Jason Harm Schreur | Age: 44
Description: "I tried to quiet my mind, like so many before me. It did not turn out how I expected it to."
I sit on my mat, and I am facing Northwest. My mat is black with a gold, gray and beige
pattern that resembles the woods. I ask Alexa to turn on “Zen Music.” I cannot hear it, so I state, “Alexa, turn up volume two.” I still cannot hear it, and ask again, with the same command. I can now hear the music, and I ask Alexa to skip track. The music is way too loud, so I ask Alexa, “volume down one.” Now it’s just right. I begin to meditate, however I ask Alexa to set a timer for seven minutes. This is because I deliberated in my mind that ten would be too long, as I am just now easing back into meditation. But five would be too short. I toyed with eight briefly, quickly realizing that seven was a sacred number to me, and was the obvious choice for the perfect amount of meditation. Now I begin to meditate.
The first five minutes do not go well. I know that my goal is not to “empty my thoughts.” I
merely want to observe all the thoughts that drift by, and let them melt into the sound of the
music and the blowing fans. I do not accomplish this task at all. As I try to push my thoughts
away, more and more start to hit me. I try to think about when I last meditated with my friend and essentially guru, Jerome. I am transported to Ala Moana Park after we shot a yoga commercial, whereupon Jerome is telling me to feel the string pull from my spine up through my skull and into the universe. As I try to bat this thought away with the mantra, “Om,” I then suddenly discover - Om is in your name Jerome! Like, the sound is in your name! Now as I try to meditate, I imagine emailing or texting Jerome about this revelation, completely missing the
point of the exercise I am undertaking. SO yeah, it was a rough first five. I literally heard the
voice in my head say, “you can get through this!” I was not reaching a meditative state.
Something changed in those last two minutes. I tried to refocus on not focusing. The
background music drastically changed tone, and there were keyed instruments banging out a
staccato that was jumpy and fast. Each different note started to key a response in my mind, and I started seeing images of nature flash by - A tree grew out of the ground in front of me, shooting high above my head into the clouds. The clouds started to swirl and move past the
mountain range, moving as if in a time-lapse video, rain started to pour and rivers filled up, the
clouds cracked with lightning in a valley-wide blitz, volcanoes spewed lava and smoke into the air . . . and THEN! The music dropped, and a low hum hung in the room, as before my closed eyes an enormous scene of calm blue ocean water stretched over the globe . . . BOOM! A single note broke the calm as if a drop of planet-sized water hit the surface of the ocean and we were thrown into space! Past Mars and Jupiter we flew through the Solar System, close enough to touch Saturn’s rings. And it continued on, leaving the system behind, rocketing through space until there were no stars, there was nothing, it was all black. I had no time to think any thoughts at this moment; there was no need to utter, “Om.” I merely pondered nothing, for the moment, until I was flung past a new Sun, and saw new planets rushing to greet me. Lush gardens of purple and green colors I had never seen before, animals I could not comprehend paraded before me . . . I slowly ascended to the soft ground below, and before me, almost borne from the ground and now fully formed sat another form like myself, obscured by color and shadow, sitting in meditation, against an ancient tree. BOO-BOO-BOO-BEEP-BEEP!, Alexa shouted.
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