Goenka, Service and the Rainbow Path

 Three weeks of Goenka! Ten days of service, followed by a ten day retreat (my second). Or, to put it another way, physical boot camp followed by spiritual boot camp. I have broken it into two blog posts. Here’s the first: 

The Rainbow Path

“If it seems disorganized, that’s because it is!”

With those disarming words, Roger, project manager for the eight day service period, filling in for the “real” manager who was recovering from pneumonia, read off the tasks for the day.

In my last personal blog, weeks ago now, I wrote about how I discovered that, for the past 58 years, two characters I called Happy Ali and The Worm have run the show called Alison. They are both very, very young and as a result, they are tireless people pleasers, desperate for approval. They are also worn out! It felt long overdue for an adult to step up to the plate, so I made the drastic move of resigning from my many volunteer jobs with Long Beach Meditation to break the pattern. (Just this week I bumped into a parent from my daughter’s elementary school days some 15 years ago, whose first words were, “Are you still volunteering as much as you used to?” It is a very old pattern.) I had no idea what would happen next, but I thought if I took myself far away, beyond communication with the outside world, LBM would have to manage without me, and I wouldn't be able to change my mind. The irony that I chose to go somewhere far away and serve was not lost upon me.

I went to Goenka’s California Vipassana Center in North Fork in the foothills of the Sierras for this adventure. Although the center at Joshua Tree is nearer and brand new, I prefer trees and green to desert, and I thought North Fork in the early spring would be beautiful. (It was). I had signed up for the between courses service period, which meant maintenance work around the property. I had no idea what this might entail, but was willing to do whatever was needed. I’d had a moment's pause when they emailed me a list of possible skills – was I handy with a chainsaw? - but thought I could do something organizational in the office. They had just wrapped up their first thirty-day retreat and not many people were around.

In fact, there were precisely two volunteers that first day: a 19-year-old willowy yoga teacher named Colby from Santa Cruz - and me. I asked Colby if she was at the university in Santa Cruz. “No,” she said with a big smile,  “I’m on the Rainbow Path.” Colby was young and beautiful and could say something like this and get away with it. There were also a handful of men, long-term servers, who'd been living on the property for a period of months. Most days brought new volunteers, and what tasks were assigned depended on who showed up with what skills. I kept making the mistake of waiting to hear all the jobs on offer before raising my hand, sure somehow that the best would be saved for last. This was rarely the case.

They had had a month of severe winter storms: snow, rain, fierce winds. It took five men with chainsaws working daily for a week to clear some of the fallen trees. Therefore, the primary concern was removing tree limbs (a fire hazard) and fixing the gullies and potholes in the roads worn down by the rain, all before the next ten day course started the following week.

Because of my desire to hold out for the good job, young strong yoga teacher ended up staining a few half doors, nicely laid flat on trestles, while I worked with the guys, clearing brush and forking gravel. That first day my comfort zone was left far, far behind. I learned to drive a golf cart. I (tried to) dig out the very deep roots of three established bushes. I backed the most enormous truck I have ever seen in my life downhill while the chap on it pitched gravel from its bed into the deep ditches along the side of the road. (Just getting into that thing was like heaving myself onto the back of a really tall horse, without benefit of stirrups. I wondered, is it possible to pull off a steering wheel?). I almost got sent off in that truck by myself to pick up a load of gravel – the only thing that squelched that idea was that I was too short to actually see out of the mirrors. But how exhilarating! I loved that there was no sense of ‘Well, here’s a fat old bag, obviously out of shape, hm, what can we fob off on her?’ No! It was, ‘Here is a body, with arms and legs that seem to work – great! Go dig a drainage ditch!’ How could I not rise to these gloriously outrageous expectations?

All the same, I was delighted to hear, in the afternoon of that first day, that more help had arrived in the form of Jane from the Bay Area, her Persian friend Ramen (“like Ramen noodles,” said Jane, “but pronounced Rameen”), Leora from Israel and Sung Yee from Taiwan. The first three were in their late 20’s; Sung Yee was 60 and had a herniated disc so she did get that office job I’d hoped was out there. I was a bit (!) envious of this until someone said, “You must have been so glad you didn’t have a herniated disc and you could go out there and do the heavy physical work.” I hadn’t considered it like that at all, but when you think about it, well, of course!

