Samadhi

I had fallen asleep on the thinly-padded slat-bed nearly as soon as my head hit the pillow. When the bell rang at 4 AM I got up easily for Day One, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and headed to the hall. On my way up the footpath to the hall I passed the beam of my flashlight across a small white sign in the ground “This path only for Meditators,” it read. “Well, that’s me,” I reasoned as I headed up the path to the hall. The Dharma Seat at the front of the hall was illuminated and remained empty. The teacher sat on one of the small platforms on the female side. She already had her eyes closed and appeared to be in meditation. After settling onto my cushions I started meditating since there didn’t seem to be a formal start to the proceedings. I worked with my breath and all morning, trying to feel the movement of air in and out of my nostrils. I arranged the foam brick to allow me to first sit in a modified seiza and then alternated into a half-lotus or cross-legged position as I had learned at Nilambe. When my mind drifted, I breathed harder until I felt settled in meditation again. The early morning meditation with a half-hour of Goenka chanting in Pali before the bell rang for breakfast. After breakfast break I returned to the hall to work “patiently, ardently, and diligently,” with my breath as Goenka told me to do on the tape at the start of the 8 AM meditation. After lunch I tumbled onto the bed for a nap before the afternoon rounds.

I learned that during the sessions marked as “Meditate According to the Teacher’s instructions,” the teacher in the hall would play a tape of Goenka re-iterating his instructions from the previous night’s DVD to feel the breath at the tip of the nostrils and breathe harder if you couldn’t feel the breath or if you lost focus. The instructions were given first by Goenka in English and then a tape was played of a translation into Sinhala. By the end of the afternoon session I could feel my breath, in and out, moving through my nostrils by breathing only slightly more forcefully than my natural breath. During the afternoon session the teachers called each student to the front of the room to sit in front of them on their little platforms. “Can you feel your breath?” the older assistant teacher asked me. “Yes, yes, I can feel my breath,” I replied. Then each student would meditate in with the teacher. After my meditation the teacher told me “Good, good, your vibrations are very strong,” and I returned to my seat. On my way to tea I felt happy because I had learned something new. I felt that I was learning to walk a tightrope between the past and the future, learning to balance on the present moment and move forward only as fast as time moved forward.

In the evening discourse Goenka discussed why all other forms of spiritual practice needed to be suspended including yoga and all forms of exercise. I was prepared for this restriction, but Goenka explained it by vaguely informing us that some students had “done themselves disservice by continuing these practices.” He explained that in the case of focusing on the breath and saying a mantra the mind is calmed too quickly, but it was not the right kind of calm that his method required. He explained that his method was a surgical procedure during which we would make a deep incision into our own minds. The first phase of meditation was sharpening the knife, then on day four we would begin the surgery. “This is why you cannot leave,” he re-enforced. “You do not get up off the operating table in the middle of the surgery and say ‘some other time, I’ll come back and finish it some other time,’” he warned. I thought this was a good analogy and I hoped it would help give me the endurance to go the distance with the program.

On Day Two I could feel my breath right away in the morning. When I was well-focused I started to feel my whole face relax. “I had no idea I even had all of that tension in my face,” I marveled after sitting. When my mind wandered, it wandered home to Charlottesville and all the things I could do again when I was home. I thought about being able to walk down the street without harassment. I imagined summer evening walks around Dan’s neighborhood. I imagined being able to run in my own neighborhood and all the way across town when I got back into shape. I thought about some of my favorite runs along the Rivanna River. When I was on a good period of meditation and able to keep my mind away from my favorite teahouse on the outdoor pedestrian mall, I would sometimes reach a point where I was able to drop down into the breath and feel my whole body move with the respiration, but sitting all day was becoming more difficult. On one of the breaks I had to request extra cushions to put under my knees in half-lotus to support my aching hips. Directly in front of me sat one of the oldest women on the program who sat in a saree with her legs tucked under her to the left, her spine rounded, her head down, and her body listing to the right. It looked like the most uncomfortable position in the world to me when I opened my eyes to shift and re-position.

In between meditations over the course of the second day I felt increasingly worse. I walked slowly, like a zombie. I gradually felt more and more shell-shocked. When I looked out over the valley I could not appreciate the beauty of the view, even at sunset. “I’m not at Nilambe any more,” I thought to myself as I dragged myself back to D-Block after tea. Along with tea we were served three water crackers and a banana. Goenka had warned us not to expect meditation to make us feel good, and I wondered how else I was supposed to evaluate the system. “This is a surgical operation,” I heard him say again in my head. “It is going to be difficult.”

