Another thing on meditation. Know what I hate? Every time you see a magazine or some web article about meditation, the picture is always of some woman in a tanktop and baggy pants sitting on a beach or something. Or else it's some old Tibetan monk in flowing robes sitting in some temple balanced precariously on a Himalayan crag.
News flash-- men meditate too, and not just Central Asian men. Also, you can meditate on the subway, or sitting in the gutter on skid row, or in the bedroom while the TV blares in the front room. It has nothing to do with flowing clothes, sunsets on the beach, or windy mountaintop temples.
We Americans reduce everything to image. If you wear the right clothes, and sit in these postures in peaceful places, and adopt a serene expression, you're doing it. You're wrong.
And no, I'm not really sure why this bothers me. It just does.
My guess is that what bothers you about it (me too) is that everything in our society gets commodified. It seems that nothing is immune.
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