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.