Social Acceptance
The whispered voice sounded urgent, “Jyotisha! . . . Jyotisha!” I opened my eyes to see a pair of khaki pants in front of me, a stripe up the side ending near a holster with a gun and a shirt with a badge.
I squinted in the bright mid-day sun as I looked around. The three of us meditating in a field were surrounded by four policemen, two from a police car on the nearby street in front of us and two from the car which had been driven up in the field behind us.
They stood at the ready, as if expecting us to flee. When we merely looked at them with a mixture of curiosity and some trepidation one of them spoke. “What are you doing?” he asked warily.
“We’re meditating,” I replied. I explained that we were traveling through Wichita returning home to California from a yoga retreat and that we were washing our clothes in the laundromat across the street. While waiting for the clothes to be done, we had decided to do some meditation in this field.
The officer looked at us, the laundromat, and the growing crowd of on-lookers. “You mean you’re just sitting with your eyes closed?” he asked. The other officers shifted uneasily and glanced sheepishly about.
Regaining his composure, the leading officer informed us that the field we were sitting in was private property and that we must return to the laundromat. The crowd of on-lookers parted for us to pass and we sat in the laundromat until our clothes were finished.
That was 1974 and, although things have improved, meditation and other practices are still poorly understood in our society. Many still view meditation with suspicion due to religious intolerance, ignorance, fear, and superstition. But just as yoga postures were once a misunderstood-oddity and have now become commonplace, so too meditation will one day be a widely accepted practice.