Over Meditated Cont.

 

We are

just flits of fleeting electricity

inside 

a wrinkled grey sponge 

steering a bone-mech 

wearing a meat suit.

We are

elemental,

electric, 

water, vapor, rock and fiery tissue.

All the universe within 

us.

------

Yesterday's post ended because the day did, though there is more to tease apart. Let's start with subject of expectations. What can one reasonably expect from a retreat which lasts only ten days? A question which I wished I'd asked myself prior to my participation in the course. Having heard Asia and James relay their stories of incredible insights and life-changing epiphanies, I perhaps set my sights too high. Somehow I thought I'd be lost in an ocean of profundity, soaking wet and gasping, dizzy and desperate for something to hold onto. So eager was I to receive the bounty of sagely wisdoms set aside for me, that going into the experience I even feared I'd regret not having brought a small piece of paper and a pen despite them being forbidden. I believed I'd need something to capture the innumerable morsels of truth - that after the event I'd have so much figured out. 

My miracle didn't come. Instead it became something I had to let go of on day five. On this day, my ass, unbearably sore and praying for reprieve, pled with me to persuade the teacher to permit me a mat and a cushion. Due to an old spinal injury, up until that point I'd been seated on a hard and uncomfortable chair with my spine upright not touching the back of it. The teacher granted my request. However, I soon came to realize my error after sitting crosslegged on the cushion for about fifteen minutes. After four days of acclimating my body to the conditions of the chair, once I had switched to the new position I noticed new muscles would need to be recruited to support the fresh posture. Those already fatigued muscles would be of no use to me. Quickly my legs became numb. Painful pins and needles turned into harrowing psychic horrors which I alluded to yesterday. Fearful thoughts swirled, painting pictures of the permanent damage inflicted on my legs. Blood clot fairies danced in my head. What made matters worse was that I asked for this. Someone had to go retrieve the mat and cushion, making an exception for me. To get up would result in a twofold failure: the first because we are not allowed to move during Vipassana meditation, and the second because it would mean the facility manager provided me with this privilege for no reason. I felt trapped. Soon this feeling transformed into anger, frustration. Rage fumed inside me and I wanted to scream. Then another change; sadness; defeat. If I couldn't sit on the chair and I couldn't sit on the cushion, how would I proceed? Despair. My eyes were wet with tears.

Then the mind began offering me seductive escape plans disguised as self care: 

C'mon man, don't be too hard on yourself. You've got an injury, what can you do? 

You gave it your best shot buddy. Some people didn't even make it to day five. Focus on the positive! 

Listen, aren't you craving completing this course right now? Just let go. 

Calling it quits is actually a way to demonstrate equanimity here. No? 

Oh. You don't want to give up? 

Look, if you're too proud to leave and you stubbornly force your way through this isn't that just your aversion to failure? 

See, the middle path is to accept you can't do this and walk away. You can try again next time if you want. 

Pretty sophisticated manipulation. 

The mind is a very slippery and very guileful thing. There is no better time to recognize this than during a meditation retreat. By grabbing onto a single word, anicca, meaning impermanence, I was able to tell myself this intensely negative moment would pass away in time. Luckily, after a shift in focus to my breath, it did. Unfortunately my problems weren't resolved yet. Still there was the dilemma of the chair or the cushion. With a strong determination I decided I would remain on the chair - a thing which forced me to deal with the unpleasant feelings of having wasted both the manager and the teacher's time and effort. Time and time again the adventure presented me with fruitful opportunities for rumination. Self doubt, fear and aversion are cornerstones of my lived experience. Perhaps this is why a pause in all these fearful, critical, negative, intrusive and overall abusive thoughts felt like such a blessing. Those days of freedom and emptiness were restorative and enchanting. For the first time in a long time, I felt able to breathe. Clearing the mind of these kinds of impurities helped me watch it more keenly. Consider for a moment a messy, crowded room. Stacks of magazines and newspapers, errant books here and there, old cups and glasses, piles of dirty clothes, plates full of crumbs, an unmade bed, scattered photos strewn about, empty bags of potato chips and various other wrappers littering the floor; nothing where it's supposed to be. Now, imagine trying to find your wallet in that room, or trying to locate the source of a scurrying sound among the chaotic landscape of trash and disorder. Replace that room with an empty one and you begin to understand how much easier it becomes to see when a new energy attempts to enter.