Wonder why there are no buildings numbered 4 - 9?

I did pull one lucky job, inspecting fire extinguishers - did you know a certain type of wasp likes to fill up the open ends of extinguisher hoses with mud? First I had to locate the extinguishers, (there were 42 and I had a map), then check the hoses and cover them with tin foil. This was a very nice job that took all morning, wandering all over the property with a clipboard.  

Any time anyone was at a loose end, there was always brush clearance. The lovely Colby, having stained the doors, had a brief taste of brush clearance and cleared herself out while we were at the afternoon meditation, leaving a note saying she wasn't quite in the right head space to do this work at this time... In my head space, I was indignant: how could she leave when there was so much to be done and we were so short-handed?!! But I was ashamed of myself when I heard the others, genuinely sorry that she'd left and assigning no judgment or blame. Leora said matter-of-factly that it was good that she left if it wasn’t working for her. And the people in charge took pains to tell us to rest if we were feeling overwhelmed. I recognized my own sense of duty would not have allowed me to contemplate leaving even if I had wanted to, which I didn’t. But if the Rainbow Path means listening to yourself and honoring yourself, then good for Colby!

I loved the rhythm of these working days and had hopes of following a similar schedule when I got back home. (Still working on that). 

6 - 7                     Meditation

7 - 7:30                Breakfast

7:30 -                   Meeting to assign tasks

8:00 - 11:30/12     Work

11:30/12 - 2          Lunch and Rest

2 - 3                     Meditation

3 - 5:30                Work

6 - 7                     Dinner

7 - 8                     Meditation, followed sometimes by a movie

10 pm                   Lights out and total collapse

The idea was six hours of work per day, plus three hours of meditation which everyone had to do - I loved seeing the carpenter, the brush clearers, the cooks, everyone, drop everything three times a day and go sit. There was the sense that the sitting was the real work – everything else was just stuff that had to be done. (I must confess I had a hard time staying awake during the sits, especially the afternoon and evening ones, after all that physical labor. One time I tried kneeling and almost fell flat on my face).

But back to the chores: there was no sense that this is how it's done. I struggle with control (who doesn't) and have been convinced most of my life that there is only one way to do things - mine. Yet here, total novices that we were, we were shown a task and then left to our own devices to figure it out as best we could. And like you read about in those very progressive schools, after some time of standing about looking at the problem, someone would take the initiative and without any fanfare, the thing would get done. And however it was done, the results were received with gratitude. I mentioned this to Nick, the kitchen manager who appeared a couple of days before the ten day began. He was exceptionally low-key and easy-going, which is something in a place where everyone is low-key and easy-going. He shrugged, “Short of someone setting the place on fire, everything is pretty much okay.” Oh! To be open like that and truly let it all go! I saw how my own need for rules and direction and constant reassurance -  “Is this all right? Is this how you do it?” - kept surfacing. I saw how scared I am to experiment and take chances. How hard I am on myself for fear of getting it wrong. Seeing how much all that worry is tied in to a sense of self, and how much it doesn't matter, was tremendously liberating. 

We had a jolly teacher named Greta, who sat with us at most meals and led the meditations. One day she inquired what we'd been up to, having noticed the little red pickup truck going up and down the hill all morning. I told her: we picked up branches, stacked them onto the truck to a tottering height, drove (though not by me – why did I never learn to drive a stick-shift?) to a disused airstrip on the property, and unloaded. Then we picked up rocks - big ones! - from same airstrip, drove back to the road leading up to the property, heaved the stones into the ditches created by rain, picked up another load of branches. The whole routine was horribly quick, it only took about fifteen minutes, which meant many, many trips could fit into a day. It was a bit like that awful fairy tale where the miller's daughter has to separate feathers. An impossible task, in other words, given that every night more branches would topple. Sometimes whole trees toppled, the work of the cute little ground squirrels, undermining the roots with their burrows. The work therefore was never-ending.

Greta listened in growing horror and told me to speak up and refuse these jobs, but I didn't. The outer mirrored the inner: I was there to clear out old patterns and move the brush and rocks of the mind, and that work is never-ending too. I loved the symbolism.

