Mid-January, and I was headed to North Fork, to the California Vipassana Center. I had heard things, both good and bad, about the retreat and tried to keep my expectations low. I was doing it. That was enough. The drive took five hours, leaving crowded smoggy L.A., over the mountains, across flat landscape until I branched onto a smaller freeway and the scenery became hilly, very green, studded with those happy California cows of the cheese advertising campaign. I pulled over to eat my peanut butter sandwich and within minutes a policeman pulled up alongside, mouthing, "You okay?" I waved my sandwich at him, he smiled and sped off. I was impressed at the speed of his response and his concern. Happy cows, concerned cops - I felt safe before I even got there.
North Fork is a tiny town, village really, proudly proclaiming itself to be the very center of California. The Vipassana Center was a few miles out on the other side of town. I turned in right at 3:00, the time we were told to start checking in. I was surprised to see a lot of cars already in the parking lot, with license plates from all over: British Columbia, Oregon, Mexico, Canada, Nevada... I found registration in the Dining Hall, people filling out forms, standing quietly, waiting their turn. I was given a map of the property and a blue booklet entitled "Vipassana Meditation, as taught by S.N. Goenka in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin Introduction to the Technique and Code of Discipline for Meditation Courses" which I would practically memorize over the next ten days since it was the only reading material we were allowed. They had handy carts you could load with your stuff and wheel to your quarters. Cars could not go further than the parking lot. So up the dirt road I went, pulling my cart, and found my room. It was small, clean and simple. It had two beds, two bedside tables with two shelves, two hooks and four hangers, plus a small bathroom with shower, sink and loo. There were signs all over the walls: the daily schedule, please don't adjust the heating, don't open the windows between certain hours when the heating was on, how to clean the shower, how to wash your hands. All these signs were very clear and comforting - when speech is forbidden and the whole experience is so new, you need to know exactly what to expect and what to do in order to feel safe. I unpacked and made my bed: they provided a covering for the foam mattress, over which I put my own sheet, and they also provided a pillow and a coverlet. I had a borrowed sleeping bag plus my pillow from home. It looked quite cozy. My case, shoes and dirty laundry bag fit under the bed. Nothing else to do now but wait for my roommate and/or dinner, whichever showed up first.
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| my room |
Roommate arrived first, right at 5:00, the later check in time. We hadn't been given instructions about talking, but I figured I would start as I meant to go on, being silent, so I gave her a smile and closed my eyes to discourage chat. While she was unpacking, I left her to it and walked down to dinner. We ended up sitting at the same table with two other women, roommates from the room next door to us, and for a lot of the meal we were silent. But then the people behind us started whispering and when no-one said anything, they got louder, and still no-one said anything, pretty soon it was as loud as a regular restaurant. Louder perhaps, because there were a lot of nervous beginners laughing very loudly. Finally one of the women at our table said, "Well, someone from our table has to take the plunge and start talking" and she did. I tried very hard not to get sucked in; I explained that I thought it would be harder to go into silence if we got to know each-other. I was the old hand at retreats on our table, and found myself explaining about the importance of keeping eyes down, to give people privacy to drop their social mask. Of course I couldn't avoid overhearing the personal information the others shared: two things stuck with me, that my roommate had five children, ranging from 33 to 8 years old, and that she had never meditated before! It took me two days to get her eight year old out of my head, and the fact that she was a beginner meditator led me to feeling all sorts of concern - and admiration - for her which lasted throughout the course.
After dinner, we were welcomed, introduced to the retreat manager, told to go to the Meditation Hall (MH) at 6. I returned to our quarters, stopping en route at the car for my lip balm. My roommate came too and noted we had exactly the same car, same model, same year, same colour. A bond! We got back to the room and arranged who liked to take showers when - this was a most useful thing to have done; I'll bet she was wishing we'd discussed the window situation, since she clearly boiled at night with the window shut. I'd wake up next day to find her pajama top flung off in a heap, while I was hunkered down deep in my sleeping bag. I wanted to tell her it was okay to open the window a crack but couldn't think of any way to do that without inadvertently communicating with her in some way, since the window was only accessible by standing on her bed. Thoughts such as this whirred endlessly in my mind...