Standing like a bouncer at the door of my mind, repeatedly I'd catch fear trying to get in. Once apprehended and removed, again he'd appear wearing a fake mustache, or a wig, or dressed in drag. With a ferocious persistence he attempted to gain admittance. Eventually, and only for a time, he'd retire. It became clear an unwavering vigilance would be required to keep this defilement away. Part of me wondered whether this was even feasible longterm. Enormous amounts of energy and attention would need to be marshaled and expended to secure the psychic perimeter. Patrolmen, barbed wire, fencing, dogs, watchtowers, night vision binoculars, thermal binoculars, metal detectors, video cameras, around-the-clock security. I'm still not sure that's an energy bill I can afford. In another Buddhist tradition there is a practice, called chöd - not to be confused with chode - which suggests battling demons only serves to make you weaker while making them stronger. An alternative is offered: instead of fighting the demon, feed it. To me this seems a far more practical solution. Just look at the historical response to the US's southern border. Has a militarized war mentality reduced immigration and helped Americans and our neighbors, or has it created a humanitarian crisis that multiplies human suffering? Food for thought.

Aversion, as I mentioned above, became a big topic for me. Fear, at its core, is aversion. Health anxiety, a product of fear, is also aversion. For as long as I can remember, fear has played a pivotal role in my reality. Seldom has there been a more definitive feature of my life. Last week, while listening to an episode of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, Buddhist meditation teacher David Nichtern remarked, "panic is the most fundamental experience we [humans] have." Of course this resonated deeply with me. Not just because I feel it in my soul to be true, but because I had just wrestled with the idea at the retreat. While I was there a series of memories like breadcrumbs led me back in time to the possible origins of my condition. Most recently there was the testicle. Before that the kidney stone and its aftermath. Before that a year of suffering with gastritis. Further back a different series of digestive issues prompting a colonoscopy. The year before was a mysterious onset of a frozen shoulder where my arm was completely and idiopathically immobilized. Tracing back through the years I recalled staph infections and the accompanying hospitalizations, the breaking of my spine, and lifelong GERD. Older still are memories of a broken hand, Osgood-Schlatter's disease as a teenager and mononucleosis, a winged scapula. However the oldest of all of these must be the congenital birth defect which required open-heart surgery at the tender age of one. None of this takes into account the non-physical traumas of living a life. But in terms of the embodied traumas, I began to peel away even more layers of the temporal onion to uncover what my infant experience must have been like prior to the surgery. All of this happening like a complex surgical incision into my consciousness in the hopes of being able to excise the cancerous growth which had, with malignant aggression, infested the future from the past.

Whatever I imagined was just that: imagination. I cannot truly know whether there's even a shred of legitimacy in these reflections or whether they are merely games of perception yearning to rationalize, to create comforting narratives from a hodgepodge of stories I've heard my parents tell over the years, intermingled with distortions and half truths. But what I understood was that things were unsteady at the time of my birth. A new mother, my mom suspected intuitively that something was wrong with me, but without any proof there was little to be done. She had taken me to doctor after doctor all of whom had been unable to make a diagnosis. During this time I must have absorbed her worry and anxiety on an energetic level. Prior to that, while she was pregnant, realizing she was to have a child with a biker whom she knew had a drinking and drug problem, she must have had certain concerns and apprehensions regarding his commitment, stability, and reliability. He didn't want kids so he didn't view taking care of me as a priority. As a matter of fact, after I was born he continued to take long trips to wild and hedonistic biker gatherings where he'd party and be missing for stretches of time. Responsibility was not a strength for my father. While all of this was going on I can't imagine I wasn't ingesting some of the stress. Ignoring the psychological components of that situation though, when I contemplate the biological circumstances of my one-year-old self, I can only imagine the strange conditioning I was subjected to and how the fear and aversion must have taken root there as a sick child.

