Manoj Dias’ debut book, Still Together: Connection Through Meditation, explores the ways we detach from our lives and relationships, and discusses how we can begin to reclaim ourselves through the core teachings of mindfulness and Buddhist meditation.

Many of us have experienced moments of anxiety, especially as we emerge from a global pandemic. In Still Together, Manoj helps us understand that ‘we are not our thoughts.’ He takes us step-by-step through the core teachings of Buddhist meditation and mindfulness and explains how we can apply this ancient wisdom to modern life to cultivate true and deep connection in our day-to-day lives.

With beautiful illustrations by French design duo Sacree Frangine, Still Together teaches us how to apply these essential learnings while enriching us with a deeper sense of connection to both ourselves and the world around us.

Book Excerpt: Epilogue

Full disclosure: when I started writing this book I knew that this final chapter would be a call to action for each of us to look at ways we could integrate these teachings into our beautiful, brave and ever-evolving lives in meaningful ways.

Then we experienced the COVID-19 pandemic.

After over a decade of practice, study and teaching, I had a fullblown panic attack. After I had sworn that I would never again put myself in the position of burning out, I burnt out. After teaching so many people to turn towards their anxiety, I did everything I could to avoid my own. And having just written a chapter about the perils of social media, in the midst of lockdown I found that

social media was the only thing that gave me comfort.

As the world became gripped in a state of collective fear, anxiety and trauma, I did what I unconsciously do all the time: I started to over-work.

It never occurred to me that I was doubling my usual output in the middle of a global pandemic.

Not until one day when I jumped out of the shower, sat down on my bed and broke down crying. I thought my tears were for others. I thought of my lonely mother, and my black and brown friends in New York who were disproportionately affected by the virus. I missed my girlfriend, whom I had not seen for six months because Australian borders were closed. I wept for my daughter, who was living in a COVID-19 hotspot and was separated from me and her grandmother, my mother. But as I continued to weep, I noticed my body, which was trembling and shaking. I turned towards it with the gentleness of a mother tending to a child that is distressed.

As I did this, what opened up in my body was trauma.

What I was going through was grief and loss. I had lost my way of life. The things that made me feel happy and safe were gone. I was trying to reconcile my own loss and grief while simultaneously navigating hoarding shoppers and feeling an unrelenting need to be productive and to hold space for family and friends.

I remember thinking how revolutionary it was to slow down. I wasn’t shopping online, I wasn’t eating out every day. My mind, while still anxious, also felt like it was slowing down. And my body started to feel clean again. Importantly, I started to feel like I was in my body.

Then Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd were murdered.

The weeks and months that followed were some of the most challenging in my life. What arose in me was not only the anger at seeing people who looked like me being treated like disposable items, it was also the sudden realisation that racism, something that had been my lived experience, was all of a sudden trending. The dichotomy was that I was happy that racism had finally entered the public lexicon, while simultaneously reckoning with something I had endured silently for decades.

Having had incredibly challenging conversations with those both close to me and far away and seeing the pain of my black and brown friends, I felt my heart break again. But this time the heartbreak was accompanied by another powerful force: anger.

Immobilised by rage, I sat in bed for days, spoke to people I trusted and simply cried. This time, I struggled to meditate, to teach online classes and even to finish this book.

But what followed in those weeks was a starkly different response to the one I had in the early stages of COVID-19. I felt the anger pushing me towards action. This was the moment we had been waiting for, I realised, and the moment I had been practising meditation for. This was a moment for liberation.

If our mindfulness practice aims to liberate us from suffering, then we have to acknowledge that our suffering, yours and mine, is intertwined. If you suffer, I suffer; if I do, you inadvertently do. This is not simply poetic, it’s based on the philosophy of interconnection that COVID-19 demonstrated. If a pathogen can cause suffering in China and we simply think it is a Chinese problem, we suffer. But if we can be moved to treat another person’s suffering as if it were our own, the impact we can have is limitless.

Every action begins with a thought; the idea of separateness is a construct of the mind. And our meditation and yoga practice can no longer be separate from the wellness of those around us. Perhaps it’s in stillness that we come together. 

Perhaps it’s in togetherness that we become still enough to recognise what really matters, and what we can do to encourage the wellbeing of not just ourselves, but of our friends, family, lovers, friends, neighbours and complete strangers.