Wendyl Nissen: Humour Om, er, um

When I was 12 I went to Auckland's Cook Street Market and bought a yellow muslin dress.

I then went home and made some raffia no-shoes. They were yellow and consisted of little macrame daisies which you hooked around your big toe and then tied around your ankle.

I then lit some incense and played with my hair, wondering how long it would take to grow it down to my bum. It was 1974. It feels like yesterday.

"What are you smoking in there?" was my father's reaction to his daughter finding the hippie within and mistaking patchouli for pot.

"What on earth is that God-awful smell?" was my husband's reaction to his wife finding the hippie within on Wednesday.

"It's incense; doesn't the house smell amazing?" I replied as I wafted past him in my new yellow cotton kaftan playing with my hair and reeking of frankincense.

"What happened to the lounge?" asked my daughter as she logged on to Facebook after school.

"Isn't it cool?" I said. "It's called the tree of life. Don't you just love the colours? I think the yellow really lifts this room."

I had been shopping at the Indian shop and found myself drawn to several - okay, lots - of printed Indian cotton bedspreads which were now draped over all the couches in the lounge to great effect while emitting a gentle sandalwood odour.

She didn't need to say anything. Her eyes said it all. They squinted in my direction, puzzled and just a little bit frightened.

"It's okay," said her father. "It's just the meditation."

A week earlier he had persuaded me to join him on a meditation course. He was doing it for a book he is writing. I apparently needed to do it to get "some balance".

"It's just what you need. A bit of time out, stop you feeling so overwhelmed."

I wasn't overwhelmed, I was just insanely busy. A position I had not found myself in for several years having established a work/life balance which gave me a few days a week to wander around the house and garden talking to chickens or myself should the mood take me.

Then I was persuaded to start a new business making and selling natural cleaning products and I had become a little resentful of the lost wandering time.

"Busy is good," he would say. "It's just how you look at it."

I looked. It wasn't good.

So I found myself learning how to meditate with other busy people looking for some balance and absorbing the lessons of our maharishi guru.

Now I sit still for 20 minutes in the morning and in the evening, shut my eyes and say a word over and over to myself. I can't tell you the word because it's my mantra, and it's secret.

The first few days were a nightmare.

Just finding the time to meditate made me jittery in the supermarket queue as my meditation time loomed perilously close and I was in danger of missing it.

I worried that I would sleep in and not have time to meditate in the morning.

I became slightly cynical of meditation benefits, but reasoned that just sitting still for 40 minutes a day would be quite nice.

And then it happened. I found my hippie within.

"Go back to sleep," muttered my husband as I leapt out of bed at 6am ready to start the day.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" said my daughter as she cautiously watched me stir whole grains on the stove for breakfast.

"Like what?"

"Like you've lost your mind."

Which is exactly what my husband had said the day I returned from the Indian shop laden with shopping bags, my new healing quartz crystal dangling off a chain, rugs and bedspreads, incense and love oil, kaftans and harem pants spilling forth.

"Have you lost your mind?" he asked.

"Maharishi made me do it," was all I could think to say, finding my 12-year-old within.