The day after Colby left, Greta intervened and asked Roger to give us a later start so we could have a bit of a rest. He picked me up in the truck on the way back from the meditation hall that morning and outlined his plan: we would rest till 10, and then – we’d tarmac the road! Greta roared with laughter when she heard this – he'd kept quiet about the tarmac.

And that’s how we, Jane, Leora and I - "the girls" - became Road Crew and fixed potholes. This was easily the most exciting job ever. We got to wear special clothes from the dress-up trunk of work clothes: Leora and I wore matching red plaid shirts and blue jeans, all spattered with paint from other messy projects, while Jane found a white lab coat and looked like some sort of mad scientist. We wore big rubber boots and straw hats. You can imagine, we were a vision.

Monster Truck

Leora, the youngest and strongest, stood on the back of the monster truck, a Ford something-or-other, turbo-charged, shoveling the tarry stuff over the edge, while Jane and I raked and tamped. Jane raked lovingly and carefully, like a chef icing a cake. I tamped like I was unblocking a particularly stubborn toilet. Great for getting rid of aggression! 

Road Crew days were the two days that week when the temperature suddenly rocketed into the 90's. That first day was such a novelty we actually volunteered to do it again the next day. But Day 2 was not so fun - more like hot, sweaty drudgery. Finally, "I don't want to play Road Crew any more," I said, and the others took pity on the old lady and let me loiter by the side of the road. There was so much tar! Two tons in two days! By the end we were inventing holes just to get rid of the stuff. Roger said, “Think of the poor people who have to do this as their livelihood, day after day.” Once again, those poor people hadn't crossed my mind, I was much too busy thinking about this fat and winded old body and what did she think she was playing at?

What was I playing at? It was surely not random that I had chosen to come to this beautiful place, after having thrown myself out of my comfortable nest, unsure what to do next. It was not chance that surrounded me with three strong women, each one leading an rich and unconventional life. Colby’s Rainbow Path! 

Leora was 28 and had never been to college. But she had taken numerous Open University classes, was widely traveled, had spent months in Nepal teaching at a local school. She had been in the States since January and was bravely traveling by herself, couch-surfing and following her nose and her interests. After the service period, she was going with Jane and Ramen to Yosemite and from there she was talking of going up to Oregon to visit a bee farm. Her only firm plan was to return to the East Coast in the summer to work on a boat out of Cape Cod as a volunteer - counting fish! Leora was cheerful, curious about everything and full of energy. She even climbed up on the roof to learn all about sump pumps. She found everything interesting. 

Sung Yee was 60 years old, a widow, afraid she had wasted her life and that she was running out of time. So with her new freedom, she sold the family home and used the money she would have spent on rent to travel to someplace far away and work for a charity organization.  In this way she could see the world and help at the same time. She'd just come back from six months in Africa working at setting up a Buddhist school for HIV orphans. She had hopes of doing similar jaunts to India and the Middle East. She had written four books already, donating the royalties to charities, and planned to write about all her experiences. She was quick and bright, and seemed much younger than her 60 years. 

Jane was 30 and reminded me of my own daughter with her glasses and her quiet manner and her studious demeanor. I thought for sure she at least had some sort of career. We had a chance to talk one afternoon after digging that drainage ditch (!). I asked her what did she do, and she replied, straight-faced, "I'm on the Rainbow Path too." We collapsed laughing and then had a very serious conversation about what that meant. What I understood, from her, from Leora and from Sung Yee, was this determination not to settle, not to do the thing society expects of you "just because." All three had in common a boundless curiosity, a big appetite for life, and a strong spiritual inclination. (In order to serve, everyone has to have completed one ten day course. Jane had done three.)

I asked Jane whether this path was hard? She said yes, very. That she was a person who liked to draw up tables of pros and cons and spreadsheets and to-do lists, but that every time she used her mind to plan her life in this way, it just evaporated to nothing. It took her several years after college to come to terms with her lifestyle and be okay with not knowing how it was going to turn out. She said the biggest critical voice was her own. At one point she decided to go to law school to please her mother, "so that at least one of us would be happy with me" - and she dove into researching the LSat and law schools until she came to her senses and thought, "What am I doing?!! I hate law!!" From that point on, she was able to relax into the not-knowing, no longer afraid to make mistakes, opening herself to experience and not saying no to life. At least she knew what she didn't want to do.

