That High, Lonesome Road

I’ve mentioned how finding the right metaphor for a situation helps clarify it, give it handles for the mind to grip.  Four days into a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in early March, the right metaphor wasn’t hard to come by: myself on a rocky path, silhouetted against an inky pre-dawn sky, toiling onwards and upwards through thinning air.  Dry.  Cold.  Alone.  What had I been thinking, signing up for this?  All my Ayurvedically-trained intuition was clammering for me to stop, turn back.  Dryness, coldness, harshness--these are the very qualities responsible for aggravating Vata dosha, the internal wind.  Ayurveda, “knowledge of life,” is predicated on balance; balance is achieved by treating with opposites, so cold is countered by comforting warmth, physical dryness by the lubrication of moisture or oil and psychological dryness by life’s master lubricant, love.  “Treat Vata like a flower” says one Ayurvedic adage.  Looking around the barren scree slopes around me, I see no signs of life at all.  No flower could survive here.  Nor would one have to study the ancient Indian science of life and longevity to understand that the remedy for loneliness is human fellowship.  But here I was, sworn to silence at the retreat center.  Warmth was parceled out in the form of two silent meals a day and whatever time one could find to spend in the shower.  Sneha--oiliness, love--was not to be found at all, it seemed, and this above all was what was getting to me on the fourth day of sitting.  And yet here I was living on the charity of others, their freely given gifts, so that I might have the same experience they found so powerful.  I was being fed, housed, served, instructed for free; this out of the way center in Northwestern Illinois was no prison camp but a temporary monastery of sorts, and I knew that behind the external roughness of the experience lay a vast reservoir of goodwill.  Still, I felt a thousand miles away from the fellowship and overwhelming feeling of accomplishment I knew would be waiting on day 10, when we makeshift monks would break our silence and prepare to return to the world.  

Day 4.  Underfed and overwrought, I returned to the meditation hall, my mind a seething sea of doubt.  This wasn’t for me.  I had been sick, needed nurturing, not the harsh treatment of this spiritual boot camp.  I wasn’t going to make it; that was OK.  There was no shame in that.  I would talk to this instructor after this group sitting, explain my reasons calmly, go reclaim my belongings and call Thandiwe.  She’d arrive by evening, understanding, loving, and take me home.  I’d have lost nothing.  But I knew I would be harsher on myself than that, that to leave would be to fail in the task I had set forth.  I gritted my teeth and prepared for another cycle of wrestling with myself.  But now it was time to sit again.  

For the past four days, we had been learning and practicing a technique called anapana.  Sitting upright, we were taught to bring our awareness to our breath, to its passing in and out of the nostrils.  This breath awareness is the foundation of many meditation techniques, and it’s notoriously difficult at first.  The mind resists the ball and chain of fixed attention, slips subtly out of its shackles to frolick free over field and fen.  Into memories and fantasies it travels, past and future, ever resisting the present moment.  Realizing the attention has wandered, the instruction is to bring it back, gently and firmly, to the breath.  Within seconds it is gone again, cherishing memories of past pleasures or reliving insults; tracing the contours of forgotten episodes from childhood, or plotting how to spend the first day of freedom once this Vipassana madness is over.  You realize you’ve been duped by your own mind again, and try and focus on the breath.  It’s been 10 minutes or so.  You are to sit quietly, not opening your eyes or leaving the room, for another 50.  Then you’ll have a break before starting again.  And again.  And again.  You’ll have a tea break, then watch the evening discourse and maybe even get to laugh once or twice at Goenka-ji’s all-too-apt characterizations of us fledgling students, our predictable trials and tribulations.  Then one more sit, and sweet bed in your cold little cell.  Tomorrow at 4:30 it starts again.  But what’s this?  Where has the mind gone? You were exhaling...

For the first three days we practiced this anapana, awareness of the breath, with increasing subtlety.  Once an awareness of simple inhalation and exhalation was established on the first day, however shakily, we were to refine our awareness to the place where the breath first touches the nostrils.  The new instruction is exciting for the first hour, before monotony sets in.  The endless task of dragging the attention back to the patch of skin where the breath blows back and forth, the inevitable loss of concentration, the interminable sitting.  On day three we moved our attention to the patch of skin below the nostrils and above the upper lip: a further progression from gross to subtle.  There were moments now of quiet focus, perhaps 10 seconds at a time, between the mind’s protesting interruptions.  Grudgingly, I had to admit, something was happening.  Since the teacher, Goenka, likened Vipassana to surgery, I began to picture my attention as a blade.  Drawing the steel edge minute after minute across the stone, it began to gain an edge.  I was able to feel my breath below my nostrils, whereas I knew that four days ago I would have thought this impossible.  And this exercise represented a finer-grained stone than the previous day’s had.  My awareness was sharpening, slowly but surely.  And I knew that soon we would make the first incision.  

