Has this hard economic time tempted you to hightail it to the ashram?

The New York Times says that people are going in droves.

After a “hard time” living in a provocative desert that threw my body off-kilter, I thought sitting still would do me good. I didn’t want to (nor could I afford) “going to the ashram,” which I’d read about somewhere. At the ashram, Hollywood-esque folks paid an exorbitant price to be forced to eat only kale, hike and sweat it out, and lose 20 pounds to fit into a dress for next month’s party. I wanted something authentic, which to 23-year-old me meant Hindu monks in saffron robes teaching us the intricacies of the Bhagavad Gita.

I found the exact place in the Catskill Mountains and laid down a precious, hard-earned $2,000, the most monumental straight-cash purchase of my young life. We sat crossed-legged for hours–chanting, meditating and doing yoga asanas for 30 days in a row. My inflexible hips opened too quickly, a mistake I am reminded of every time they crack and click. We read ancient texts. We even wore white uniforms. I was one of the four people who camped on the soggy lawn. It was a wet September. Everyone else slept in the housing barn. We ate brown rice and vegetables; our one taste of sweet manifested as shriveled dates. I eyed these delicacies and when the communal breakfast platter made its way across the room to me, I had to steady myself from snatching my one date, from snarfing it up like a pig. On the last day my new friend, an Irish woman recovering from cocaine addiction, admitted that every night (while I read quiet poems in my tent) my barn-dwelling fellow meditators were gorging on a stash of KitKat bars smuggled in from home.

The point is that changing my scenery and routine changed my internal framework. I called my mother one time, towards the end of my stay. As she worried out loud about my soldier brother and his 173rd Airborne Division roaming somewhere in Northern Iraq, this response rolled out: “It’ll be fine, Mom. If Peter dies, then that’s how he was meant to go.” Pause. “We’ll all survive and, really, he’ll be at peace.” In that moment, standing under a maple tree dripping rainwater, cell phone pressed to my ear, my words were not forced. I had truly lost my capacity for rhetoric, my gift at spiel. My days of quiet had worked. My beloved brother could have died that day, and–no biggie–I would have been calm, on board with the strange uncertain rhythm of life. I felt that assured, that pure. It was my purest moment to date.

How do I get back there? Not to being out of touch, but to undoing worry. I’m unconvinced that it requires a jettison of normal life and bee line for the cave. That standard formula has worked for centuries for many people, including me. These days I’m thinking about sustainability. Instead of bolting (my go-to way), instead of extremes, what about infusing meditation practice into the dirty corners of daily life? And not only in hard times. Perhaps in joyful times too.