Newly born, a day must feel like a lifetime. In fact, it is. Time stretches out toward infinity during that first year. By the end of this interval, a day is still only 1/365th of your life. Now, at almost thirty-eight, a day is 1/13870th of my life. Days rush by. Back then, though, they lingered. So throughout this early formative period, each time I would feel hunger I would be greeted by an unpleasant sensation and cry - because it was the only language available to me at the time - get fed, but then encounter an even worse sensation when I'd begin gagging and then eventually vomit. Effectively I had involuntary bulimia. Each time this scenario replayed itself I must have developed a deeper aversion to feeling hungry, and an additional aversion to the feeling of being fed. Multiple times each day this lesson was taught. I'm not a natal psychologist, so I can't say to what extent a toddler remembers, or to what degree they've established a sense of causality, if it all. As mentioned above, this is purely speculative, wild conjecture. Perhaps proof of its falsity is that I never had an eating disorder, something which might be a logical conclusion if it were true.

In either case, I had arrived at a possible source of my misery. How this serves me, I'm not sure. Maybe it doesn't. It's just something I pondered in the small, intervening windows between meditations.

Enough for today. Between writing and two hours of meditation, plus preparing to upend my life over the coming 60 days when I leave my apartment and begin living in a van, a scarcity of time is emerging. Somehow there's never enough of it. Every passing day increments the denominator by 1, accelerating its passing. Practically imperceptible on the daily timeframe, but viscerally felt as the years accumulate. I'd like to play guitar, to learn a song, to watch a movie, to finish reading a book I'm nearly done with, to tidy up my apartment, to begin selling things and getting rid of my possessions, to research storage locations, to locate a van for sale and, if I'm being ambitious, maybe even record a podcast.

Over Meditated

 

It's been nine days since completing the Vipassana retreat in Poland, at Dhamma Pallava. The experience - which lasts 10 days - is a fairly unusual one, in many ways, but particularly in its isolation and intensive inwardness. First, it's worth noting that there is no official fee for the course. The facility grounds and infrastructure, the lodging and meals, meditation accessories such as blankets and mats and cushions, are all provided and made possible by the donation contributions from previous students. Students, during nearly the entire length of their stay, are not permitted to speak. Even eye-contact is discouraged, though it does happen accidentally from time to time. Meals are restricted to only a light breakfast and lunch. All food is vegetarian. New students are permitted a small snack in the latter portion of the afternoon, consisting of an apple or a banana. The schedule is quite rigorous, with little free time entrusted to the participants. Each day concludes with a video discourse from the teacher, S.N. Goenka, recorded in 1991. His lectures contain clever aphorisms and salient, relatable anecdotes to help students make sense of the trying journey they are on. Upward of ten hours each day are dedicated to meditation. More time is allocated for meditating than for sleeping, which ultimately places people in a position where they are underfed, under-slept and over-meditated. As a first-time participant, everything seemed considerably well-oiled and meticulously conceived, though quite demanding. 

A Pali word which roughly translates to "clear-seeing," Vipassana is an ancient Buddhist meditation technique designed by The Buddha and intended to bring one's attention to the ephemeral nature of all things and, in doing so, in attuning oneself to the true nature of reality, one can gain deep and lasting insight. Therefore, Vipassana is considered an insight meditation. Special emphasis is placed on respiration, at least for the first four days, to help calm the mind. Students are instructed to notice and observe the breath, not to try to adjust or change it. Gradually, increased focus and awareness are directed toward the nostrils and the small area between the upper lip and the base of the nose - the Hitler moustache. A kind of heightened perception is cultivated as subtle sensations - changes in temperature or moisture, for example - begin to surface. The mind clears itself marvelously of its everyday clutter since any distraction is absent the daily routine: no reading, no writing, no music, no television, no movies, no phones, no drawing, no speaking - nothing but meditating. 

