Three Days on Retreat at Yokoji Zen Center

The Path - actually the road to the retreat center.

Well, a few more little detours on the path to digging into the early years. I guess I'm not looking forward to going there. Although I don't think the detours are detours at all. They are the Path itself. Of course, your life is your path. Meaning, as my extraordinary niece learned after spending ten days in the Amazon on retreat with a shaman (now there's a story!), that your specific life is your path: everything that happens to you, every person you meet, has something to teach you. That's an exciting thought, isn't it?  So it's important to look at the so-called interruptions and see how they figure in the scheme of things. I had three big ones in the past couple of weeks. My daughter flew down from Berkeley to spend her birthday week with us; my cousin from Australia unexpectedly arrived for three days on Friday; I drove Helen back up to Berkeley the following Tuesday, and came back to Long Beach the next day (long drive!); and Thursday was the beginning of our three day silent meditation retreat at a remote Zen center a fair drive away from home.

Helen as tiny snow angel

Any time I spend with my daughter is a happy time. She turned 22, and chose to come home to spend her first birthday with us in four years (since college). She strengthens me, gives me courage in myself, simply by her presence. That she wants to spend time with me makes me think perhaps I haven't been too shabby a mother. This is not a question that secretly begs reassurance: I believe your mother essentially stops being your mother at whatever age you are when you leave home. I had my mother until I was eleven; after that, I feel I brought myself up, muddling through with the help of my peers at boarding school. My mother was simply not there. So once Helen passed eleven, I was flying blind. Add to that strange American rituals like sleep-overs, proms, high-school electives, driver's ed, parent-teacher conferences, FAFSA, dating - all of which I had either managed on my own or never experienced. I was at a loss as to how to shepherd my daughter through many of these alien rites of passage. That she managed, we managed, is more testament to her than me, with a huge nod of thanks to her Dad, my husband, who is American and grew up in a large family with the kind of Mom I would love to have had. So all this to explain that whenever Helen rolls back into our lives, she brings a jolt of joy.

But something else. She also puts me back in the role of Mom. Remember Martha-Lou, the Voice Dialogue lady, advising me to find time every day to let myself cry? This is hard to do when you are being Mom. I don't care how old or mature your child is, it is surely disturbing to hear your mother say, "Excuse me, dear, I have to go cry now." So, I didn't.

Michele, my Australian cousin

Helen's arrival closely followed by my cousin's was surely no accident. This cousin is a middle child in a family of eight. Her father is my mother's brother, who was as terrifying to his children growing up as my mother was to my sister and me. My cousin took a different tack. Instead of becoming a people pleaser and an all round good girl, she rebelled. At 17, she decided she had had enough of being quiet and shy and set out to change herself. A little younger than I, she has become quite fearless, traveling the world by herself, independent and comfortable in her own skin. She is blunt and direct, fiercely proud of her wrinkles ("I earned every one of them and I don't want anyone telling me I look younger than my age. I am proud of my age and how far I've come!"), a sort of warrior woman, and just who I needed to come visit at a time when I'm feeling a little precarious. Her blood is in me, after all. But here's what she taught me. Sunday morning and I was torn between conflicting duties: my regular Sunday at Long Beach Meditation, checking in the beginners for the new series of meditation classes; and my cousin on a once in a lifetime trip to America; and Helen 's visit. I was agonizing over this until Michele said mildly, "Why not do what you want to do." Her words stopped me short. I have a choice? I can do what I want? An idea so rare it brought tears to my eyes. In the end, I checked in the beginners but chose not to stay, Helen went for a bike ride with her Dad, and Michele and I went whale watching, spending a splendid afternoon sighting hundreds of dolphins and many blue whales.

