When I was 16, I trekked with a friend into the hills of San Juan Capistrano, looking for a place to meditate.
We stopped in the middle of an empty field with a pair of blankets and an instructional text.
After years of punishing gymnastics practices, I couldn’t sit comfortably cross-legged; following the book’s suggestion, I tried to meditate lying down.
I woke up 45 minutes later.
I didn’t try again until early March of this year, when I ventured into a small classroom in the back corner of Royce Hall, where Garima Singh and Nikhita Dunphy teach a weekly class in Sahaja Meditation.
There were a dozen or so of us seated in two rows of plastic chairs.
Dunphy, an alumna, stood before the blackboard and briefly explained the seven power centers, or chakras, which extend up the spinal column to the top of the head.
Each corresponds to a different set of qualities, which we can tap into by awakening the Kundalini, a nurturing energy that otherwise lies dormant at the base of the spine.
Then Dunphy led us through the meditation in its basic form. We placed our hands on our knees, palms facing up, closed our eyes and tried to stop thinking.
When we finished, Singh, a public health graduate student, took over at the front of the classroom.
She said Sahaja Meditation, if we did it regularly, would help us react less to the complications in our lives. It sounded almost impossibly peaceful.
Speaking in slow, patient sentences, Singh often broke into a smile, as if unable to repress the joy of her present moment.
She led us through a more advanced meditation exercise in which we placed a hand on various body parts and targeted chakras with various chants.
I was supposed to clear my head, but thoughts and ideas bloomed continuously. Several times I caught myself falling asleep.
When Singh ended the meditation, she said we should be calm and relaxed, but instead I felt agitated, unable to sit still any longer.
As she and Dunphy started teaching another class, I rushed off to a film screening. I had learned nothing.
I planned to begin meditating twice daily, which lasted until I woke up the next morning and ran out of time.
That night, I sat in my desk chair in silence for three minutes, but I couldn’t stop thinking. I tried twice more over the next few days, but each time my mind wandered.
Meditation, I told myself, is counterproductive.
If I have a problem, I need to think it through, not set it aside.
Remembering all the talk of chakras and the Kundalini, it was easy to write off Sahaja Meditation as a fancy stunt. But Eileen Luders made it somewhat harder.
Luders works at UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and in 2009 she co-authored a study in which certain areas of the brain that regulate emotion were shown to be larger in participants who meditated regularly.
Luders guessed that the effects of meditation come as a result of regular mental training and offered as an analogy an experiment in which participants who practiced juggling displayed neurological changes over time.
But she couldn’t say any more definitively why meditation works, only that studies seem to indicate it does.
Singh and Dunphy weren’t sure why meditation works either, but they helped me realize why it wasn’t working for me.
Above all else, they both said, meditation requires a deep personal desire. I just didn’t want it badly enough.
When I talked to her recently, Singh explained that I shouldn’t expect anything phenomenal to happen while meditating; the effect is much more subtle and might not emerge until the day after.
The way she talked about it, though, it was as if meditation had given her access to a whole new color spectrum.
“I reached the point in my life where I could go without eating, I could go through my life without sleeping, but I couldn’t go without meditating,” she said.
It was late evening when I finished talking to Singh.
I sat in my desk chair and thought about meditating, but the distractions of the digital age called to me.
I watched a TV show instead, though I can’t remember which one.