(Wikimedia Commons)

Or maybe it didn’t. But for a long time, I thought it did.

I dabbled in yoga in high school then, in an effort to be cool, became a regular at yoga club in college. During a long stint as a study abroad student in India I got a teaching certification. Then I did another intensive teacher training course back in the US. And somewhere in that time I started to have a little more self-esteem and I decided to cut out some destructive habits.

In a past life, I had struggled with depression and had occasionally let dark thoughts swell up so quickly in my mind that they exploded into full-blown, hyperventilatory panic attacks. 

It was during my yoga studies that I finally started to accept that happiness could only come from inside, that I could only find love if I loved myself, and that emotional openness could get me through my most frightening moments of insecurity. Maybe I was becoming more mature on my own, or maybe the yoga, meditation, and soul-searching I was doing really were having positive effects. 

I taught yoga for about three years around Los Angeles. I loved hearing how I had helped make someone’s tension headache dissolve. I got excited when my students achieved little breakthroughs in their inversions and backbends. I looked forward to moments of quiet in rooms full of people looking for inner peace together. The yogis I knew seemed youthful, relaxed and open minded. 

But a lot them also seemed judgmental, hypocritical and holier-than-thou. 

I quit teaching to go to grad school, but I also quit because, after a few years, I had gotten sick of my job.  

It was a job that never quite paid my bills even while my students were a privileged group who could spend $17 per class. I felt weirder and weirder about the Orientalist implications of teaching yoga to white Americans in studios that also offered Thai massage and were decorated with Buddha statues and Moroccan lanterns. I began to seriously doubt that $90 yoga mats and cutesy Lululemon pants were really speeding up anyone’s journey to enlightenment, as advertised. And with a rocky emotional past of my own, I wondered if I was qualified to be anyone’s spiritual advisor. 

I continued to practice on my own and to attend an occasional class, but I lost interest in the weekend workshops to “get to know your root chakra!” the retreats with messiah-like yoga stars, and the daily routines of a true devotee. 

But fate caught up with me, or maybe the stars aligned, or maybe Lord Shiva intervened, or maybe it was a coincidence, but in my last semester of journalism school I found myself in India again, this time with a class of journalists writing about religion, and we were all checking into a meditation ashram together.

The place—the Osho International Meditation Resort—in Pune, India, is an upscale getaway mostly for Westerners, which was started by a somewhat creepy charismatic leader with a less-than-perfect personal past. Visitors to the ashram must wear special robes—maroon during the day, white in the evening—which you can buy for a steep price in Osho’s shiny, clean gift-shop. Osho offers your typical yoga classes and quiet sitting meditations, but it’s better known for the more eccentric paths to finding yourself. You can flail about and scream during “Osho Dynamic Mediation,” you can yell gibberish during “Osho Gibberish Meditation,” you can hum loudly for half-an-hour during “Osho Nadabrahma Mediation.” 

On first impression, the resort stuck me as scammy, culty, and out-of-touch with the real world. I felt confused by the many mysteries of the place. Why so expensive? Why the recycled videotaped sermons of a long-dead leader? Why the monotonous, surf rock dance music? But in spite of my bafflement, there was a lot about Osho that felt extremely familiar. 

The find-yourself-by-letting-go-of-yourself rhetoric espoused throughout the mandatory summer-campy orientation session was something I could almost have recited.  

“It’s all the same kind of crap I used to say to my yoga students,” I vented to a friend.   

“Wow, you sound really jaded,” she said.

She was right. I was annoyed with Osho’s teachings because I felt like I knew them so well. They were ideas I had learned, taken to heart, grown tired of, and all-but renounced in more recent years. 

But in the way I’ll complain about my mother but stop anyone else from saying an unkind word about her, I also felt the need to jump to Osho’s defense. 

I felt hyper-aware of the Oshoites’ ridiculousness. I was quick to think of them as entitled Westerners coming to play “spiritual journey” in the Orient for a while. But I also saw them as my tattooed, mellow, vegetarian brethren—damaged souls who had been saved from self-destruction somewhere along the way. As much as I wanted to separate myself from them, it’s easy to imagine that had I had a little more money and little less burnout a few years ago, I could have become one of them. 

My current fact-seeking journalist self and my former truth-seeking meditationer self were in conflict for the entirety of my stay at Osho. The part of myself that had once sought to be open minded to anything was now focused on critically analyzing everything. I hated feeling so judgmental. And the more time I spent trying to clear my mind in Osho meditations, the more time I ended up thinking about how much I’d changed since my Serious Yogi days. I had once succeeded in learning to open my mind enough to make space for positivity. Now where was I? Judging “wackos” for trying to heal themselves the same way I once had?

Why couldn’t I meditate my way past over-analysis?  Meditation—whether it’s the kind that involves downward dogs or screaming gibberish—is supposed to be about forgetting all sides of these internal arguments, honoring the moment, and letting go. 

“What did you think about during meditation?” a fellow student asked me after a round of Osho Kundalini shaking mediation.

If I were more in-practice with meditation, my answer might have been, “Nothing, of course, my mind was clear and I was living entirely in the moment without a care or worry. And boy, do I feel blissful now!”

But, in truth, there were all kinds of things on my mind during meditation, and during my whole weekend at the retreat: judgments, disappointment in myself for feeling judgmental, self-consciousness, frustration, failed efforts at thinking like a devotee, urges to joke. 

But chief among my plaguing thoughts was, “It would probably be good for me to get back into this stuff.”