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| The Meditation Hall |
We filed up to the MH on time, the rules being once you entered the hall, there would be no more talking until the tenth day. So we were a little nervous, a little apprehensive in that huge room, with its high ceilings, windows way up above to let in light but no view; nothing to look at, nothing on the walls, nothing on any of the walls actually, not in our rooms, not in the dining hall or bathrooms. The men sat on one side, the women on the other. At least fifty of each. We were allotted a foam pad and a small bean filled cushion, light blue for the women, navy for the men. I had brought my own round purple cushion from home. Before entering the MH, there was an outer room to hang up coats; it was also a storage area for extra foam squares, pillows and cushions of all shapes and sizes, blankets and coverlets, low wooden benches. Everything you could think of for comfort.
By the second sit of the first day, at 8:00 a.m., the meditation hall looked like a refugee camp. People plundered the supplies and created a nest. This continued the whole ten days, as people tried first one thing then another in an elusive quest for comfort. I want to tell them to give it up, comfort doesn't exist. No matter how cozy your nest appears, after you've sat in it for eleven hours, it hurts!
The course is very cleverly done. Mr Goenka recorded the entire ten day course some twenty years ago, the chanting, the words to start and finish every sit, and the evening discourse, a talk every night from 7 to 8:15. This soon became a highlight; he started off very serious and unsmiling for the first couple of days, but as the course progressed, he loosened up and told stories and twinkled in great mirth and kindness. He warned us that there were two hard days: Day 2 and Day 6. And Day 4, when you wouldn't be allowed to move ("But we won't talk of that now, I don't want to scare you!"). He initiated the pattern of explaining to us what we had done that day, and teaching the technique that we would use the next day.
There were two teachers, a man and a woman, assistant teachers to Mr Goenka who was our actual teacher. We had no dealings with the male teacher, nor the men, apart from sharing the MH with them. They had their own walking areas, residences and dining hall. The very first full day, Goenka began by chanting the Buddha's words in Pali. I had been warned about the chanting: his voice is quite unique and some of the sounds are beyond belief, like a small boy pretending to be a truck (brrm! brrm!) but very deep, guttural and long. So this incredible sound was met with a snort of laughter from the male side of the room. You could almost feel the answering wave of suppressed laughter ride the room, but luckily we were so new, so anxious about doing the right thing, the wave passed without incident. Very quickly we got used to his chanting and funny intonations; in fact we welcomed them: the tiny click of the CD payer meant the hour was almost up. Goenka would return at the end of every hour's sit intoning the words, "Anicca!" Impermanence. We managed five more minutes with joyful relief. Anicca indeed.
I hadn't realized this was a real course, that we would be taught something new every day. Somehow I envisioned sitting all those hours, mind running rampant, eternally watching the breath. But no. There were lessons that built upon the efforts of the day before, every day a new addition to the technique, a modification, an elaboration. And so we began on Thursday morning, and yes, very simply, following the breath in and out of the nose. Not controlling it, not making it anything other than what it was, just observing it. That night Goenka told us, "You thought you were simply watching the breath. But what you were also doing is watching your thoughts and seeing, perhaps for the first time, what a mad thing is this mind!" He told us the mind has only two pastures where it likes to roam - the past and the future. And only two sensations it explores in those pastures - pleasant and unpleasant. The one thing is sure - it has no interest in remaining in the present moment, especially one that involves something as monotonous as watching the breath. So the instruction was to gently bring your mind back to the task at hand, but also pay attention to where it went and if it pursued mostly pleasant or unpleasant sensations. It was extraordinarily hard to do because the mind moves so very fast. But it was interesting to try.