On the morning of Day 4, a sign posted in the dining hall proclaimed that this was Vipassana Day and listed a new set of rules and explanations.  After the previous day’s heroic push up a long dry slope, I felt ready to begin the real technique, the one we’d been honing our awareness for, the mysterious Vipassana.  But Day 4’s morning meditation dragged on, still concerned with our upper lips.  We were told now to notice sensations, not just the breath.  Perhaps there were some feelings, like tiny pricklings and itchy spots.  Christ, I thought,  how much longer can this go on?  Finally, after hours of morning practice and the afternoon group sitting, it came time to listen to the Vipassana instructions.  We were not to leave the hall for the duration, and the first instruction explained that we were now to practice adhitthana, the strong determination not to shift positions, move our hands, or open our eyes at all.  I felt the path steepen, the air growing even thinner, colder, the wind more biting.  After the previous day’s feeling of accomplishment and the confidence that went with it, I was now back in the jaws of fear and doubt. The instructions continued to unfold, Goenka’s gravelly voice on audiotape telling us to move our attention over the surface of our bodies and notice any sensations we might find.  It was crucial, he explained, not to react to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations we would encounter, and this was why we were not to shift positions or even scratch an itch.  Oh cruel technique, oh torturous technique.  I hadn’t seen this coming, this sadistic twist: the path seemed all but impassable now.  I labored upwards, trudging blindly, frostbitten.  I found my legs could keep moving somehow through the snow, even has they lay there crossed on the meditation cushion; flogged into submission, my attention and stayed mostly on my exterior and on the sensations that greeted it as it moved across my skin.  When the guttural sounds of Goenka’s chant signaled the end of our first proper Vipassana sit, I was a charged mix of emotions.  All through the past hour and a half I had been telling myself I would leave, would turn back.  Now there was a giddy high feeling that shot through me as well--I had made it, had sat adhitthana for over an hour.  I felt stretched to the breaking point, slightly mad.  Coming to the surface of my turbulent emotions once again was doubt.  This was the revolutionary technique?  Scanning the body for sensations?  I might be able to make it through six more days, but what would be the point?  What did this have to do with “purifying the mind,” creating new habit patterns in the consciousness, following the Buddha’s steps towards enlightenment?  I didn’t know exactly why I had felt compelled to come to the retreat, but surely it wasn’t to do this all day.  Outside the meditation hall I spied Josh, the manager of the men’s dormitory, an old student volunteer who served behind the scenes and sat the three daily group sits with us.  Early on I had noticed his inner quiet, his kind expression.  Someone I’d like to meet, I had thought.  He was the one person I was permitted to talk to besides our assistant teacher, and the only one with whom I felt a glimmer of possible communion.  Speaking with Josh was technically reserved for material concerns, so conversations with him should be strictly limited to a whispered “Josh, there’s no more toilet paper in my bathroom,” at which he’d nod and conjure up a roll.  On impulse now, as a last resort, I approached him and asked shakily, “are pep talks in your job description?”  He smiled a little, ruefully, and replied “not exactly,” but beckoned for me to step aside with him and talk.  Days of pent-up anxiety and doubt came tearing forth in a few short sentences.  “I--I’m not sure why I’m doing this,” I said.  “If I stay it’ll just be because I don’t want to quit.  But I don’t see the point.”  I looked over at Josh, putting him on the spot.  I was asking him point blank to give me a reason to stay, a purpose for the profound discomfort.  He looked at me with his deep, liquid eyes and said simply and slowly, “it...does change everything.”  Standing in the grace of his compassionate presence, I believed him, though such cryptic words might have only alienated me further.  Instead I felt my doubts melting a little in this ray of human warmth.  Echoing a feeling I was becoming aware of, he went on, seeming to choose his words carefully: “And everything changes with this sit,” meaning the beginning of Vipassana proper.  “I can see that, I think,” I replied.  Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the path plummeting precipitously below, and realized I had come to a pass.  The path ahead was rugged and wild, but I had reached the high country.  And I had made it through the first crucial phase of acclimatization.  I had made it through an hour of adhitthana without moving; though I would have to do this again and again, nothing more difficult would be asked of me.  Overcome with a slurry of emotions, I gave Josh a heartfelt “thanks” and walked in the late afternoon light into a grove of silver maples on the men’s side of the retreat center grounds.  I stood facing west in the circle of trees bare trees and let my tensions well up and out of me.  I cried hard, hardly knowing why, for a few minutes, letting the tears flow down my cheeks and into the mud at my feet.  My fear flowed away and carried much of my doubt with it, leaving a strange fierce joy.  I knew somehow that the worst was behind me.  I had had my crisis, and now I could get on with the journey.  

                      

         Image: Buddha displaying the Abhaya mudra (gesture of fearlessness) in Manang, Nepal

Vipassana is a Buddhist technique, in the sense that it originated with the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni.  And though steeped in a quintessentially Southasian worldview in which the concepts of karma and rebirth are assumed, Vipassana itself is simply a technique.  It is free from theology, and S. N. Goenka, Vipassana’s great modern promulgator, emphasizes the non-sectarian nature of the practice.  This approach follows directly from the Buddha’s teachings, for the Buddha offered his dhamma, or path, as a remedy for a universal malady.  The malady, what in Sanskrit is known as duhkha, is no more or less than the miserable human condition.  