Yokoji, the Zen monastery that was our retreat center

By the time the retreat came around, I had been busy doing, driving, planning and coping for days. I was more than ready to set it all down and be quiet. I envisaged a peaceful time in this rustic setting: we were staying in a real Zen monastery, in the mountains below Idyllwild, about three hours away from Long Beach. The monastery, called Yokoji, was off the grid: electricity came from solar power and a small generator. No cell phone reception, no paved roads, shared accommodations and loos, a communal bathhouse, vegetarian fare and no dessert apart from fruit. Two resident golden labradors and one visiting very friendly pitbull. Bring your own sleeping bag and pillow and bath towel. I envisaged a rough, semi-camping experience, and was pleasantly surprised to find it far nicer than I'd anticipated. We spent so little time in our rooms that the bare bones of the sleeping arrangements was not a problem. And enough loos were dotted about the place that that wasn't a problem either. We spent our days either inside the zendo (the meditation hall), or walking outside, 30 or 45 minute sits alternating with 30 or 45 minute walking meditations. We had an hour's rest after lunch, an hour of yoga in the afternoon and in the evening, an hour's dharma talk given by Victor. The day began supposedly at 6 a.m., but I was usually awake earlier than that and in the hall by 5 or 5:30. The last sit was over at 10 p.m..

Victor walking down from his cabin, being greeted by one of the resident dogs.

Friday, after the first walking meditation, Victor challenged us to break our patterns. We sit like statues, he said, hardly daring to move, trying so hard to be "good little meditators". And then we go outside and pet the dogs, stare at the mountains, walk at our usual brisk clip. So the question is, can we take our meditation off the cushion? Can we break our patterns, so ingrained, so persistent? Victor suggested the only way he knew how to do it was to slow everything way down, walking especially.

The beautiful butterfly wing

So at the next walking meditation, I walked back and forth over the wooden bridge. Two boards' width was exactly one foot length. Ten precise steps with each foot covered the bridge. Back and forth I trod, carefully, mindfully, placing each foot within the planks of wood, not lifting the one foot until the other was stable, synchronizing breathing and walking. After plodding back and forth many times, I noticed something sticking up between the boards: half of a butterfly wing, a beautiful wing, unusual, multi-colored, pink and blue and black. It was perfect. And I would never have noticed it if I hadn't deliberately been walking so very slowly! Happily, I picked it up, examined it and wondered what to do with it. I carried it back to our zendo in cupped hands. We had an altar upon which people were encouraged to place treasures. I hadn't brought a treasure, but now I had one. Later when we were sitting, I had to smile. Picking up the butterfly wing and putting it on the altar was such typical Ali behavior. "Look what I found!!" Even without words, sitting in silence,  it is possible to shout that message. So much for breaking patterns. The atypical thing would have been to have left the wing alone for someone else to notice in wonder, when they were walking slowly and mindfully across the bridge. I considered taking the wing and stuffing it back where I had found it, but thought that would be silly. Still, the whole incident underscored how being aware of patterns - let alone breaking them - is a moment by moment affair.

A second, related theme of the weekend was, do we take refuge in awareness or in the personality? The whole thrust of our being is to take refuge in the personality, in the self. We say, "That's just the way I am. That's me!" Yet the self is impermanent, thoughts are fleeting, emotions too. Ajahn Sumedho, the wonderful American Buddhist monk whom we are studying on Wednesday nights says,
"The mood comes and goes. It changes, revolves; it's happy, sad, elated, depressed, inspired, bored, loving, hateful, and on and on like this. According to the conditions that come together at this point, then the mood is this way. It's so easy to say, "Oh, I'm in a bad mood" or "I'm in a good mood." Our language is like that, so we become the mood. "I feel happy today, everything's fine" or "Today is one of my bad days." That's why I encourage this investigation of thought, so that you're not creating yourself, endlessly reinforcing the sense of a self through your proliferating thoughts."
p. 230, The Sound of Silence 

Picnic tables on the right

I sat writing about this at a picnic table after lunch that first day, intoxicated by the scent of the pine trees all around, the sun warm on my back, the breeze gentle. It was perfect. Then I thought, imagine if it were cold, rainy, muddy... The monk who gave us our orientation talk told us that just the day before our arrival there had been a hail storm such as he had never seen in seven years of living on the mountain. Hail stones as big as golf balls. So imagine if it was like that. Would I be feeling so mellow? No. Taking refuge in the personality with its "proliferating thoughts" then is dangerous, just like Ajahn Sunedho said - we are "sensitive," dependent on too many factors, any one of which can change at any moment: weather, temperature, bodily aches and pains... (Ah, but when everything is good! Then "God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world"... and it's almost impossible to summon up energy to inquire within).