Day 2 was hard. Our instruction varied slightly: we were to feel the sensation of the breath inside the nostrils ("nose-trills") as it went in and as it went out. Here body and mind were united in resistance. If the thoughts weren't zapping madly from one topic to another, the body was protesting in serious pain. And then there were the distractions in the room: a woman two rows in front had a new and very juicy cold, and soon so did many others. The coughs, sneezes and sniffs were loud and very catching. I counted - if somebody cleared their throat then within seconds between five to seven others also cleared theirs. If we got three minutes of silence before somebody started fidgeting, it was a miracle. Plus people were getting up and leaving on any excuse, to blow their nose, cough, get water, go to the bathroom, stretch their legs, run away for a minute... It reminded me of yin yoga classes with Sasha, where we would have to hold a pose like pigeon or sphinx between five and ten minutes, and the urge was to get up and leave. Sasha would call us on it, draw our attention to it. Tell us, "If you're wanting to leave right now, perhaps this is what you do in your regular life when things get tough. You want to get up and distract yourself. Now we're trying something different. Can you stay with it?" I was glad for that earlier training. I was also glad for my earlier Catholic boarding school training. Wasn't that the whole lesson of boarding school? It was painful and there was nowhere to go, you just had to bear it knowing eventually it would come to an end. Plus Catholics are very big on penance and sacrifice and suffering. That's why when the girl in front of me came with yet another armload of cushions and proceeded to build a slightly different nest I wanted to pat her shoulder and tell her to give it up. Nothing would work, but she was like the Princess and the pea and was never able to relax into it.
Day 3 we had a new task: to focus on the nose and the bit of skin between nose and upper lip - a triangle, to see if we could feel sensations within this triangle. The idea was that we were sharpening our awareness day by day in a smaller and smaller area. In the afternoon, we focused on the bit between nose and upper lip alone. Now we were at a patch of flesh no bigger than a postage stamp. Mr. Goenka would instruct us to "Be patient and persevere. Be diligent, and you are bound to succeed. Bound to succeed!" He made it seem possible. But oh, we breathed, fidgeted, sniffed, and suffered.
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How the bench works, demonstrated by
someone who is not me! |
Physically, these first three days were agonizing. If it wasn't the back in some form, upper or lower, it was the knees or the neck or the shoulders. As time wore on, I used a combination of the bench and my cushion and three bean bag cushions to rest my knees. The early sit from 4:30 to 6:30 a.m. was the longest of the day, since there was no formal break. Much experimentation took place before I settled on kneeling for the first 45 minutes, sitting for the next half hour, holding my poor knees during the chanting. The teachers joined us at 5:30; at 5:45 the chanting started and went on until 6:30. God forbid you were caught in an uncomfortable position when the chanting began - it was frowned upon to leave during it, or to change your position. One thing I knew from past LBM retreats is that a painful sit didn't doom you to a day of pain; each sit was an entity in itself, and the only thing that you could count on was that it would be different from whatever had gone before. Roommate and I inhaled aspirin, three times a day.
Day 4 we finally learned the Vipassana technique. Now that supposedly we could focus our minds on that tiny space below our nose, we were ready to tackle the entire body, "piece by piece." We started with the scalp, then the face, noting any sensations in the forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, chin etc., the shoulders and right arm, left arm all the way to the tips of the fingers, then throat, chest, belly, then back upper back, lower back, then right leg, left leg and finally, modestly "whatever else you have missed", not leaving an inch uncovered. If you lost your place, you had to begin again up at the scalp. In this way it took me several hours to make it to my left leg. When you reached the tips of your toes, you returned to the scalp and began again. What was electrifying about this technique when first we were taught it was that you could have heard a pin drop in that room. Finally all 100 plus of us were quiet, so focused were we on the instructions and identifying the sensations, either on the surface of the body or within the body. That first afternoon we sat from 2:30 to 3:30 as a group, then from 3:30 to 4:45, receiving the instructions, without moving a muscle.
Further instructions elaborated on what we were doing here. We were to consider our own body a laboratory, a place to observe the constant change in everything. The place to observe the change was in the sensations of the body. Either the gross bodily sensations, or the smaller, finer ones. If you hit upon the gross kind, aka PAIN, your manner was that of an impersonal doctor (I pictured House). The doctor inquires of the pain, "Just where do you begin? How far do you extend? Up, down, side to side? How deep? Is it acute? A sharp pain or a throbbing? I see," and nods and says, "I'll check it again on my next round," and off he goes to continue scanning the body, piece by piece. It was important not to go straight from one painful spot to another - in that way you would train the body to miss the finer sensations and sense simply the big obvious ones. So no, you kept the routine, the steady inspection from one part to another. And lo and behold, once you returned to the painful area, you would find the pain had changed - it might be more acute, but usually it was less - the sensation would have moved to someplace else on the body. It was truly exhilarating. Everything still hurt, but so what? Now the pain wasn't something to resist, but to observe. It changed all the time!