In the evening discourse Goenka spoke against bhakti, blind, passive devotion. He drove home the point that you have to do the work yourself and making offerings to “that god or this goddess,” wasn’t going to move you toward liberation. These were points I felt were obvious to the Western Buddhist already obsessed with self-development and more directed toward his Hindu culture of origin. His argument reminded me of the idea of monks as fields of merit and the surrounding culture functioning as cheerleaders and supporters of the monks Dan and I had discussed a few weeks earlier when we saw the white monk on TV at the Galle Face. I felt a bit vindicated in my Buddhist identity without monks “He’s definitely encouraging people to get out there and make their own merit,” I mused. “The Sangha can be anyone who is liberated, anyone inspirational,” Goenka added, as if in response to my thoughts. “I think a lot of people with disagree with you on that,” I replied to him in my head. But I realized it made sense since his teacher wasn’t a monk, but a lay meditator. At the end of the DVD Goenka instructed us that from now on not only would we focus on respiration, but we would also focus on the sensations we experienced on our upper lip. If we couldn’t feel anything on our upper lip, then we would go back to the breath. We were then instructed to return to the main meditation hall to practice.

When I was seated in the main hall for practice I realized that it was easy to feel my upper lip. It seemed to always be tingling, sweating, or sending in some form of sensory information. I felt pleased to be able to feel my under-lip, but Goenka had warned us that even happiness in your practice is just another form of craving. “Try to observe with equanimity,” he instructed. I felt that I was working diligently, ardently, and patiently, exactly as his disembodied voice instructed us over and over.

After a solid night’s rest, on Day Three I worked steadily feeling my upper lip, sometimes returning to the breath when I lost focus. The older assistant teacher called me to the front of the room again to check me in the late morning. I realized that the primary instructor, a younger woman, didn’t speak English very well and most of the English speakers were being called by the older lady. The primary teacher rarely smiled and I got a sour feeling from watching her order the Dharma Helpers around. The older woman was serene and meditated with a radiant expression on her face. When I sat in front of her she asked me “Can you feel sensation on your upper lip?” I nodded, “Yes, I can feel sensation on my upper lip,” I replied. “Most of the time I am sweating a little bit,” I joked. “Good,” she replied, smiling. After I meditated with her she told me that my vibrations felt very strong and I returned to cushion number six.

Over the course of the third day, my mind still ran back home to Charlottesville, to my friends, to my favorite walks and favorite restaurants. Looking around the room I realized that most of the participants had come here to have their lives stripped away for a personal experiment, but I had already separated myself from so much already. They would go home to their homes and favorite walks and favorite restaurants, and I would go home to Kandy where I often felt like a prisoner in my own home. I remembered Dan telling me back in July that with acceptance you might learn to live a productive life in the host culture, but I was coming to realize that certain things like not being able to feel comfortable walking down the street weren’t possible for me to accept. Living without public culture and coffee shops was impossible for me to accept. I realized as I returned to my breath that the only thing I could accept was that I would never be comfortable in this society. As I felt my breath pass through my nostrils a deep feeling of sadness washed over me and I allowed myself to sway slightly with my breath. I analyzed the sadness while feeling my breath in my nose and realized that I longed for some form of comfort, the comfort of home, the comfort of Dan, the comfort of my favorite foods. Instead continuing to do my best at finding comfort in Kandy, I had put myself on a mountain where even human contact was forbidden to me. “Hopefully this experience will make me more appreciative of what I do have in Kandy,” I reasoned, feeling as though the surgery into my mind had started.

