The benefits of meditation can be yours for only $700, according to a women's beauty magazine.

Maybe I had an awareness of what meditation is before about 2006, but that year was the first time I tried it for myself. This was the middle of undergrad and I was procrastinating on my homework so zealously and successfully that I was always finding myself days (hours) away from a deadline and with a lot of stress. Part of my procrastination was dedicated to researching ways to reduce my anxiety (save the very obvious approach of doing work on time; that would have been too, well, obvious). 

Vegan eating was still a very fringe activity eight years ago so when I wanted a treat at the end of a week, I'd go to the Whole Foods salad bar. Sometimes I would add a magazine to my purchase to read it with dinner. It seems almost redundant to list the types of magazines Whole Foods carries, but, suffice it to say, there was more than one each about Buddhism and yoga. Knowing nothing about either, other than that both promised their practitioner a peaceful mind, I reached for the esoteric Buddhism ones. Yoga was peaking among my peer group, making its claims of peace seem more dubious. 

Inside the glossy pages I learned about the technique of meditation. Science was starting to more seriously study meditation's benefits and alongside serene looking monks the magazines had photos of brains in all sorts of colors, the brains of meditators less chaotically hewed. 

Here was as close a thing as you could get to a cure for America's anxiety and best of all it was free! Sure, the back of the magazines included advertisements for cushions and Tibetan ringing bowls and incense and all sorts of meditation accoutrements. But no one claimed they were necessary. Sit on your butt, preferably in a cross-legged position if you can't do lotus, and close your eyes for a bit of time. There weren't even fancy timer apps you could download for your iPhone because no one had an iPhone. 

Free was a price point that played well with my student budget. And so I tried to learn how to sit. I'd put my alarm clock next to me, look at the time, and close my eyes. In the beginning I'd open them ever so slightly -- somehow this felt less like cheating -- to peak again and I'd find barely two minutes had passed. Eventually I started sitting for longer, working up to 15 minutes at a time. Fifteen minutes of sitting doesn't sound too hard, hell, office workers sit for eight hours a day, but this sitting was mentally and physically tougher. As I got better, there were no extra bells or whistles to buy. As my practice became more serious, there were no upgrades I had to do to my equipment because the only thing one needs to meditate is a place to sit or stand or lay down or jump (you get the idea). 

I was reminded of this yesterday when I was flipping through a women's beauty magazine. I forget which one, but nearly any of them would do the same thing, I'm sure. On seeing a feature on meditation my first response was delight that this activity, which I had ceased talking about with people because it made me seem even more fringe than the above-mentioned veganism, had gone mainstream. Of course my delight turned sour on the next page, when I learned that to improve my practice I should buy a cushion ($100), a Tibetan ringing bowl ($105), a semi-precious stone to stare at ($350), incense ($25) and a bench ($200). 

Meditation is about sitting, or not, for a long time, or just a short one, not trying consciously to do anything. There's nothing wrong with buying a $100 cushion to sit on. It just seems antithetical to the point of the practice to suggest these items to purchase at the end of an article about an activity that's about minimizing. Staring at a $350 stone instead of whatever random junk happens to be around you when you sit doesn't make the practice less true. But it is maybe not true to the spirit of the practice to sell it to American women in this way.