Victor sitting in front of the altars, big and little

Friday night's dharma talk was for me one of those electrifying talks that Victor conjures up at least once on retreat. Here is the quote around which he built his talk:

"The empty mind cannot be purchased at the altar of demand; it comes into being when thought is aware of its own activities - not the thinker being aware of his thought."
J. Krishnamurti, 
Only Revolution California Part 3

"When thought is aware of its own activities..." that would be us! WE are thought, the thinker IS thought. Not simply being aware of our thoughts, "Oh, that's just a thought!" But that which is thinking, "Oh, that's just a thought!" is itself a thought! The empty mind is the mind that realizes this. Hard to do, you're - er - thinking. Well, yes. From the standpoint of the ego, impossible. Because the ego is the part that thinks. Awareness - that which we truly are - does not think. It reflects. It mirrors back what is. But we have allowed the thinking mind to take over to such an extent, our sliver of pure awareness is almost lost. And this is why we must work so hard at something that is probably quite simple: being quiet and still in the mind. Being with what is, moment to moment, without reference to thought, to memories past, or expectations for the future. When you sit for any amount of time and try to stay in the present moment, you immediately see how difficult this is. As Victor has noted, the mind has a tremendous resistance to staying in the present. It has nothing to do. And if it has nothing to do, it catches a whiff of its own mortality and it panics. Who am I, without thought? Incessant thought, that critical voice in the head that endlessly comments and judges and compares and analyzes. Whatever else it is, it feed us the illusion that we are not alone. Stephen King, master of horror, said, "Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

The thinking mind is robotic, mechanical. You can argue that it's not, but the proof for me was when I was doing The Artist's Way, writing three pages every morning without fail for twelve weeks straight. In the ninth week we were instructed to go back and reread what we had written. And what a shocker to find that certain thoughts played out compulsively over and over again, each time written as if I'd never had that thought before. In fact I would have sworn it was brand new. Yet here was the proof. Pages and pages of repeats. The Voice Dialogue work shed a little light on that: maybe the thought seemed new because each time a new persona was thinking it, and since they have no interest in speaking to each other, don't want to know each other's thoughts, then perhaps for that one it is in fact a new thought. (I don't know if this is true. It's just a thought!)

So for me the galvanizing thing Friday night was when Victor told us this: "Imagine that you have just been given a spiritual book. One that you have searched for, longed to read for years, and at last, in this very beautiful library, the book is placed in your hands." He continued, "Wouldn't you read every word, every page, of that book with interest and curiosity? Now..." (drumroll) "...imagine that you are that rare book. You must learn to read yourself, your thoughts, your mind, with equal interest and curiosity."

"Know thyself"

After this dharma talk, I was wide awake, mind racing. If we hadn't been in Noble Silence, I would have been up all night discussing this. Isn't it funny how an idea can spark something? I felt like a keen college student, exposed for the first time to Big Ideas. I loved being that book in the library. Because it seemed to bring together all the strands we have been reading and talking about lately. And for me it also seemed to marry the psychological work to the spiritual, which is usually quite a conundrum: How to bolster the self on the one hand only to knock it down with the other?

So I was thinking, if awareness is a mirror, it is reflected through the self. Each of us has our own unique self through which to reflect back out into the world this awareness, which in fact we share with every living thing. Call it energy, if you like. You can have bright energy, high energy, low energy. Your job then is to polish your mirror, your self, so that what you reflect back into the world is bright and clear-seeing. So yes to therapy, to self-examination. Chogyam Trungpa spoke of spiritual bypassing - how much easier it would be, to just hurtle over the murky bits of the self and get straight to the calm sitting. But it doesn't work like that. The things you do not face simply go underground; they do not disappear. Maybe you will be able to tiptoe through life avoiding the thing that will trigger you - but since you are likely unaware there even is a trigger, how do you know what to avoid? Until the unfortunate day when that buried aspect of yourself comes roaring out, to everyone's surprise, but mostly your own.

