Part 2: Silent Meditation Retreat: Watching the breath

Victor Byrd, our teacher, was galvanizing that first night in his dharma talk. I had never heard him speak quite like that before: focused and forceful and deadly serious. He told us of his childhood friend, now gravely ill, and how he couldn't think of anything more important than this, what we were attempting to do. He challenged us, "Can you?" He was intense and compelling. He spoke of his tachycardia starting when he was ten years old with a heartbeat of 320 beats per minute. He told us how strange and weird it was to have your heart and your breath completely out of synch; that you could breathe great long slow breaths and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to that racing heart. It occurred to him that we are suffering from tachycardia of the mind (later he would coin the phrase: tachy-chitta - 'tachys', from the Greek meaning rapid or accelerated, 'chitta', Sanskrit for the mind), meaning that our minds are completely disconnected from our bodies. He reminded us that 'watching the belly' or 'counting the breath' is simply technique: what is the point beyond that? What are we trying to achieve? This weekend is about slowing down the mind, watching the body breathe, matching up mind and body for once. And if we do that, then maybe, maybe we'll have a chance to be silent enough to let the Great Matter, as the Zen masters call it, make itself known. No-one else can do it for us, not a teacher nor a book: it is something we must do for ourselves. We are at the gate. We are the gate. If we could only be quiet enough to see that. He urged us to try, in these two days, to work as hard as if we were on a two month retreat, to condense two months' work into two days. He made it seem entirely possible.

Since we couldn't speak, I have no idea how the others reacted to this. I know I was on fire to try, filled with concentration, awareness and resolve. We sat after this talk and I slowed my breath down and watched it. Eyes closed, in the darkened room now illuminated with tea lights and a single burning log, there was only sound and the sensation of the body breathing. I got the idea of each breath being like a little one inch square tile - each in-breath a tile, each out-breath a tile. And every noise I heard I imagined as a mark on the tile: a big black mark for a big noise, a small dot for a little one. Some noises continued over a single breath, but the noise would almost always change: it might start out loudly (and therefore be a black mark on that tile) and fade to a low hum on the next breath (and therefore be a lighter mark). I wasn't paying attention to what the sounds were, I wasn't identifying them: I was simply noting 'sound'. Because the room was so silent, it was unusual for there to be more than one sound at a time, which made it easy to note. Occasionally - very rarely - a sound continued at exactly the same pitch over two or more breaths. Then I added in another sense to differentiate between tiles: how about feeling? And then once again, each breath, each tile-shape, was different. Now there is a sharp pain in the knee; now there is a dull ache; now a fizz in the back, or a pressure on the ankle or whatever. The point was, when the breath was slowed down to the size of a tile, it was absolutely clear to see that everything changes breath by breath by breath. My first reaction on discovering this was exhilaration: every moment is as unique as a snowflake! I couldn't quite believe that it was so, but I put it to the test, breath by breath, and sure enough, every single one was different. 

It seemed incredibly poignant then, to see how fast everything changes, how nothing stays the same. Imagine if the eyes were open? Imagine if I added thought? I wondered if this is why we tend to spend so much time either reliving the past or anticipating the future. When we go over and over events, real or imagined, in our lives, we give them a certain heft. It makes us feel grounded and real. "I did this. I will do that. This is who I am." Instead of seeing the truth of it, that each moment is never to be repeated, as ephemeral as a wisp of cloud. The present moment, all we really have, and it's so swift - a breath! And gone. Ineffably sad.