After our new instructions, starting on Day 5, a new ordeal was initiated: three sits a day of Strong Determination, from 8 - 9 a.m., 2:30 - 3:30 p.m., and 6 - 7 p.m., in which we were not to move our hands, legs or open our eyes. I called them the Sits of Grim Determination. Yet, astonishingly, the huge group, as one, embraced the challenge and for the most part succeeded. It was an extraordinary contrast to the early days of restlessness, and spoke to the power of the mind. As Goenka said, "The mind got you into this; it's the only thing that will get you out."
Outside the MH, we quickly developed routines. Since the only exercise we could take was walking, we soon discovered the trails around the property. A favorite was tramping slowly around the pond, which made for a fifteen minute detour on the way from our room to the Dining Hall. On break times I was either plodding around the trails or flat out face down on my little bed. The weather was remarkable - it only rained on the very last day, which for January was very lucky. It was sunny and mild during the day, briskly cold at night. The grounds of this place were so beautiful, 4,000 feet up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. The only sign of the outside world was the odd contrail high overhead in the blue blue sky. I saw deer several times, and woodpeckers and blue jays and fat little grey squirrels. When we could speak, my roommate told me she was surprised there wasn't more wildlife - but then she lived in the country just outside Sequoia National Park. For me, coming from the big city, I thought it was teeming with animals. And the stars at night! Wow! I seemed to be the only one who would stop en route to our quarters to look up at the night sky. So many stars! And a big full moon too to light our path.
The food was plentiful and delicious. Breakfast (6:30 to 7:15) was a feast, of oatmeal and stewed prunes, three kinds of cold cereal (corn flakes, raisin bran and cheerios), yoghurt, raisins, rice milk, soy milk, 2% milk and whole milk. It took me two days to find the bread - it was on a side table in a part of the room I hadn't ventured into. But there were several types of very healthy bread, and the kind of oily peanut butter you have to stir plus jam. A wide selection of teas and honey and instant coffee in jars. Lunch (11 - 11:45) was a culinary tour of the nations : Moroccan stew, Indian curry, Mexican tortillas, Chinese stir fry, split pea soup and the final day, everyone's favorite comfort food, macaroni cheese and chocolate chip cookies. Every lunch also included a full salad bar, of lettuce, grated beets, carrots, chickpeas, cucumbers and tomatoes, sesame seeds and raisins. And two types of salad dressing. Dinner (5 - 5:30) was just a Tea Break - all those teas plus a big bowl of fruit, apples, oranges and bananas. We made fruit salad out of them every night. Got pretty sick of it too! But we were better off than the Old Students, who had to promise not to eat any dinner at all, just tea without milk. I did lose five pounds, it was all so healthy.
On that first day, we had to agree to the Five Precepts for the duration of the course:
1. to abstain from killing any being
2. to abstain from stealing
3. to abstain from all sexual activity
4. to abstain from telling lies
5. to abstain from all intoxicants
The old students had to take three additional precepts:
6. to abstain from eating after midday
7. to abstain from sensual entertainment and bodily decorations
8. to abstain from using high or luxurious cozy beds.
That last made us laugh a little - our beds were considered "high, luxurious and cozy", with their foam mattress on top of wooden slats?! But after that first day, when the poor body was protesting vehemently, to stretch out on that little bed was indeed the height of luxury. Old Students have to sleep on the floor.
We had no problem adhering to any of the precepts, since we had Noble Silence - meaning "silence of body, speech and mind. Any form of communication with fellow students, whether by gestures, sign language, written notes, etc. is prohibited." I thought this might be hard - in fact, I loved it. For me who feels compelled to barge in and offer advice or comfort whether it's welcome or not, all in the name of 'helping', it was a huge relief to set down that particular self-imposed responsibility. If people didn't know about the bread hiding on that side table in the breakfast room, so be it. If management didn't know that we'd run out of Bengal spicy tea bags, oh well. If people missed the deer sightings, or the Big Dipper, or the excitement of the bug running down the aisle separating the men and the women just before one evening's sit, too bad. It wasn't my duty to tell anyone anything. Ah!