All my life I have leaped over the sad bits of my life, like a super-hero leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, eager to get on with it, with life, with its seemingly continuous forward motion. I bought my family's unspoken motto, "Never look back, never go back." Now I am finding out that I must go back and revisit every dreary floor - I like the image of trudging up and down each skyscraper, in and out of all its rooms, down the corridors, the elevator shafts.

The funny thing is, after we have done the work, spent the effort reading every line of our one book, it seems we will find that the book wasn't the thing at all. After all, it is one book among billions, a single volume in that library containing a copy of every book ever written. So what? Is it the library, is that it? The container of all those individual stories? As the ocean is to the little wavelets on its surface, each wave unique yet part of the whole? So what's the point of reading our own story so carefully? Is it to discover the commonality of our stories? If I plumb my own depths, will it increase my compassion for others? There are only so many plots after all...

Talk about "proliferating thoughts."

I had an interview with Victor the following morning, still brimming with excitement over these ideas. We sat outside at a picnic table. I told him how much I loved the idea of reading the book in the library. Mildly, he pointed out the fatal flaw - "WHO is reading the book?" Aaaargh. He added, "Why does there have to be anyone reading the book? It is being read." So imagine that. There is nothing to do, nothing to be. It just is. Hard to fathom this! I love words, I love analyzing and yes, thinking. And analyzing and thinking provide a good cover for not doing the actual work. HH tells me the same thing. So often I will plunge into an intellectual discussion, while he keeps trying to bring me back to feeling, as in, "What are you feeling right now?" Most of the time, I haven't a clue or don't want to know. Who wants to be sad? I'd rather live in my head.

So here I am on retreat, thought firing on all cylinders, and Victor is warning me that the mind is very clever, it can find connections between anything. My clever mind is busy doing just that. I can spin a good story about investigating elevator shafts, but in fact I am back to my old trick of leaping over the tall buildings, aka messy emotions, flying high on pure thought.

Meanwhile, something else is going on. I noticed during the first full day, Friday, whenever I was feeling particularly upbeat and happy, for instance during the little story of the butterfly wing, there would follow a tearful interlude. Nothing dramatic, just a little drip of cold tears. They weren't even accompanied by great physical sensations, no tightening in the throat or heaviness in the chest, just a steady drip of tears. In the restroom below the zendo was a little card tacked to the wall - "In case of cold weather, please don't turn the tap off completely." I knew enough about cold climates to know the dangers of pipes bursting from frozen water expanding. I thought the stream of my cold tears was analogous to relieving pressure in the pipes. I thought to myself that this was the little girl from Voice Dialogue, the one who holds the sorrow, feeling safe enough to show her face and gently weep. It was all very calm and measured and actually rather pleasant.

Somehow I lost control. I wish I could tell you how it happened. And why. It would be nice to be so aware I could pinpoint the exact thought that set me off. But truth is, I can't say for certain what happened. By Saturday afternoon, the sorrow was growing, the tears less polite, the sensations in the body becoming unbearable, until I knew that sooner or later I was going to break down. I thought yoga wold help - it usually does - but when I found tears sliding into my ears while lying in savasana, I knew meltdown was impossible to avoid. The very next sit, the one right after yoga which is usually the best one as far as I'm concerned, the pipes burst. Luckily I remembered that at Goenka they would escort you outside not just for laughter (as I knew firsthand), but also for sobbing. In both cases, the sounds and emotions can infect others. So when I felt an unstoppable "ugly cry" arising, I got up from my seat and with a panicked glance at Victor and a vague wave at my face, fled the zendo.

My room, there's my bed right by the door.

