I Choose Dharma* over Drama
Accepting that life is impermanent, and all things change, is easier when talking about the weather than, let’s say, your finances or your bowels.
When facing one’s own mortality or the finite lives of loved ones, living this central Buddhist truth is even tougher. Death is a condition of life; that’s a big, sad hurdle, making life seem hard, silly, or even a cruel joke. Why try when death is the reward, no matter what?
Yet, this core belief in impermanence, or anicca, is at the heart of Vipassana meditation, and what I had to embrace if my 10 day Vipassana silent retreat was to have value.
After a two hour ride across the city, I was dropped at 3:30 p.m. on December 15 at the Bangalore (India) Vipassana Paphulla. Gyan escorted me to the women’s dormitory, where 25 some beds lined two walls. Aluminum dividers separated us into tiny stalls. The beds were stone slabs about 2 feet off the ground with thin futons. Navy blue curtains enclosed the fourth side and the 5 by 9 foot space our own.
Common bathrooms were at one end of the building, with hot water promised at 6:30 every morning, after a small brush fire heated the outdoor tank. A dining area completed the other end of the building, with plastic lawn chairs facing a shallow shelf that framed three sides of the room. We would sit facing the walls to eat a small breakfast at 6:30, a full meal at 11 a.m. and lime water at 5 p.m.
Within three hours, its was dark and 45 to 50 men and women from Bangalore, other parts of India and the world had arrived to begin 10.5 hours of daily meditation and instruction. We promised to read and write nothing, eat no food except what was served, do no religious practices, only walk in a designated area during breaks and of course, follow the daily schedule and observe Noble Silence.
From the moment the soft gong sounded at 4 a.m., rung by the serene and shy young man named Gyan from northern India, to lights out at 9:30 p.m., we agreed to trust this ancient teaching and surrender to the routine. On a practical level, we were not allowed to make eye contact with anyone (our teacher spoke with closed eyes), stand and enjoy sunlight or moonlight or nature, such as the roses blooming in front of the meditation hall. Our attention and focus was on the single task of meditation, to wrestle our restless minds to the ground. Removing outer stimulation and distractions, we hoped to discover and develop powerful inner mind-body-breath connections.
Described as a step by step scientific process, Vipassana meditation provides tools to still and purify the mind, cued by regular respiration and bodily sensations. Depending on where you spend most of your time, in the interior or exterior worlds, using these simple tools to access the body’s truth can be an exciting adventure or utter struggle.
Utter struggle quickly presents itself as screaming back aches, hip and knee pain. The practice is done seated in lotus position on futon pillows on a cement floor for hours and hours and hours day after day. Students who can’t sit cross legged can arrange to sit on a stone slab leaning against a cinder block wall or in a plastic lawn chair, but that only takes out the utter, not the struggle.
Why Do People Do This? Why Did I?
Before more detail is shared, the reader is surely wondering who takes a Vipassana course and why.
Learning only about my fellow travelers when Noble Silence was broken around 10:30 a.m. on the last day, I can only answer for myself. This was actually my second Vipassana course at the Bangalore center; I did my first 10 days last March. At that time, a giant hole was being excavated next door by two backhoes and two dump trucks, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. When the diesel engines fired up at 7 a.m. that second day I was desperately working to feel the sensation of an exhale on my upper lip. I wondered if anyone had ever gone crazy at a Vipassana course. How could I inhale dust for the next 10 days? I did. And came back for more.
Nine months later, the machines were now small diesel powered cement mixers, and the hole now supported a big, unfinished meditation hall. Several families, from toddlers to mothers and fathers, made and poured cement the same hours the heavy equipment and shovels had operated. Women in colorful saris laughed together as they sifted sand through screens or carried baskets of rocks on their heads. The dust was finer, the noise lighter. I wasn’t worried about going crazy.
We were still in the temporary meditation hall with the blue tarp roof. On the other side of the walled compound we could hear sheep and a cow. The only sheep I’ve spent time with are the sweet baaing lambs at Kristin and Neil Urie’s Farm in East Craftsbury.
I believe this bleating Over the Wall Gang were aging fellows, whiny and depressed, rather Woody Allen-ish. The cow was an interesting gal, announcing herself as “Maaa,” never a “Moo” passing her lips.
But back to who and why. I have meditated since 1990, when my friend Regis Cummings in Montpelier, Vermont, gave me some basic instruction in a technique taught by the late Benedictine John Main, founder of the World Community for Christian Mediation (www.wccm.org). Using a repeated word (mantra) from the Old Testament, a Christian meditator quiets the mind by offering it this bit to chew on, like a crying baby settles on a pacifier.
More than 10 years later, I was given a personal meditation mantra by Swami Mahadev at the Sivananda Ashram in Val Morin, Quebec. (www.sivananda.org). An ancient Sanskrit verse, the phrase is repeatedly mentally until the mind becomes still.