Over the course of the next few days, I mulled this over. We yearn for security and stability – yet there is none. So is it possible to know this and still thrive? It is, of course, people do manage it. But could I do it? Am I too old to think this way for myself? It is after all as true for me as for anyone. The thing that was lovely about Jane was that I could ask her a question out of context and she immediately understood and so we had a single conversation that strung itself out over several days. For example, I asked her how did she know in what direction to turn? She said, "Pay attention to the things that shine for you. We tend to ignore them, thinking they must shine for everyone just as they do for us, and so we miss the fact that they are special to us. They are little clues about who we really are." We were allowed to sit in the newly built Pagoda for that 2pm sit. The Pagoda was a beautiful building full of little meditation cells. 

The Pagoda

A cell in the Pagoda

Sung Yee tried it and hated it: So dark! No windows! Like being in a closet! Jane tried it and liked it for all those same reasons: she felt completely alone with herself and loved it. I tried it and promptly fell asleep, propped up against the wall in the dark. So it’s not the case that everything you like, others like. And that’s important to know.

One morning walking down the road with Jane from the meditation hall, there was a particularly sweet burst of birdsong. I asked her, "Do you know the name of that bird?" And she replied, "I was just thinking of the Tao of Pooh, and how he tells Piglet not to bother with the names of things but just to enjoy them... that's what I was thinking right before you asked me 'what is the name of the bird?'" Another time I asked if she knew the name of the white flowers that grew on slender stalks by the thousands in the meadow. “I call them Heaven,” she said. Jane was very wise.

For three nights in a row, after the evening meditation, we watched what Leora called our Prison Trilogy - three films about Vipassana meditation as it's been taken into the prisons: one in India, a men's facility in Alabama "Dhamma Brothers", and a women's prison in Washington State. It was especially moving to see the violent criminals (the men in Alabama are mostly in for life with no chance of parole) come around through meditation to the experience of accepting responsibility for the way their lives had played out. Instead of throwing blame and hostility out onto the world, they were looking inwards for the first time and sometimes finding compassion for themselves in there too.

The Saturday after we did road crew for two days in a row, Roger announced we were going to have a day of rest. This was unheard of, but as Roger said, "Not every service period has a road crew." Better yet, he was going to take us off-property on a hike to a waterfall; and first we would stop in at North Fork and see what sort of celebrations were going on for Earth Day. A field trip! We went in two cars, men in one, me driving the women in the other; it wasn't planned like that, but we were too many to fit in one car and we were used to being separated by then and so naturally it fell about that way. (We worked together, but mealtimes, meditation and our sleeping quarters were segregated). 

First, the North Fork festivities (a brief stop - North Fork is really very tiny and not much was going on: a rummage sale, a few booths, a little band;  I was impressed they'd made the effort).  Then we drove along twisty forest roads to the waterfall. It was a fairly strenuous hike, spectacular, if rather scary - one slip and you'd be over the edge - but so lovely: different colored lichen on the rocks, the cooling mist from the 50’ falls, surrounded by pine trees and manzanitas and other trees I can’t name. I rested and wrote in my journal all afternoon (the usual restrictions about reading and writing are off when you're serving, although reading material is limited to the dharma books they have in their own library). That evening we watched the last of the Prison Trilogy about the Dhamma Brothers, and to finish off an amazing day, Leora, excited as a puppy, woke Sung Yee and me up at 4 a.m. and the three of us crept out to lie on our backs on a huge flat rock beyond the women's buildings to watch a rare meteor shower.

The meteor shower of April 2012

There was a possibility of hundreds – we saw seven and were thrilled. Sung Yee said, "I can't remember the last time I got up in the middle of the night just to look at the sky!" So companionable it was, looking up together at the black sky filled with stars, and watching as the grey light of dawn crept up from around the sides, like a circle, getting smaller and smaller, until there were just a handful of stars left that we could count one by one.