I charged down the hill and into the room I shared with Wendy. I threw myself on my bed and sobbed as if my heart would break. The same thing had happened at last year's retreat, but in the morning. And it didn't last as long, nor was it as severe. And I managed to chatter to myself, before, during and after, about what was happening and what it might mean. This time around, there were no words or thoughts in my head. Just sobs, just like during the Voice Dialogue session. It helped a lot having that behind me. I wasn't panicked about a need to attach the tears to a particular story.  Goenka again said something useful about our stories - that the story is only necessary to lead us back to the emotion. Once you feel the emotion, you can let go of the story and simply stay in the body. So the thing here was to cry it out. I felt like a child who is overtired and cries for no reason - but still needs to cry. I did go on and on with the crying, and felt a little frightened. I wondered if I'd ever being able to stop. Then Wendy came to the room after the sit and in silence stood next to me, in silence rubbed my back like the good mother she is. After a long while I was able to whisper, "I'm ok." Thank God Wendy had been part of the Voice Dialogue workshop and had seen that sobbing child before. Plus she's a therapist and one of my strong supports. I frightened myself, but I didn't frighten her. It was a huge help. Eventually she left for supper and later I found out she asked the Yokoji people to put a plate of food aside for me. She whispered to me it was "up the stairs in the kitchen" but I didn't know where the kitchen was, and since I wasn't hungry, I didn't hunt for it. But I appreciated her kindness.

My favorite Buddha

After Wendy left and while the others were eating supper, I washed my face and escaped from the room. I took my notebook and pen and held them tightly, words ever my lifeline, although I didn't write. And I walked all over the property. There are Buddhas scattered about the place, stone ones with big ears, wooden ones, carved ones, big ones, even a funny little one wearing real clothes, an orange bathcap and robe. I found my favorite, a tall androgynous Buddha with fresh purple flowers around his/her head and a small child looking up beseechingly.

Big yellow comforting dog

I sat next to it and for the first time noticed a tall wooden pole next to me. It had five sides, each side with words painted upon it. The side facing me read, "Buddha Spirituality. Experience No Separation." Which so fit with what I had thought all those hours ago in the morning, about why we must study our own little books in order to better understand one another, that I copied it into my notebook. Then I felt self-conscious to be caught mooning about on a rock next to the Buddha, face all puffy with tears, so I walked about some more. The dining hall was empty by now so I made myself a cup of tea and took it out to the picnic table where one of the big dogs was stretched out.  I put my head down on her yellow fur and cried. I think many people have done this very thing because she knew just what to do. She turned her head and licked my face, lay back down and let me cry on her some more. When I was quiet, she got up and moved to the end of the table and I made my way back to the zendo.

Tran hugging me in the silence

Tran and some of the others were outside, looking up at the setting sun reflected on the mountain. Tran is my beautiful young friend who always makes me laugh. She hugged me with such strong arms I could carry on with the evening's program. (In an aside, Tran played a large part in last year's retreat. This year, when we were allowed to speak, I told her, "I think we've grown up a bit since last year." At least we weren't wildly inappropriate and there's a switch).

When I finally did get to bed, I could hardly sleep and next morning I was up and dressed in the dark and in the zendo by 5. Someone was doing yoga stretches at one end of the room and I wrote in my notebook at the other. I wrote about the night before, all those tears, that there was no reason. And that it's all thought, isn't it? Anything I write is a thought. A thought put into words. If it can be put into words, it's a creation. Was it that idea - that we are thoughts - that on some level is so bleak? But that thought is itself a thought. How the mind can occupy itself, going round and round in thought.

We are not vegetables if we don't think. I think that is the fear. (My fear. One of them.) There is much beyond thought, beyond the descriptive power of words.

 For instance, the words to the left, by Brian Andreas, read:
"I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand and  the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep and there are no words for that."

"There are no words for that." Yet we "know" just what he means. When I speak of the comfort in Wendy's hand rubbing my back, or Tran's strong embrace, you can imagine how it felt. Words are the signpost to something beyond thought. But we've invested thought with such importance that now we must go through contortions to turn ourselves off. I do realize the hand, the embrace, the sense of touch, are still creations, still "things" arising from the senses, from this conditioned realm. But we start where we are, and here is where I am. I imagine pure awareness is that empty stage and all the little selves quiet. Nobody wanting anything from anyone. And there. Silence. Of course in the imagining, I conjure up another creation...

Life is not linear after all, but a spiral. These reflections are not very different from last year's retreat reflections. Then I wrote after that crying jag:
"My little girl, felt in the tight heart of the night before, was the one who was shattered. After spending an entire, excruciating year clawing her way into the light, now she is dismissed, and told she is "only a thought?" Oh no! This was a plunge back into darkest pit."