All mediation roads are taken to quiet the mind, find peace and clarity and be able to live life with less anxiety and hair trigger reactions.
But in the various traditions of meditation I have studied, the mind is basically thrown a bone to busy it. Vipassana makes a greater demand of the meditator. We are told no words or thoughts or images can be used to find stillness. Rather, focusing on the sensation of the breath and sensations within the body, the Vipassana meditator quiets the mind by starving it. (To learn more, sign up for a course, at www.Dhamma.org.)
Why did I chase this method? Because Vipassana also promises something beyond a quiet mind. It is grounded in principles taught by the Buddha, which call for us to live our Dharma… moral lives, in harmony with the laws of nature. Dharma is our natural design, how we help ourselves and others simultaneously.
Vipassana promises that if we live our truth, our dharma, we will be freed from our misery. It promises to free us from cravings, clinging and aversions, our life of reacting to likes and dislikes. I could relate to that pattern. At age 55, I seem to spend more and more time hoeing old ground or stirring up coals, looking for regrets or mistakes. Or, I stare into the future, wondering what I should do next and will it make a difference or be needed. I think about the inevitable aging of people I love, though no amount of thinking will ever change that reality. Avoiding this senseless pattern of thought appealed to me. Like my yoga practice, a strong meditation practice is about self care.
(As an aside, I also respect Vipassana, India’s ancient nonsectarian, secular meditation system, because it is practiced by people of all faiths. We need not divide one another!)
Raised by a mother who is an active peace marcher, I long to find and share peace with the world. I sought this meditation practice to keep me rooted in creation, not reaction. I know I am the author of my own life, and therefore, my own misery. But how to not write misery? How to be happy?
My first 10 day course was largely focused on survival of the elements. Lots of gassy ladies full of Indian food and too much sitting, sleeping like stacked cord wood together. Sweating in the near 100 degree sun. Mosquitos. No toilet paper. The backhoes. Having completed that course, I thought I had mastered the environment, and during my second 10 day course I could leave the outer world and journey into my body and mind.
Known for ideal temperatures of low 80s during the day and 60s at night, December in Bangalore seemed ideal for a second 10 day course, and a chance to have a truly Silent Night a holy experience. Waking and walking from the dorm to the meditation hall on Christmas morn, I saw ice on the grass and my breath in the night sky. Who would have guessed India would experience its coldest temperatures for this week in 124 years! So much for an easy route to my inner world.
Lessons on the Pillow
After a few days, the first heightened sense I noticed was SMELL. Such awareness became a great chance to avoid slipping into reaction or aversion, as virtually every smell was unpleasant.
My bare feet while seated. They reminded me of the Frito smell of dog’s paws. My pants: using my hand for wiping instead of squeezing the Charmin left a faint trail of Eau De Urine. Sorry.
Lunch began to smell a lot like the bathroom in the morning. And the heavy blankets we wrapped in to meditate or sleep gave off a lanolin-petroleum odor. The label said “50 percent wool,” the remaining 50 percent written in Hindi. I tried to imagine what material could be so heavy? A metal alloy? Wood? At night, it felt like the mattress was on top of me, but given the temperatures, I was not reacting in aversion.
Dozens of bodies wrapped in this woolen armor returned me to South Junior High’s locker room, stuffed with girls unwashed gym uniforms. Walking into the meditation hall after two or three days of cold rain called to mind wet stinky long haired mutts coming in to dry off.
Plus the regular inhaling of sheep scat.
TASTE was my next hyper-sense. Our teacher was excited when I mentioned these changes, noting my mind was getting sharper and sharper, an essential requirement of the practice. My tongue was scummy, no amount of cleaning or brushing would help. I took to sucking on toothpaste, as it allowed me to taste something else and comply with the no snacking rule.
I won’t pick on the poor volunteer cook, who was dealing with nearly 50 different alimentary canals and independent systems of elimination, all with their own special requirements. The tumblers of barley water tasted like that white paste we used in grade school, rumored to be made of dead horses. I stayed with boiled vegetables and white rice, but my tongue grew furrier. (The first 10 day course cook was so wonderful, I gave her my watch. In reaction, I would not give this pot-walloper the time of day. Wait! Even the cooks taught the lessons of craving and aversion, of creating likes and dislikes in the kitchen. I released thoughts of food, learning to make what Vipassana meditators call a choiceless observation.)