In the middle of the fourth day, the actual Vipassana meditation begins. This meditation incorporates body-scanning into the regimen. Every inch of the body is to be observed, from head to toe. The body must remain entirely still during this process. Over the subsequent six days students wrestle with the absurd relentlessness of pain; physical and otherwise. Mysterious things begin to happen on this journey. Due to the cumulative nature of the discomfort, how it worsens as each day goes on, the second half of any given day typically requires more mettle than the first. Sore and aching limbs choked clean of oxygenated blood, throb, pulsate and tingle madly with uncomfortable numbness. Muscles in the back and neck scream and spasm not just from the degenerate bedding and the lumpy contemptible pillow provided by the facility, but from days of stationary suffering in silence. Yearning to cry out, the fibers of our fragile human anatomy vibrate and hum and jerk with snarling and borderline rabid electrical impulses signaling in Morse code the letters: S.O.S. As this happens we are instructed to endure with equanimity - to observe that pain and pleasure are merely sensations - and to realize that they are neither good nor bad.

The stated goal of this exercise, if it helps one to frame it in terms of a goal, is the liberation from misery - a humorous paradox. Once the realization is had - at the experiential level - that anguish and misery are the result of ignorantly reacting to neutral thoughts and sensations, then, at least ostensibly, one can attain freedom from this recurring cycle of suffering. Note that an important distinction is made between 'intellectual' knowledge and 'experiential' knowledge. It is with relative ease that we can muse fondly about the lovely pragmatism presented by these guidelines. Of course misery is created and multiplied by blind reactivity! Sensibly, this must be so. The argument is sound. What reasonable person could disagree? But this is no matter of reason. In fact, reason, one learns while pantomiming a statue for 10 days, is no salve for the almost unbearable agony which must be confronted constantly. The intellect cannot penetrate it and the pain remains invulnerable to the intellect's scrutiny. Only through experiencing the truly psychedelic nature of transience and emptiness can one find a passage through the torment. In school we are taught that on an atomic level, things are mostly empty space. Often imagery is invoked of a nucleus sitting like a ball in the center of an empty football field. We can acknowledge this intellectually. In school we are also taught that continuity, at least in terms of photons, is illusory - that the light from a lightbulb is actually flickering on and off at a frequency the human eye cannot detect to create a sort of misapprehension where the light source appears to be constant and steady. We can acknowledge this intellectually as well.

However, it is a completely different thing to be sitting in a chair with a storming sea of lactic acid sloshing in violent fits and waves over the musculature of your hamstrings, hips and buttocks - stinging, searing, all shrill and poisoned - while slowly dragging your awareness like a rake over hot coals only to discover that as attention arrives to those singed sit-bones, that somehow, inexplicably, the pain simply evaporates. Gone. Vanished! Replaced by empty space. The mind, mesmerized by the disappearance, as a child before a street magician, cannot fathom how the trick was achieved. The body understands instinctively and imparts a precious wisdom: all things are temporary; the true nature of the universe is a vast and empty spaciousness.

Decidedly, the experience among students will differ. Certainly some commonalities emerge: the struggling, the doubting, the hurting, the searching. We are unified in this special regard. Still, each individual must discover their own meaning and establish a reason for persisting over the 10 days. Some people flee without finishing; perhaps five or so out of the total 100 in attendance. In each of those who conclude this arduous spiritual campaign, something is manifested. Whether it be a change, a recognition, an unraveling or an evolution, presumably a metamorphosis of some kind occurs. The experience itself is so uniquely bizarre that it lends itself to alchemy as an outcome. Personally, I'm still processing; still digging for gold. 

So much I want for the experience to be instructive. I want to have learned something - to have gleaned some greater truth or timeless wisdom. Of course, expectations are pesky things, and wanting is just another word for craving; a verb we are reminded to be mindful of entertaining. In truth, I was surprised by how quickly all the clarity and supple spaciousness evacuated once the retreat ended. With the haste of a passing cloud, suddenly the calm stillness dissolved. In the early days of the course there were these glorious moments of blissful emptiness in the snowy forest footpaths lined by tall, thin pines and birch trees. Gentle wind would blow and rustle the tops of the trees, shaking loose fine flakes of powdery snow, sending them falling all around me. They'd shimmer like sugar suspended in shafts of sunlight. Following it down where it dusted the small patches of green confectionary moss, I saw the footprints of a stray cat who had traipsed through before my arrival. The wind tasted sweet and the sun was warm on my face. I breathed with the breeze. An animal instinct. My empty mind, free from even the slightest thought, had attained a rare unity with the environment around me in which I was a part, not apart from. Words fail to adequately convey the depth of the richness, or the repleteness of it, but it was remarkable. Wrinkles on the pines took on the texture and quality of human skin. The slender birch trees seemed wrapped delicately in white linen. Everything sparkled, expanded and contracted.