Ajahn Sumedho again, "When the self starts to break up, some people find that it becomes very frightening, because everything you have regarded as solid and real starts falling apart." What's different is that each go round, it seems what I thought I understood, I only understood intellectually. It has to be experienced in the body. As Victor wrote a year ago, "There is no path that skirts your crying, Alison." I didn't understand that then. Perhaps I couldn't. Not sure I fully understand it now, it runs counter to years and years of programming and change is not easy. And now I have come full circle: this is where I began, trying to break the old patterns. The retreat showed just what a monumental task that is.

When we were no longer in Noble Silence on Sunday, I told Wendy I think we live our lives from the tip of the iceberg. And we haven't a clue what's going on below. Hardly an original thought but I understood it in my bones. Also that I felt as if I never needed to overeat again. That lasted until the next meal, but at the time it felt like I no longer needed a padding of fat to cushion life's edges. I did feel lighter, as if all those tears had shucked off a great swathe of old sorrow. How, why, to what purpose or for how long, who knows. My aunt, my mother's sister, says I am reclaiming my childhood, my self. We will see where it goes. If I say I have a destination, I am looking for a certain outcome, I am setting up expectations and am no longer open to what is. So we shall have to see.

And probably at our next retreat, I will spiral around once more to these same reflections and I will cry and be shocked and write about them as if they were brand new.  But hopefully I'll expose a little more of the iceberg. (What did I just say about setting expectations?!)

Victor read us more from Krishnamurti on Saturday night:
"The sky is very blue, the blue that comes after the rain, and these rains have come after many months of drought.  After the rain the skies are washed clean and the hills are rejoicing, and the earth is still.  And every leaf has the light of the sun on it, and the feeling of the earth is very close to you.  So meditate in the very secret recesses of your heart and mind, where you have never been before."

In my next blog, I will explore that sad little girl who lives in "the very secret recesses" of heart and mind and see what she has to say.

Victor, My Mother, My Shadow and Me

In response to last week's blog, I received an interesting email from one of my online writing friends. She reminded me of an incident I had completely forgotten about. Two years ago, a few of us from the writing group spent a long weekend at our teacher's summer house in Oregon. There, our teacher announced she was planning a course on writing about the shadow.
 
I was uncharacteristically furious with her for even suggesting such a thing. I thought it was a dangerous thing to do without proper support and said so, loudly. Now I know who was upset: Happy Ali, who has made a career of shoving all negativity firmly under the rug. My writing friend pointed out that in the years since then, I seem to have surrounded myself with a "tremendous support system" and now I am "free to take that deep dive."

I look around and realize to my surprise that yes, I have collected around myself an inordinate number of warm loving people who are on some sort of spiritual path, many of them therapists, besides HH, my 'real' therapist. And then there is Victor, who is the key. Why is that? Because besides being my meditation teacher and a psychotherapist (not mine), this tall thin man from Tennessee astonishingly wears the face of my tiny French mother.

Goenka tells a story during his ten day meditation retreat, about an artist who paints a portrait of a beautiful woman and promptly falls in love with it. His friends laugh at him, telling him, "It's only a painting!" But he doesn't listen. Next he paints a terrifying face, only to give himself nightmares; again his friends tease him. The point is, we do this all the time. We are that deluded artist. We paint a picture of who we imagine someone to be and tack it up over their face and then we react to our own painting, ignoring the real person underneath.

So it has been with Victor. What is brilliant is that we both know he is my mother - or not actually my mother of course, but the signpost to her. It has taken a while - years! Two things had to happen: first, he had to be impervious to Happy Ali's easy charm. It seems I have spent a lifetime getting people to like me. Victor understood that early on, in an off-the-cuff remark, saying, "You can't bear anyone thinking you're not wonderful." I remember staring at him, blank with incomprehension: what was he talking about? Then HH asked me over a year ago, "How many people don't like you?" Another blank lasting several minutes. He said, "Wow. You've really worked hard at this." That was my first clue that this is apparently not normal. Doesn't everyone work tirelessly to be liked? Until last weekend's Voice Dialogue exercise, I had no idea how vested I was in being completely lovable.

