Too Truthful for Meditation Circle

Oh baby I'm so granola that I'm crunchy! Sort of. Well, the truth is that I dabble in a holistic lifestyle from time to time until I find out just how unfeasible whatever it is that I am doing is and usually drop whatever the trend at the time might be from there. "Presentness," I tried it. Hot yoga, yeah it almost gave me a heatstroke. As for free bleeding, let's just say there are places I am no longer welcome (the CO-OP). Just because it doesn't always work out doesn't mean that I am going to give up on trying to find the next bandwagon to jump on. So, when I had the chance to use my company's insurance-paid meditation class I was all for using up a few late afternoons to do it. This is why it didn't last long.

It was a lovely studio for sure that I walked into on my first day there. The floors were new, the walls had just been painted, and nothing was out of place it seemed. My class was well organized too. It was a little awkward though that everyone seemed to know one another except for me. I came in wearing my black leggings and a Metallica t-shirt, while everyone else was in hand-dyed organic cotton. Still, as an adult, none of my friends had the time or money to waste on this frivolous pursuit with me, so I had to grin and bear the lack of any social comfort blanket that comes with already knowing the people around me. The class had a set order of events to follow. There were the opening breathing exercises, then the main stretches, and finally the meditation circle at the end which allowed participants to interact with one another. Overall the class consisted mostly of a little stretching, and people overtly checking themselves out in the studio's mirrored walls for an hour.

When it came to the meditation circle, the questions were never the same, but always equally bland. "What do you think of world peace?", "What was your favorite time in your life?" Nothing particularly thought-provoking or that far from the realm of beauty pageant quizzes came up. Every person who answered gave some highly histrionic reply as if their response was a type of humanity exam that they had to ace or be voted off of the island. I was ignored for the first couple of meditation circles. I am invisible to the self-indulgent. On the day that I was offered to answer the meditation question, I had skipped lunch because I was at the courthouse disputing a parking ticket- I lost by the way. It would be accurate to say that I was not in the mood to be in the class at all but went anyway out of stubbornness. Maybe it was the pissy expression on my face but my question was, "What would make you the happiest?" The social expectation was for me to answer with something like "For cancer to be cured" or "To stop climate change." Only I am an honest person and I answered how I felt at that moment which was to be happy if I had "a chicken sandwich." As soon as the words left my mouth I heard the room audibly gasp, mind you that all were vegans but me there.

The class ended and when everyone was walking out I got a lot of angry stares. I went back after that one more time for the exercise, but the way the people around me acted, any onlookers would have thought that I had the plague or something equally terrible. The attitude that I encountered was as if the other attendees worried that I could contaminate them with my chicken sandwich eating ways. My presence was to them a gateway into voting for Trump and buying a Ford F150. Ironically in middle school, this might have upset me, but at my age, I knew that no one can make everyone happy and I moved on with ease. As for the yoga enthusiasts in an apocalyptic scenario, carrying a chicken sandwich for self-protection, it seems to scare them off if they get feisty.