At 05.20 last Thursday morning, I was beginning to question a decision I had made three days earlier.
I had signed up for a seven-day sadhana with the Isha Foundation, culminating yesterday on Guru Purnima — the first full moon after the summer solstice and, in the yogic tradition, a time to honour the teachers who came before us.
I liked that. None of us begins with nothing. Whatever we know has come through somebody.
Two hours each morning. Another forty minutes in the evening. Vegetarian meals twice a day only. No food before midday.
The morning began at 05.30.
Or it was supposed to.
On the first day, the app did not work. I pressed things. Closed things. Opened them again. By ten past six, centred was not quite the word for how I felt.
But I began.
At ten to seven, I stopped the sadhana, opened Zoom and led my usual 7am breathwork. Afterwards, I returned and completed what remained.
That was not how the practice had been designed.
But there were people expecting me at seven.
The sadhana was important to me. I had chosen it freely and wanted to complete it.
The breathwork was different.
The hour belonged to other people too.
There is a large body of research on religion and health, and it keeps producing a result people do not expect.
The Nurses’ Health Study followed 74,534 women for around two decades. Those who attended religious services more than once a week died at a rate a third lower than those who never attended.
You would assume faith was the reason. Prayer. Belief.
But when researchers separate these things, attendance is what stands out. In one large study of Black American women, they tested attendance, prayer, religious coping and spiritual identity side by side. Three of the four faded.
Attendance held.
Not only what people believe. Whether they turn up.
Nor is this only true of religious societies. The Global Flourishing Study — 200,000 people across 22 countries — found the same association strongest in the most secular countries of all.
The researchers offer several explanations. Healthier behaviour. A sense of meaning. Social support.
And the relationships that form when people keep appearing in the same place, at the same hour, over years.
It is not only religion.
Alcoholics Anonymous built the meeting into the method. Same hall. Same hour. Largely the same people.
Parkrun did not invent running. Running was already free. What parkrun created was nine o’clock on Saturday, in that park, with those people.
And in Okinawa, researchers studying longevity often point to the moai: a small group that meets and supports one another over a lifetime.
Different worlds. Same arrangement.
Show up. Regularly. With the same people.
Nobody asked what the hour was for.
There is an app on your phone you have not opened since March. A course you meant to finish. A practice that lasted until the difficult week arrived.
You tried to maintain them alone, often quite seriously. Then life became busy, the practice dissolved, and somewhere inside you filed a private verdict:
I’m not very disciplined.
Perhaps discipline was never the whole problem.
Alone is simply easier to arrange. It asks nothing of a diary that already makes demands before you are out of bed.
Alone was never the advanced version. It was the version that scaled.
You may be thinking that you do have people. Friends. Colleagues. The board. The mastermind.
But you often arrive in those rooms as the capable one. You bring the problem partially solved. You make the intelligent contribution. You remain useful.
That is the currency of the room, and everyone is spending it.
You can be surrounded by accomplished, thoughtful people and still have nowhere the capable part of you can stand down.
Turning up somewhere you have to be good is not quite the same as turning up.
Where in your week are you expected by people who do not need you to be impressive, useful or certain?
Yesterday afternoon, the sadhana ended with a live Guru Purnima celebration.
For seven days, I had known that thousands of people were doing the same practices. That knowledge mattered. But we had not been doing them together.
Twice, I caught myself thinking I was behind because I had missed the 5.30 start.
Behind.
In a spiritual practice.
Company you are out of step with can easily arrive as comparison.
Then the livestream began. There was music. Sadhguru spoke from a vast hall filled with people.
For the first time, the thousands of people I had been imagining became a gathering.
The screen had not changed.
The hour had.
My morning breathwork also happens through a screen. But at seven, we are there.
The screen was never the suspect.
It is whether the hour is shared.
Perhaps that is what the hour is for.
Not simply to discipline us.
To give us somewhere to meet.
Rosaleen
P.S. Look at the recurring thing you have kept longest — the walk, the class, the call with your sister. Did you keep it because you are unusually disciplined, or because someone else was going to be there?