On the subject of clearing the mind, one thing that amazed me was how long I became able to focus my attention. Leading up to the retreat I was meditating for sessions lasting at least an hour, with some sessions exceeding the ninety-minute mark. During these meditations, my attention waxed and waned: a few seconds here, a few seconds there, a burst of 10 - 15 seconds followed by a minute lost in thought, perhaps followed by the occasional 30-seconds of continuous emptiness and, rarely, maybe something approaching a minute of vigilant voyeurism of the breath. At the Vipassana course, however, by the fourth day I was able hold my awareness, uninterrupted, for tens of minutes - something previously inconceivable to me. The notion of directing my undivided attention on an object for longer than a minute, an idea which seemed a distant and perhaps impossible prospect for my entire time as a meditator, was suddenly an actual realized accomplishment. Since returning from this very fertile and very encouraging setting though, it is increasingly difficult to command my attention and pin it to my breath for longer than a period of 60-seconds, at best; a thing that saddens me. The default world brings with it a host of distractions. We were advised to continue our meditation practice for 1-hour in the morning and 1-hour at night. For the first week I kept this program, but found it hard when traveling for Asia's cousin's husband's birthday in the Bavarian countryside 2-hours outside of Munich. On one of the days I missed both of the sessions. Since returning to Berlin I've resumed the recommended dosage. I want to give it a fair try, to see if I observe any lasting changes outside of the meditation center. This is something I will know after one month. Time will tell.

Not all things were rosy. Some moments I felt gripped by panic so piercing I legitimately thought I might die. A latent hypochondria had been awakened in me by a recent kidney stone episode which I still need to write about. It didn't help the matter that I had an active infection in my right testicle. On top of that, fears of catching Covid ran rampant through my mind as a chorus of coughs perforated the silence of the meditation hall. Tis the season for sickness. Right after the holidays is prime time. As if the threat of another stone, Covid, and a tender testicle weren't enough, I began to notice my mind weaving an elaborate tapestry of terror which sought to convince me that the repeated exposure to numbness I'd been subjecting my extremities to was surely contributing to the formation of a fatal blood clot that would travel to my heart and kill me. An unscrupulous mind wouldn't cite sources, but mine did. It even highlighted the possible comorbidities of Covid and deadly blood clots plus charted the risk of myocarditis and other vascular and cardiac complications. All of it impeccably scholastic. Later that day, while biting into an apple, fear sank its teeth into me and my entire body began to tremble uncontrollably. The shock of cold hysteria shook me and it took a few minutes of concentrated breathing to soothe my nerves. Meanwhile, throughout that day and the days on either side of it, stabbing pains ravaged my testicle in uneven intervals. Savage sparks of lighting skewered my scrotum as I tried to tell myself ‘sensation is just sensation’ without craving or aversion. I couldn't help but feel the universe was delivering exactly the sort of confrontation needed to facilitate spiritual growth. Health anxiety needed to be addressed sooner or later.

In a way, all meditation is a contemplation on death, isn't it? What better time to come to terms with your mortality than during ten days of silence and nonstop self-examination? What is required is surrender. One must accept pain, accept hardship, and observe them as temporary phenomena. To pass through this trial - and this life - gracefully, one must embrace impermanence: it is the contagion and the cure.

He who is in a state of rebellion cannot receive grace.

-----

There is still much to say but the hour is getting late. A mystery that has stuck in my side like a thorn:

If all sensations, whether pleasant or painful, are just sensations and are not to be clinged to or avoided, then why is the stated aim of this discipline to liberate oneself from suffering?