My wife hated me meditating from the outset but when I went to India, she insisted I take a pair of her favorite Capri pants that had been made in India with me and to buy some more. It seemed a mission doomed to failure. I explained that many clothes were made in India for export and not available there because Indian women, at that time, had a different sense of fashion to their Western counterparts.
I looked around New Delhi, not a Capri pant in sight. Saris yes, Punjabis in profusion, Capris conspicuous by their absence on what India women were wearing and absent from what was available for purchase in street markets and stores.
When it came time to leave, the people I was staying with offered to get some made for me and to mail them. I left them $200, an inordinately high amount, but I wanted to do my best that sure nothing could go wrong and as a token of my thanks for their hospitality.
Months passed. No package. My wife decided that this was all the evidence she needed that my newfound meditation was a scam, my new found friends in India were scammers. How could I be so stupid?
Nine months or so later, a bulky package arrived from India. It contained her old Capri pants and two more pairs, made from what appeared to be rough sisal, the material of burlap bags, material that was so rough to the touch that it would have had the effect of sandpaper and if worn next to skin. A casual inspection revealed that their only resemblance to my wife’s Capri pants were that they had two leg openings.
In the days that followed, my wife went through an impressive range of emotional indignance. It would have been better had my friends simply pocketed the $200 than to do what they’d done. Every cliché in the book was thrown at me, beginning with insult to injury, that she’d known from the outset that something like this would happen. Friends? Indeed! Moreover, this was proof positive that the form of meditation I was practicing was a con.
Weeks later, at my meditation class, which was forty minutes drive from my home, I turned around, and there she was, sitting near the back. The expression on her face was evidence confirmed that she’d come not to like it, to prove, for once or for all, what she already knew, that this was a cult, and nothing happened to change her mind.
What’s there not to like?