The service period ended officially on Monday, but of course I was there until the new course began on Wednesday. Sung Yee had a chance of a ride back to Sacramento Monday morning so she jumped at that - it would save her hours on the buses; the others left on Tuesday. Once Sung Yee vacated the office, I got my wish to do office work. Only I had to laugh: my task was to catalog five bins worth of electrical stuff, adaptors, wires with prongs, things whose use I couldn't even guess at, much less name, things that had something to do with the AV system, or possibly computers, or maybe cell phones. Once again, like picking up the branches, the task was hopeless. I'm good with words, only I had no words to do this job. My words were useless. I figured it was a foreshadowing of the next half of this experience, the silent retreat, where words would also be useless.

While I was puzzling over this new and awful job, my three young friends, Leora, Ramen and Jane, came to say goodbye en route to Yosemite. They stood at the bottom of the steps to the little office bungalow and stretched out their arms to me - no physical contact is allowed on site - they called out, "We've come to give you virtual hugs!"

I wrote later that evening:

“…it occurred to me that I was in fact old enough to be their mothers - funny, because I felt not any age with them. But there it is - I stood at the top of the steps and felt like the Mother Pig in the Three Little Pigs, sending her children out into the world." For once, I caught myself in the act of telling myself a story: 

"No, I didn’t. That’s how I interpret it now, hours after the fact. At the time it was nothing of the sort. It was just goodbye and that was enough. No story!! Isn’t that what I am here to learn? To drop the story and see reality as it is, not good, not bad, but constantly changing. It becomes good and bad when we want things to be otherwise. And we always want things to be otherwise!”

On Wednesday, Day Zero, hours before registration for the ten day would begin, that nervous back-to-school feeling in the air (and in my stomach), I said to Greta, "I hope I've been a good service person." So often I'd felt I wasn't strong enough or skilled enough to be of any real use. She shocked me by saying, "I loved you the best." "Why?!" "Because you didn't run away!" That was cheering and would prove useful to remember in the days ahead. (I realize only now as I write this that once again, I was seeking validation - 'Did I really do a good job? Tell me how good I was!' I mean, what could she possibly say? "No, you were crap?" Perhaps one day I will catch myself before opening my mouth...** I am reading this to my husband who has just pointed out that my putting this anecdote in here in the first place is ALSO making it all about me. 'See how special I am. I didn't run away!' I am leaving it in, even though I am quite mortified, to show how completely unconscious we are - all right, I am - of these things that run us. Me.)

Greta joked that I would blog about this service period and no-one would ever come help again. I hope that’s not the case! I hope it is obvious that Old Students are needed and welcomed, whatever their abilities, for however much time they can spare: a single day, a weekend – really, anything is received with such gratitude: the maintenance is ongoing and it’s a very big property. It is also gob-smackingly beautiful, which doesn't hurt.

Now I am home again. What was the take-away from that time to myself? Since the mind that thinks is often ten steps behind whatever it is that really decides what's going on, I hesitate to put into words what is still unfolding. But perhaps that is in itself the gift of the Rainbow Path. A letting go of plans and an idea that "I" have control over any of it. I think of Roger's words, "If it seems inefficient, that's because it is!" Yet, everything that needed to get done, got done. Without stress and without worry. Imagine that! I couldn't have fathomed it beforehand, I was filled with anxiety about the future. I learned that the great thing about hard physical labor is that it focuses the chattering, obsessive, worrying mind simply on what needs to be done at that moment. That is good to know. A huge, huge plus was I hadn’t anticipated working with such lovely people, genuinely good and patient and kind and bright. They taught me about the Rainbow Path when I needed it most.

I read a book of reflections while I was a server and copied out several. Here’s one that I found especially fitting:

"If you can't do the right thing

or don't know what the right thing is,

simply do the next thing - 

with as much clarity, gentleness and kindness

as you can muster...

and then forgive yourself

when you are dead wrong!"

And one night, half dead with fatigue (a good moment to write, the ego is practically asleep), I wrote, not quite knowing what it means:

"We must bear witness. We must witness. Be aware, pay attention, listen to each other and bear witness."

So do what presents itself, one step at a time, and say yes to it all... 

And keep meditating. It is the key.

P.S.

 I think little kids know all about the Rainbow Path. This is the first drawing my daughter Helen ever drew for her Dad, when she was three years old. She told him it was a rainbow. I love that she drew it on a memo from Sea World - See World.Yes!!