Half way through the course and most everyone was well into comfort. Make-up was a thing of the past, as was any sort of hair care, eyebrow plucking, bras and color co-ordinated wardrobes. This was the period of baggy sweatshirts or robes, thick socks, stretchy yoga pants, layers and shawls, scarves and woolly hats. People would sit around after the meal, two people to a table, sitting at an angle so as not to face each other, eyes distant, scrubbed faces devoid of expression, sunk deep within themselves. When you glimpsed a face in spite of trying to keep your eyes down, it looked so very young. Open and vulnerable.
It was odd to see women walking the grounds, head bent, alone and quiet. Odd to realize we are almost never seen like that, that we generally flock together in a chattering pack. Somewhere on the third day, walking the trail around the pond, I came across a little calendar someone had drawn in the dirt. The dates, days of the week, and boxes with a big X crossing off each day. I was delighted. It was like finding a secret message in solitary! Someone outside the MH had put a small stone atop a large rock. I found a still smaller stone and balanced it on top of the small stone. And with that a craze was born: little stupas started cropping up on all sorts of surfaces outdoors. And then someone gathered lots of little pine cones and periodically would place them in a big design on the road on the way to the dining hall - a giant heart, a big smiley face, a star. I suppose these things were against the rules, breaking Noble Silence in a way, because communication with others was established. But since no-one ever saw the artists at work, these things appeared as magically as the deer sightings, and the effect was as cheering. Not that I was lonely. Not at all. I did miss being able to touch people, like one night when I woke to hear my roommate making the saddest sound: a little snore on the in-breath, a little sob on the out-breath. She sounded exhausted and sad even in her sleep. She didn't remember doing that.
The restriction on writing was easily the hardest thing for me. I regret not being able to take notes at least a little bit every day. I tried so hard to remember everything, I would find myself writing in my head all the time. It was maddening. After a few days of silence and meditation, the mind slows down enough that the thoughts aren't jumbled one on top of the other. And you get to hear yourself describing to yourself exactly what you are doing at any given moment, providing a commentary to every little thing. I couldn't stop that part of my brain that wrote. It even talked slowly in dictation, giving myself time to write, as if I were really writing. Worse was realizing that I had thought this same sentence, phrase, paragraph at least five, ten, twenty times already that day, in exactly the same words- and I'd caught myself all those times too, saying something like, "There I go again!" and realizing I'd had THAT thought before too and on it goes.
On Day 7, I was extremely irritated with myself for not being able to control my thoughts - and a funny thing happened. Earlier in the week, a young girl sat across from me at breakfast. She ate her bowl of cereal with a curious open-mouthed smacking noise: it reminded me of my old dog Snuffy eating peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth. That thought made me smile and I listened to her eat with pleasure. Day 7, already cross with myself, at breakfast, the same young girl once again sits across from me and once again proceeds to eat her cereal with that smacking noise at every spoonful. And it drove me nuts! "Why can't she close her mouth? Why does she have to make so much noise???" I counted the mouthfuls and sighed with relief when she finished her bowl. She got up - and filled her bowl again with a different cereal! And sat down across from me and ate it in the same annoying, noisy way! Two bowls! I am really quite cross. Thankfully, she finishes that bowl, gets up - and comes back with a third bowl!!! At which point it occurred to me that perhaps she will blow up from eating endless bowls of cereal until I understand this particular point: the girl was eating her cereal in the way she apparently eats cereal; the only thing that had changed in this scenario was me! One day I think she's sweet, a few days later, for doing the exact same thing, I want to shout at her for disturbing my peace. "I, me, mine" : three words indeed that cause so much trouble. I was cross with myself for my lack of skill in controlling my mind. I was taking out my frustration with myself on this poor girl and her cereal. Walking back up the hill after breakfast, it dawned on me that being cross was an emotional reaction to be observed every bit as we were observing in meditation our physical reactions. But we hadn't learned how to do that yet, so I didn't know how it worked.
