Meditation

Recently it occurred to me that I’ve been doing yoga for twenty years. This happened while I was doing yoga, which makes a lot of sense. My Buddha-worthy insight reminded me of a time when I’d only been doing yoga for three years and still gazed around at my surroundings wonderingly, like a toddler, which, in a yoga sense, I was. I’d traveled to San Francisco for a Yoga Journal conference, the vogue back in the Aughts. All the famous yoga teachers, and their willing dues-paying acolytes, gathered in the Brutalist basement of the downtown Hilton, not a particularly beautiful or Zen location. I took workshops all day, including a lousy, pretentious harmonium-soaked one from an emaciated master who looked like a yoga version of Iggy Pop, but with worse taste in music.

Sam Harris has been in several tangles in his busy career. This is to be expected from a leader of the New Atheist movement, a vocal critic of Islam (he called the term ‘Islamophobia’ a ‘pernicious meme’), a member of the Men’s Movement (shocker: some non-men found it anti-woman), and a gleeful saboteur of the notion of free will. But for years now, Harris has been using his background in neuroscience and meditation to help people untangle their minds through his podcast Making Sense. It’s hard to find a podcast about meditation that is not made by or for quasi-spiritual, anti-vaxxer yoga moms. Making Sense is for the more serious inquiring mind. Harris, dry and wry, discusses not only meditation but philosophy, science, politics and ethics.