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 spiritual growth. 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.
But life does not consist only of hassles. Whatever popular psychology says, it’s not all “small stuff.” Coping with these annoyances is just training. The Olympic events are the crises and tragedies – accidents, illness, separation, betrayal, bereavement – that are bound to come in one form or other without warning. That is when we need to know how to find shelter in ourselves, for that is just when external supports are likely to fail.
Teresa of Avila, one of the world’s greatest teachers, illustrated this idea of shelter inside us with a famous image. All of us, she says, have a rich and spacious “interior castle” – an inner world that is our real home. Everything we need is stocked there for us to claim. But until we begin the spiritual life, we spend our lives in the courtyard and never even dream of trying the door.
Today, rather than a castle, I like the homier picture of those old Victorian houses that grace some neighborhoods in San Francisco. Imagine owning such a house without an inkling that it belongs to you. You eat your meals on the porch, sleep there, work there, play there, and never think you’re missing anything. Inside you have a comfortable bedroom and a den with a cozy fireplace, but you’re used to your sleeping bag. When it rains, you huddle on the porch and shiver. And if someone asks why you don’t go inside, you reply, “What’s ‘inside’? I’ve lived like this all my life. What else is there?”
The vast majority of human beings live very much like this. Until we learn how to enter the deeper levels of consciousness – as John Donne says, to “be our own home and therein dwell” – we are hopelessly exposed to every storm life brings.
Not insensitivity
When I talk about being steady in a crisis, I’m not talking about insensitivity. When life strikes serious blows – personal trauma, a death in the family, earthquake, war – no one should be indifferent or feel at ease. In such cases, agitation is only human. What is important is not to be at the mercy of that agitation: to stabilize the mind quickly, so that you can respond to the crisis effectively with courage, love, and wisdom.
Sometimes the storm in the mind is so powerful that it lashes your attention to tatters. That is the sure sign of agitation: concentration becomes impossible, so that every moment you have to keep bringing your mind back to the job at hand.
When you try to meditate or repeat your mantram at such times, you can almost see your mind surging up and down like a stormy sea. And what you are doing is telling the waves of the mind, “Be still.” It takes a lot of practice, but gradually the waves rise less and less until finally they subside.
That period can be painful, and even after your mind regains equilibrium, the sorrow may remain. But by then your mind is clear. You are yourself again, able to be your best even if things look worse.
There is nothing unnatural about this stabilizing process. No matter how hard life strikes, almost everyone regains balance sooner or later. The difference is that when the mind is untrained, we might need days or even weeks to recover. Once you begin to train your mind to be steady, it takes less and less time to get on an even keel again. Finally, like a good helmsman, you will not lose your hold on the wheel even in the roughest sea.
Most precious, perhaps, is how this stabilizing influence affects others. Just as an agitated person disturbs those around him, one person with an even mind helps others to find the same equilibrium in themselves. You not only develop stabilizers in your own mind; you become a stabilizer for others too.
Creative crises
If I may offer my own small example, I have been struck by very severe blows in the course of my life. The suffering at such times can be intense, especially when the blows seem undeserved or come from those you love. 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 learn to meditate. That is the real lesson to learn from a crisis: not to rely on any external support, but to find one’s own center of strength within.
For a much more significant example, I again turn to Gandhi. The “most creative experience” in his life, he tells us, occurred long before he burst onto the world stage as a “mahatma.” As a young man on his way to his first job, he was thrown out of a train in South Africa because of his brown skin. The incident so enraged him that he spent the entire night in turmoil, shivering on the railway platform while a storm raged in his heart.
What should he do? How should he deal with this kind of treatment? He had only arrived in South Africa a few days before; should he turn around and go back to India? Or should he stay – and if he stayed, should he accept the prejudice as his countrymen did, or should he resist it? And if he chose to resist, how? What could one little man do alone?
Looking back on the shining career that followed this crisis, it is easy to forget that at this point in his life, Gandhi was a timid, ineffectual young man. He did not decide to stay and fight racial prejudice. He simply resolved neither to retaliate nor run away.
But the turmoil of that experience prompted Gandhi to turn inward to find the strength he needed. He began to study passages from India’s best-known scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, and to use his mantram at every opportunity. And gradually this led to a complete transformation of character. When Gandhi says he was “born in India but made in South Africa,” that is what he means.
“Great emergencies and crises,” the psychologist William James observed, “show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
This is the opportunity that crisis and challenge offer us. You and I may not be Gandhis, but every one of us has these capacities inside us. That is our legacy as human beings.