I did go see the teacher though. I signed up for an interview with her after lunch on Day 7 and burst out with, "I can't stop thinking!!" She said matter-of-factly, "Of course you can't. Were you expecting to?" I said, "Well, it's not the thinking so much as I'm writing in my head all the time and it's driving me mad!" "Oh" she said, "Tell me about it! I've counseled writers before and it's really not a problem. What you do is put the writing part of your mind in a separate room and let it pound away on the old typewriter working on your novel or whatever it's doing; your job is just to observe and be equanimous." That was a relief! I didn't have to try and stop it! But I still think writing would have helped clear my mind. The rationale behind this injunction, according to the "Introduction to the Technique" booklet, is that "the restriction on reading and writing is to emphasize the strictly practical nature of this meditation."
The theory behind the Vipassana technique is brilliant. Wise men had understood before the Buddha that life's sorrows come to us from our "sense doors": the five senses, plus the thinking mind. The Buddha added the piece that it wasn't so much the things coming through the sense doors that were causing us grief, but our reactions to them. Which were immediate and subtle and took place deep within the body in terms of sensation. Our eyes light upon something, we react and the unconscious labels it pleasant or unpleasant, and we are unaware. These reactions are called sankharas. We experience three different types of reactions: the first, a line drawn in the ocean which has no lasting effect whatsoever; the second is a line drawn on the sand, which lasts a little longer but is washed away by the incoming tide. The third however is where you take a chisel and etch it deep into rock. Those are the deeply buried sankharas that cause us misery. Interestingly, they can be caused by both pleasant and unpleasant sensations. And both will cause suffering in the end: pleasant sensations because we don't want them to end and when inevitably they do, we cling and crave for their return; unpleasant because we want no part of them at all, otherwise known as aversion. So here we were, paying attention to the body's sensations in minute detail, perhaps for the first time, for hours on end, and what we were also doing was breaking down the wall between conscious and unconscious mind, via those same sensations, releasing old, buried reactions and allowing them to percolate to the surface.
The first day Goenka walked us through the Vipassana meditation, tears splashed out of my eyes as we examined the face, feeling the sensations. They were strange tears, cold, stripped of emotion. Not what I would call "crying." I have no idea where they came from or why. When it happened again on a different day, I asked the teacher during a break whether these old sankharas (reactions) manifested themselves as simply sensation or were they usually attached to a memory? She said it could be either. "Sometimes these things are so deep, from infancy, you have no idea why they are there. No matter - just let them flow, observe them, let them go, don't try to create a story."
As Goenka had warned, people began to break down on Day 6; men and women both, mostly quiet snuffles and sobs, one or two deeply wailing. It was clear that no-one had the corner on suffering. We all suffer. Days 8 and 9 were hard work, everyone's mind so concentrated, knowing the retreat was nearly over and not wanting to waste a minute. It was still hard to sit all those hours, but my periods in our room were shorter: I couldn't wait to get back to the silence in the MH which was palpable, and my fellow meditators who were a strong support, sniffs and other distractions a thing of the past. I made it all the way to the last day, Day 10, without falling apart, for which I was very grateful. Things became clear, dots were connected, but without trauma, only observation and understanding. In those last days a sense of spaciousness grew inside, an emptiness and a deep calm. No anxiety, no gripping, no tension. I had never felt like that in my life: truly balanced.
On Day 10 Goenka taught us the Metta Meditation, saying we needed to apply balm to the deep wounds we had inflicted upon ourselves, uncovering our old reactions. I recognized some of the Sanskrit words of the chant from Victor's Metta Chant, although the tune was quite different. Then Goenka chanted in English. This was a big mistake, to my ears. Especially when he sang the word 'love', drawing it out and out and out : "Luuuuuuuuuurve". But then we were dismissed and Noble Silence was over. Instead we were allowed "Noble Chatter". We streamed out of the Hall and immediately, it was like we plugged ourselves in to an electric current, the Ego came roaring back, all bright eyes and big smiles, talking, talking, talking. Everyone peeled off with their roommates and we were no exception. We went back to our little room and sat cross-legged on our little beds facing each other, finally able to look at each other, and shared what had been going on in our heads all those long days. We shared a laugh about the chanting ("Luuuuuuuurve!"), the pain (she said, "I thought, Is this as bad as childbirth? Well, yes - but limbs aren't likely to fall off so I'll just have to bear it."), the silence ("I'm a Quaker so it took me two days to adjust to the little fidgets and coughs - in our Quaker Meetings, those are signals that someone is going to stand up and speak, so I kept waiting for someone to start speaking!"). My roommate was very funny and we laughed a lot, for the rest of the morning, through lunch, after lunch until the next Sit of Serious Determination at 2:30.