SOUND struck next, as the ticking of clocks, snoring of dorm mates and cracking of finger and toe knuckles amplified themselves by the hour. One neighbor was unable to observe Noble Silence at night, rambling loudly in her sleep. The gong between sessions made my fillings ache. Something (I was hoping crickets) was living in the space between the tarp and sheets hung above our heads. It sounded a bit like a whirring ceiling fan. Was this what living with an alert mind was like? Let me put my head in a bucket! (Actually, this was the only way to bathe or wash hair, in the early morning air, during that 15 minute moment when hot water was available. Drinking hot breakfast milk too slowly meant all the hot water was taken, some for washing sarees.)
I also began to hear my heart beat. That was great. Taught in daily discourses to neither react nor attach to subtle, pleasant sensations, but to simply observe, I had to fall out of love with my heart beat.
The numbers of sick students grew for the first half of the course, as sneezing and coughing crescendoed by Day Five. I continued to see myself in perfect health. An American woman I never got to meet, who sat on my right, disappeared on Day Five, her bronchitis dragging her off the pillow. Days later, a lone pair of unclaimed underwear remained hanging on the indoor line that ran the length of our sleeping quarters. I realized they must be hers, removed and folded them on the blanket table.
TOUCH was last, showing up in a princess-and-the pea kind of discomfort over whatever lay under my meditation pillow or mattress. I couldn’t even have a corner of the full metal comforter under one edge, as I felt I was tipping way off balance.
Walking on the stony ground for a few minutes between my bucket bath and 8 am group meditation, I was aware of the earth’s unevenness. Eyes downcast, I saw a cavalry of ants carrying off dirt to hills a foot high, a miniature version of the concrete moving families. Dark skinned creatures in constant motion, moving many times their own weight, building giant creations of sand and sweat.
The sense gate of VISION compensated for all the over stimulation with closed eyes. I found myself brushing my teeth, eating and even dressing sightless. Somehow, it was easier to get around without seeing. I did use my shadow to check my cowlick after morning shampoos, and it was a very faithful reporter.
Yet within this scene, with all my sense gates wide open and wide awake, my mind and I were forging an agreement: no need to react. Just observe. Observe with a calm and quiet mind. An alert and attentive mind. A balanced an equanimous mind. I was getting it.
Day Five Storms
The 4:30 to 6:30 a.m. sitting of the fifth day, smack dab in the middle of the course, my food began to follow the teacher’s instruction about thoughts: “everything is arising and passing away.” I have never belched, and have been quite intolerant of my (belching) husband, who often slaps himself on the chest while coughing out, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why….” I have no patience for his uncouth and, I deem, unnecessary habit. In other words, I had a major aversion towards belching and belchers.
Until Day Five, when I joined their ranks. That morning, having not eaten since 11 a.m. the previous day, I began to belch. A deep rumbling began somewhere low; my descending colon? Suddenly, like the thunder rolling in and rattling our overhead tarps, a gastric gust would bubble within my chest and escape my lips. It had a mind of its own, as if the disgruntled mind said, “OK. Ignore me. See if I keep you socialized and well mannered. Watch all hell break loose.”
I never fully regained control of my digestive system. Five days later, when we were allowed to speak, I asked a woman (whose head I had inadvertently groped in the dark one night looking for a light switch) if she had any antacids. Within 30 minutes of gobbling her papaya pills, my stomach began to relax and settle. I had observed unpleasant sensations and now pleasant ones, but neither had great meaning. They simply were. I could remain happy, whether my stomach was or not. What a concept!
Upset stomachs are not half as challenging as churning memories brought up from nowhere. People I haven’t seen in 40 years would suddenly send a message, taunting me with a dare, “Can you ignore me? Didn’t you hate me? Didn’t I hurt you?” Teachers, the mothers of friends, former colleagues, and neighbors paraded past, igniting feelings of angry, hatred, jealousy, depression and fear. But I was now aware something was different. It was My Choice, 100 percent my choice, whether to invite them to stay for a review and regurgitation. I could let them go without reaction, wishing us all well.
The past is the past, only accessed by my choice. It can never be returned to, the visits are only mental memories I carry; to beat myself up, make sense of nonsense, grieve, regret, prevent beginnings or rewrite endings. Far from escapist, Vipassana meditation requires a realistic view of the moment and then demands we make a conscious decision.
Old classrooms, bedrooms, camp cabins; the changing scenery I carry within generated instant and overwhelming misery. Our teacher said that while a few unkind words were heard a minute or so in real time, we give them years and years of after life.
An angry man once came to yell at the Buddha. Fed up with tales of the Buddha’s influence, this man wanted to bring him down a peg. The Buddha heard the man’s accusations and said, with a genuine smile on his face, “I understand you are bringing me something, a gift. This is the gift of your anger, and I don’t accept it. No thank you, Sir.” I immediately decided to fully incorporate this awareness into my life, to not invite other people’s problems into my life. Yes, I have the power and ability to choose what I take or refuse. I am the author of my own misery. I wrote a friend that I have come to regard such moments as just waves coming into sight, catching our attention and then crashing on the beach, to disappear forever.