(Victor did recognize things like my intelligence, which I've consistently undervalued, if not actively dismissed. How could I be cute puppy-dog and also quick-witted and bright? If you're intelligent, you have to take responsibility for yourself. Guess which one feels a whole lot safer and easier to be?).

Determined to breach that wall!

The second thing that had to happen was that I had to be repeatedly hurt. This caused us both quite a bit of distress. He would set up boundaries, I would apologize and try to comply, yet within days I'd be once again throwing myself over the wall. He had no recourse but to rebuff me, sometimes gently, sometimes harshly - and while I would see dimly that I was behaving in a way I would not dream of behaving towards any other teacher in my life, it didn't change a thing. Victor the psychotherapist understood this was something I could not control and that therefore "something profoundly psychological" was going on. He urged me to seek a therapist. I found HH and all three of us uncovered my mother. Through Victor, with HH's support, I can revisit grief so buried I had no idea it existed.

The old Chinese Zen teachers speak of "ripping off your face." They are deliberately rude or hurtful, intending to provoke a reaction that shocks their student enough to look into themselves and wonder, "WHO is hurt?" Their aim is to rip off your false face. This is also Victor's aim. He has written, "What you are trying to do is utterly courageous - you are trying to heal the small self while working with a meditation teacher whose job one is to help strip you of the delusion of self." The work for me has been to take that hurt and inquire within, asking myself WHY this is hurting me so badly? What is triggering this sorrow and where is it coming from? 

This is especially true right now. Things are in a bit of a turmoil within Long Beach Meditation, the upshot being that Victor is taking himself away to spend a week at a time in Ojai, a small town approximately two hours away from Long Beach. He speaks of renting a room there and coming back to Long Beach only on the weekends to teach and hold the Sunday sits. This has devastated me out of all proportion to what he is actually proposing, a sure sign that this is not Victor who is doing the devastating, but rather something stuffed down that is rising to the surface at last. Why is it surfacing now? Because I reckon at 57 I am finally able to handle the grief I literally could not bear as a child. And I have to plough through that grief to get to the other side. We all know this, don't we? When someone dies, you have to mourn them. There are no short-cuts.

At first I thought the grief was pointing to boarding school, only this time, instead of the child being banished, sent into exile, here it is Victor, wearing a parent face, voluntarily sending himself into exile. The similarity in both cases is the sense of powerlessness: there is nothing I can do, then or now, to fix anything. It is utterly awful. And then I uncovered that it's not just boarding school. That was the big finale, the cannons and fireworks at the end of the 1812 Overture. Quiet sorrow, unremarked for the most part, existed well before that. We don't tend to think children feel things. Not really. What I am experiencing is testimony to how wrong that idea is. Children feel, all right. But if nobody is there to help them understand what is happening, the sorrow goes underground. And we get stuck. Victor again, "I think - I really think that growing up hurts even the strongest of the children, let alone the ones who had no one to help them with it."

And unless some shocking thing happens in a life that makes us wake up from, as Victor calls it, "finding a comfortable nest," we will "settle down and live out patterns laid down so long ago." Do I really want to respond to Victor as a three year old, or an eleven year old, or a bolshy teenager towards her mother? Of course not! Yet I have done all three, powerless to be otherwise because I was unconscious of the triggers that were setting me off. Where's the choice? the awareness? It's all rather excruciating. But I wanted to share with you why I suddenly have this compulsion to go ferreting about in the past. My sister has said, not recently, thank God, "But Ali! It's over now! We had a very happy childhood and anyway, what's the point of looking back?" The thing is, the past colors the present. It is affecting my life in the present. I can't just skip over it and pretend everything is fine.