We don’t have to look further than the Buddha did from the walls of the palace he was born into to see this misery, this suffering all around us: we all grow old and die, and we mostly spend our healthy years yearning after things or people we don’t have or cursing the circumstances we do find ourselves in.  Even in moments of peace and plenty, we are seldom content with out lot: the mind strays ever from the present, fixing itself on phantom or illusory objects.  On a broad philosophical level, our problem is attachment to impermanent things.  Even if we get what we want, it won’t last forever.  Our fair maiden lover will wither and stoop; our beautiful child may die a terrible death before his time, or simply disappoint us again and again with his choices, so different from the ones we had envisioned for him.  Moments of true happiness are rare, and, helpless to occupy the present, we usually recognize them only in retrospect.  Then we seek ways to regain the pleasure we remember, but such yearning does not bring peace.  Rather, it  paves the way for addiction: if not to drugs, alcohol, sex, or food, then to power, authority, making people laugh, to our own egos.  Or, when we encounter things unpleasant to us, we create addiction’s opposite: aversion.  We habitually shy away from pain and discomfort, from a rumbling belly or an unpleasant sound or image.  This is the difficulty in facing the present: the present is not always pleasant, and it is almost never as pleasant as we can imagine or remember it.  According to the Vipassana tradition of Goenka as passed down by Burmese Vipassana instructor Sayagyi U Ba Khin, all of our addictions and aversions, our attempts to replace the present reality we’re experiencing with one we can imagine or remember, are at root a single addiction or aversion.  This, tradition tells us, was the insight of the historical Buddha, the key to his enlightenment.  We are not addicted (or averse) to external objects themselves.  There is always an intermediary.  A heroin addict does not derive pleasure from heroin, but from the sensation the heroin causes in him.  Similarly, fear of heights is unpleasant because it causes us actual physico-emotional discomfort to look over the edge of a cliff.  With every pleasant or unpleasant experience, there is always a sensation on or in the body.  It is these bodily sensations we react to and, in reacting, grow addicted or averse.  

This is where Vipassana intervenes.  The technique trains one to develop and maintain equanimity, a state of not reacting to bodily sensations.  ‘An itch arises on my nose?  Ah.  An itch.  It may be unpleasant now, but it shall pass.  I will refrain from scratching it.  A lovely tingling up and down my arms?  Quaint.  It will be gone soon, and that’s OK.’  Through changing the mind’s habitual tendency of blind, unconscious reaction, it becomes possible to change the way one relates to the world.  When someone causes us anger, there is again a sensation on the body that makes us feel bad.  We are angry because we have been caused discomfort, whether or not we are aware of it as such.  If we notice the sensation and cut off the knee-jerk reaction, it is possible to bypass the ultimate reaction, anger.  

This, at least, is the theory upon which the immense body of Buddhist meditation practice rests.  First calm and focus the mind through anapana (or other similar practices, all of which fall under the category of Samatha or calming meditation) practices, then use the mind’s sharpened faculties to gain experiential knowledge of the nature of existence.  Experience the habit patterns of craving and aversion and work to change them at the root level, while realizing the truth of anitya, impermanence.    Ultimately, it is taught, this practice of samadhi (control over the mind) and panya (experiential insight) leads to full liberation as long as it is build upon a firm foundation of sila, moral conduct.  

And in practice?  How does it work?  After a month of Vipassana practice, I don’t feel much closer to enlightenment.  But I do feel a bit wiser, more focused and disciplined, and with that comes renewed confidence.  And then there’s the compassion that develops through better understanding the human condition.  I don’t expect to reach enlightenment in this lifetime, and I don’t know that I’ll ever really try to break all of my attachments to the material world.  But I have succeeded in adding a few drops to each of the 10 jugs with labels like “determination” and “loving kindness,” the paramita or qualities it is necessary to perfect in order to reach the final goal--and which just might come in handy in any case.  

After completing the 10 day course and returning home, I no longer look back to see a high, rocky path amidst snow peaks.  I took a difficult solo journey, it is true.  But I also built myself something solid and durable.  With no blueprint at first but blindly following step-by-step instructions, I lifted the heavy stones and set them into place.  By the end, I had put together a simple but sturdy hut.  Back in the world, the austere dwelling is a wonderful refuge.  It requires a certain amount of upkeep, but it pays me back with shelter and warmth.  It is far from indestructible, and I must work hard to shore it up and protect its foundations.  But it has the potential to grow into a magnificent structure.  Perhaps one day it will have room for guests, but for now if you’d like to stay you’ll have to do as I do and sleep on the dirt floor.  Or you can always build your own hut...

Vipassana meditation website: www.dhamma.org