Goenka had said, "You can't meditate when you talk, but it's important for you to talk before you leave tomorrow." He was right. The mood was much lighter, brighter, now that we could look at each other, smile and connect. Inner peace was soon to be destroyed. It happened during the Metta Chant. This time, at that terrible "Luuuuuuurve", there was a muffled snort once again from the men's side of the hall. And this time, knowing my roommate and I had collapsed over this very thing just a short while before, well, I was off. Shoulders heaving, snorting myself, and doing a terrible job of muffling the sound, I was beside myself with laughter. The French call such a laugh a "fou rire" - a mad laughter - and it is, out of control and impossible to stop. I tried though. Especially when I heard someone walking up the hall and stop just behind me. The retreat manager! This was getting really dire. I was kneeling on my little bench at the time and conceived the idea of perhaps moving my legs so that I would be sitting on the thing, rather than kneeling. Visions then of somehow being able to hide my face and getting myself under control. I pulled one leg out, then the other - and tipped over backwards! Well, of course that finished me off. A little gasp of surprise ("oh!") to find myself on my back and then gales of laughter, stifled of course. The retreat manager leaned forward and hissed in my ear, "Get out!" So I picked myself up and ignominiously slunk out of the room, still snorting, with the retreat manager on my heels.
Once outside like all those laughs, the moment you're allowed to let rip, it fizzles out. So very soon I was calm again. We went back inside for the tail end of the sit and I sat quietly down beside the door, ready to bolt if overcome. But no further incident ensued. After the sit, we could talk again, and now everyone is coming up to me, laughing themselves, "So you're the one who got sent out for laughing at the teacher!" My roommate, "I knew it was you! But thank you for that little test, I didn't lose my focus!" The Thai girl who sat on my right commended me, "Very good you put yourself out! Very good!" "No, no!" I said, "I was taken out!" and the blonde girl on my left said, "I was biting my cheeks so hard..." So I was in the familiar role of class clown, and one of the oldest members of the party to boot, suffused with swagger and a cheerful sort of shame.
After supper we returned for the final meditation of the day. And since this story was still playing in my head (it was after all the most exciting thing that had happened in ten days), I decided to try the technique on it.
Goenka the previous night had instructed us on what this technique might look like in "real life." He gave the example of anger. Suppose you were angry with someone. You might count to ten, take some deep breaths, go for a walk or otherwise distract yourself, and while this would calm the conscious mind, it would do nothing for the underlying anger, you'd just be burying it. And if you try and look at the situation directly, while that would be very good, it is very difficult to do: you are likely to get angry all over again. So instead you can examine the situation from the inside out. How do you do that? You have two tools: the breath and the bodily sensations. The breath will always tell you when your emotions are off-balance, it is your clue. Then you look inside and observe the sensations, just as we did with pain, without judgement or distress. And you can do this because this is a concept, not a situation. It is not so personal. This was, you're not stuffing it down. You are looking at it, but in a way that won't create more reaction.
So back to my silly story. If I looked at it head on, it made me laugh all over again. So I looked inside. And was amazed to discover a solid sensation like a bottle of carbonated soda, shaken and shaken, about to blow; a mass of bubbles, very volatile, very unstable lodged in the center of my chest - and extremely unpleasant. I was very surprised. Unlike the pain sensations in the body, this one from the emotions did not change as rapidly as the bodily sensations did. I couldn't get through it, I could only look at it, observe it and move on to scan the rest of the body. But whenever I came back to the front of the chest, there it was, fizzing away, filling up that empty space with the feeling that it was going to blow. Interestingly, all the body pains faded - for the first time, in the whole hour, I didn't feel a one. It was also the only one hour sit in the entire ten days that ended too soon. As I observed it, I asked myself, "When have I experienced this feeling before?" And without any real analysis or effort, the answer floated up, "Boarding school." And just like that, the sensation dissolved. The technique worked!!