Another friend wrote asking, “Did the time sitting seem long? Did you wonder when lunch would be served? Were you able to sleep on that futon?”
Sometimes.
No.
Yes.
Future Forecasting
During question and answer periods twice a day, we were allowed to speak somewhat privately to the teacher. Somewhat, because it was a whispered conversation at the front of the hall. As I had been assigned seat one, I couldn’t avoid hearing, unless the student spoke Hindi. I heard more than one student ask for help on how to deal with a mind that took forays into the future, worrying a son would run away, a daughter take her life, a job be lost.
I felt compassion for my fellow classmates, sitting in their own misery, their own self made versions of hell on earth.
As the days drew to a close, my strength of mind and determination grew exponentially. I was unmoved and unstopped by x degree weather (a rather stunning fact, as I came to India this winter to avoid Vermont’s cold!) and other daily dramas of potential disappointment or temporary highs. One afternoon I felt my “sense of urgency” leave my body. This anticipatory sense has run for decades like a motor in my psyche, making me jump to refill a guest’s tea cup, wrap gifts long after I want to go to bed and feel uncomfortable with silences. Saying good bye was a grand moment.
When the phones wouldn’t work for Christmas Day calls to the US, I observed myself and saw that in less than 30 minutes, I let that scene go and decided in 10 hours I would be near working phones, and it would still be Christmas in the US. Happily, Meera, a generous fellow student offered her phone up, so my family and I heard each other’s laughter and love, ever so briefly, ever so joyously. Meera reminded me that it was OK to have a desire and work to achieve it (such as “phone home, Elliot!’) as long as one doesn’t let it become a craving, which will lead to misery. Right! I got it!
Learning that virtually nothing merits a dramatic reaction from me, since all things are changing, changing changing was clearly the upside of impermanence. Endings are a condition of beginnings, and I found the freedom within this truth.
Breaking the Noble Silence, many remarked on how much lighter and energetic their bodies felt. I am not surprised by this sensation; it mirrors what I experience after a good yoga class or massage. Our body lets go of heavy burdens, we relax. I also noticed though that, after just two hours of talking and listening, exhaustion hit hard. I skipped group sharing and went back to my little cell for a 30 minute nap.
The end result of Vipassana meditation is not just liberation from our personal misery, but world liberation from misery. We see that not only do we cause our own misery, but the misery of all those around us. Likewise, we can be a source of great happiness and light, simply by being. The Vipassana meditation courses being taught in prisons is producing great peace of mind.
The highlight of course for me was learning the Metta Meditation, sending out of love and compassion to all. Once we can clean up our own insides, releasing all negativities and defilements, we are privileged to share this purity with others. Without creating a craving, I can safely say, I was so very happy to have the opportunity to be taught such a loving, healing meditation by such a loving teacher. I recommend a 10 day course. And, if my friends in India decide to take a 10 day course before I return to the US this spring, I’ll go. Vipassana is taught all over the world. For free. And that means it’s priceless.
Hala, a lovely English girl of Egyptian descent, on a one year spiritual sojourn in India, was completing her third or fourth 10 day class. She shared with me this Metta meditation blessing.
Metta Blessing
To all beings, great or small, near or far, visible or invisible, those that are human those that are not human, those who dwell on earth, water, air, sky:
May they be free from mental defilements.
May they be free from physical defilements.
May they be free from suffering.
May they be free from danger.
May they look after themselves happily.
May they share in my Dhamma.
May they be happy.
May all beings be happy.
To all of those who have hurt me, intentionally or unintentionally, knowingly or unknowingly, to all those I have hurt, intentionally or unintentionally, knowingly or unknowingly, may I be more mindful next time:
May they be free from mental defilements.
May they be free from physical defilements.
May they be free from suffering.
May they be free from danger.
May they look after themselves happily.
May they share in my Dhamma.
May they be happy.
May all beings be happy.
To my family, friends, relatives, to everyone I have met, have yet to meet, and will never meet:
May they be free from mental defilements.
May they be free from physical defilements.
May they be free from suffering.
May they be free from danger.
May they look after themselves happily.
May they share in my Dhamma.
May they be happy.
May all beings be happy.
And might I add:
To all those reading this essay,
May you be free from mental defilements.
May you be free from physical defilements.
May you be free from suffering.
May you be free from danger.
May you look after yourselves happily.
May you share in my Dhamma.
May you be happy.
May all beings be happy.
Bethany Knight Bangalore December 26, 2007
* Dharma is sometimes written as Dhamma
note: I am taking my third 10 day Vipassana course April 1-12 with some friends, at the Hyderabad Vipassana Center. Sign up at www.dhamma.org and join us!
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