Amma, India's Hugging Saint

Something I need to tell you. In June, Amma, India's Hugging Saint, visited L.A.. I have been for the last four years, I wouldn't miss it. It is such an extraordinary experience: the giant ballroom of the LAX airport Hilton hotel transformed into an Indian bazaar, with kirtan music all night long, booths and stalls selling items to raise money for Amma's charities, Amma herself sitting raised on a stage hugging people hour after hour without a break, eternally smiling, loving, completely immersed in the person now held in her arms. The people leave her embrace transfigured with tears, usually smiling, deeply moved. I love to watch. Anyway, on this occasion, while waiting for my hug, I went to see a Vedic astrologer who travels with Amma's entourage. I had seen her twice before so my information is stored in their computer and no time was wasted sorting out time and place of birth. I had a question about Victor, because just the day before we had had a particularly painful meeting and I was feeling unsure about his continued role in my life. The astrologer told me in this life I have good spiritual teachers. The thing that made me sit up and take notice was when she said my teacher falls under Saturn - and "Saturn does not do well in this world" - virtually the exact words Victor used once in a letter to me. She said he was a good teacher for me. She said Saturn is all about breaking attachments to the world in what appears to be a harsh manner, in order to deepen one's spiritual practice. She reminded me that nothing in this world is real. "You want to wake up, don't you?" she said. "He has more to teach you." And it is going to be very hard on me, but necessary. It seems I am in a phase of bringing up deep buried sorrow from many previous lifetimes, not just this one. I have to cry. And Victor is the key.

The idea of staying with grief. We don't do this, we're not taught the necessity of doing this. My sister tells me that she cried every time she left home for a good week at a stretch, from when she was 11 until she was 17 and probably older. She was known as the "sensitive one" when we were growing up, while I was the "independent one". Now we are old and the roles are reversed. Her early tears have made her strong, like the English side of my family; whereas my independence was just a sham, a wallpapering over the cracks.

I always thought the black widow's weeds and black armbands of olden times were to let the world know you were in mourning, a visual cue to treat you carefully. Now I think perhaps another purpose was to remind you, the mourner, that you were in mourning. A quick glance down at all that black would keep you focused, I imagine.
Victor is currently leading a Beginner's Course, in which we have explored the differences between shamata (concentration) and Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation. I discovered I am very good at shamata, I can hone in on the breath, or last week's empty stage, or a vision of the mind as a bowl filled with water and stay perfectly still in order not to spill a drop. Then it dawned on me, no wonder it's so easy. I've been doing it for years! I perfected this skill at boarding school: any negative thought and it's as if a steel wall drops down, smooth, shiny, impossible to penetrate. That's how I could "decide" I would never be homesick again, and by God, I wasn't. This new-found grief is like the cracking of the ice floes: the sheet of steel is coming down  and me - "Happy Ali" - with it.

I have always wanted to write. Ever since I was five years old, dictating "The Mystery of the Grand Piano" to our neighbor next door. But I never felt I was old enough to do the kind of writing I wanted to do, whatever that might be. For now, at least, it is this, examining a life. My life! You have to have enough life under your belt before you can look backwards and make sense of it. I write, like a lot of people do, to make sense of my life. I was blocked for months after Goenka, thinking what on earth did I imagine I had to say?  We are, after all, painted portraits, even - perhaps especially - to ourselves. But when I think of friends who have dealt with "real" sorrow as children, parents divorcing, a mother dying, alcoholic fathers, physical abuse, I feel ashamed that my little grief in the scheme of things is just that - little. But this is Happy Ali talk, it is my father's voice in my head telling my mother to "pull yourself together, Maryse!" It is my mother, impatient with her "lack of stamina." She would often quote that line about God only giving you what sorrow you can handle, and she would say that God must think her very feeble, because her sorrows were so slight in comparison to practically everyone else, and here she could barely bear it. We - her robust English family - tended to agree with her. And now look at me, turns out I'm more like her than any of us ever guessed. But I think now that there are probably many people like me, who didn't endure huge sorrows, who led what was to outside eyes a happy or privileged or entitled childhood, but who suffered nonetheless. And perhaps my little part in all this is to sound a note of warning, not to judge, not to go by appearances. Be kind.

I sent last week's blog to my writing teacher, the one who wanted to create that course on the shadow. I apologized, saying I finally understood why I was so angry about it and hoped she would now understand. She wrote back, "I read your blog entry. Fascinating, and I’m so pleased that you’re moving forward into the darkness because that’s where you’ll find the light."

Next week - into the darkness! Or at least a loiter around the entrance...