Shortly after, the sit was over. I went to apologize to the teacher for having been so childish and rude; for having to be sent out! "No, no!" she said, "No need to apologize. I wouldn't have been upset if you had cried; I wasn't upset that you laughed. It was an old reaction coming to the surface. Laughter is the other side of tears. It happens. The only reason I had you leave the room is that if others started to laugh, it wouldn't be their own personal stuff coming up, but their reaction to you."
I was shocked to find this unpleasant sensation. And I thought if this had happened out there in the real world, I would have thought it funny, and rolled my eyes a bit at myself, but would never have linked it to sorrow. And it would have been something else stuffed down in the shadow bag. Laughter is the other side of tears. You laugh so as not to cry. Heaven forbid you show vulnerability. The technique worked, although I had to sit with it for an hour before I could break up the feeling. And who has an hour to spare in ordinary life? Still, perhaps I'll get quicker with practice. And God knows there's enough to practice on in a single day! Why is it necessary to do this? Because we not only make ourselves miserable, we throw our misery out on everyone else: everyone becomes infected. As Goenka said, when someone comes to our door bearing an armful of flames, instead of meeting them with a hose of cold water, saying "We don't want your fire!" we greet them with gasoline - they burn, we burn, we all burn and go up in flames.
I came home the next day, surprising myself with my careful driving. I thought I would be out of it; in fact I was very much aware of everything. My wise husband John advised me not to talk about it too much. He said, "Once you talk about it, you're solidifying a part of the experience and then that becomes the thing that stands out, perhaps at the expense of something else you'll forget because you talked too soon." So over the first few days, I deliberately kept a low profile, trying not to talk too much about the retreat, trying to allow it to find a natural place in my life.
What's it been like after the retreat? What's the point of putting yourself through such a gruelling experience if it doesn't have some sort of transformative effect? Life seems so fast, so noisy, and words seem like potential bombs. I miss the silence! I look at us operating in the world, little houses come to life, lights blazing, doors and windows thrown open and we're on! At the retreat, when we could talk, immediately we started layering our credentials: our names, where we're from, what we do, why we're here - every word inviting judgement and comparisons, creating more and more of a barrier between our essential self and how we wish society to perceive us.
The whole notion of self seems highly suspect: everything changes, including my "self". Things I thought would be very difficult - like the silence - it turns out I loved. What else do I not know about "me"? It occurs to me that we can be many things: I like silence and speech; schedules and spontaneity; the discipline of pain and high cozy beds. So who is this contradictory "I"? Perhaps it is true to say that we have the capacity to be whatever (or whoever) is appropriate at any given moment. Only we imagine we can only be one thing, the thing that has defined us most of our lives or that we have adopted as "who I am", and we are severely blocked. Constricted by some narrow definition that in no way allows expression of the whole.
The unsettling appearance of those old sankharas continues: just today I had the sensation of ice cracking open, and old tears finally flowing. Yes, to do with boarding school, but in a completely new way. I always thought the story went that I was so homesick right at the start and then - I was fine, got tough, never cried again. I have found it wasn't like that at all: there was an undercurrent of melancholy, of low-level despair, to every day I woke up and found myself there. Nothing could be done about it, it was simply the backdrop of each day for six long years. So well-hidden, especially from myself. How strange, I've been thinking, that we can live so completely on the surface of things, we have no idea that the underneath can be completely different. Everything I felt then, everything I said and wrote and did on the face of it was nothing like what I was actually feeling underneath. I wonder if it is because finally I have tools to help me maintain distance while observing the pain and not getting caught in the story, that these feelings are finally beginning to arise. I feel safe!
One final thing: I didn't understand this business of the retreat being "free". Really - you pay nothing. How does that work? On the last day, Goenka explained. This is a rare chance for a householder to live for ten days as a monk or a nun, dependent upon the charity of others. It is also impossible to complain when you have paid nothing! So you go in the spirit of surrender. And if at the end you got something from the course, you leave a donation in gratitude, whatever you can afford, for someone after you to have a similar experience. But you never pay for what you had: that was a gift.
It was a gift. One of the best things I have ever done. On my way to Goenka, I felt safe with the happy cows and the concerned cop; now I am home, I have found safety and peace and equanimity in my own skin.
"Would you do it again?" people ask. "In a heartbeat," I tell them.
