Whenever I was asked about meditation, I would either clam up and get a sheepish look on my face, the way dogs in Manhattan do when they’re going to the bathroom on the street, or I would launch into an off-putting, overly emphatic lecture about the benefits of mindfulness, how it was actually a superpower, how it really wasn’t as weird as everyone thought, and didn’t involve “clearing the mind,” and so on. I could see the tinge of mild terror in my listener’s eyes—the cornered interlocutor politely but frantically looking for any means of egress.