In the evening DVD, Goenka delivered a sermon of hell-fire and brimstone Dharma. He first attacked common approaches to religion as based on craving and aversion. “You hear about hell so, you to convert to this religion out of aversion,” he began, “then you hear about heaven and you convert to that religion out of craving,” he explained. “Craving and aversion lead to misery,” he intoned, “misery,” he re-enforced. He preached that we are dying since the day we are born and when we celebrate a birthday we mark another year closer to death. He talked about watching the body of a loved on burn on a funeral pyre. “You say in the West that beauty is only skin deep,” he chuckled “cut yourself and see what happens,” he laughed. Then he told us that the only way out was liberation, the wisdom to realize the ever changing reality, Anichya, and the realization of no-self. “There is nothing good in this,” I thought. “This man’s voice is the only voice I hear all day,” my mind raced, “His voice starts my meditations saying ‘Start again, start again,’ and ends them saying ‘Anichya, impermanence,’ but there is nothing life-affirming in this. Nothing like let’s just be a little kinder to ourselves and each other like I was learning at Nilambe. This is the business end of liberation,” I mulled over to myself. I realized that Goenka was like a Baptist minister preaching about the flames of hell, terrifying to congregation into accepting his path. I felt swallowed by his words and images of loved ones on funeral pyres and cutting my own flesh lodged deep in my mind. After the DVD we returned to the main hall, but I couldn’t meditate. All I could feel was panic. I had accepted his paradigm of destruction, but not the solution of no-self and attachment to self. “So I shouldn’t worry about being destroyed since I don’t exist in the first place?” I anguished. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” I wondered. “Liberation is, by definition, beyond my understanding, so how can it motivate me?” I agonized. But I knew that it wasn’t supposed to make me feel good at all, it was supposed to make me feel bad.

After a restless, nightmare-filled sleep, I roused easily to the bell at 4 AM for the Day Four. In my nightmares the bell was ringing over and over again and I was waking up late over and over again. I made myself walk to the meditation hall. I couldn’t meditate. I sat with my knees drawn up to my chest. I glanced to the front of the room at the Japanese woman. I knew that she was a returning student. She sat cross-legged with her back straight and a look of relaxed absorption on her face. I marveled that anyone would voluntarily undertake this process twice. Then I looked down my row to the right to see Delia sitting at the opposite end. She also looked serene. I looked up to the front of the room to the monks. The older monk sat cross-legged with his spine rounded and his head slumped over. The young monk sat with his back against the wall. I knew that meditation was out of the question, so I focused instead on how I would get my journal back. I knew that if I could journalupposed to make me feel bad. and attachment to self. urn to the main meditation back then I could get my thoughts together a little bit and continue on. I knew my journal was in the office behind the director’s desk. I also knew that the director himself didn’t arrive until later in the morning and usually one of the office staff opened the office in the morning. “If I go in there when one of the staff is there and just act like what I am doing is totally normal, then I can just grab it without explanation. If someone challenges me then I’ll say it’s mine and I need it and just keep moving,” I decided. I went over the scene several times in my mind before I felt relaxed enough to try and start focusing on my breath and then feeling my upper lip. “This extinction of the self, the realization of the flickering nature of reality is not why I came to Buddhism,” I told myself. “I want to have more gratitude and compassion in my heart and be a happier, less reactive person. That is what I want out of Buddhism and meditation,” I reminded myself in between breaths. “If that is the path to liberation so be it, but I’m interested in little goals along the way.” This thought calmed me for awhile, “But that’s not why you go to space camp then is it?” I realized.

After breakfast I saw that the door to the office was open. I walked in, smiled at the young office clerk who I could tell spoke no English, grabbed my journal off the shelf as though this was something routine and ordinary that needed to be done, and carried my prize back to D-block. I made sure that the curtain to my partition was closed tight before I started to write. I poured out all of my thoughts on the experience s until the bell rang for the next meditation.

For the rest of the morning I was able to easily focus on my upper lip and the thin sweat that seeped from it in the heat. When my thoughts roamed, instead of thinking about our trip to Dubai, or going home to Charlottesville, they went to darker parts of my life like the first few days after the end of my marriage staying with friends, keeping an air-mattress in my trunk, and sleeping in my car. Then the four-wheeler accident I was in where a branch tore up my face followed by the related topic of the alcoholic corrections officer I dated before meeting Dan. When I discussed the relationship with my friend Samantha she used to ask me “ok, but are you done yet?” She made the point that it’s useless to just get angry for a little while and allow him to temporarily modify his behavior. “You have to either accept the situation for what it is, or be done,” she explained. One day I realized that I had to be done, that the relationship was making me a little weaker, a little less sane, every day. I called Sam and said “I’m done,” and then packed everything of his into my car, drove to his house in rural Central Virginia, and dumped it on the floor in his living room. When he came to my house for dinner after his shift I was waiting for him. I simply asked for my keys to be returned and informed him that his stuff was waiting for him at his house. He was impressed by my actions of removing his belongings and my calm demeanor. He simply handed me my keys, thanked me for “putting up with him for as long as I had,” and then left. The idea of recognizing something negative and being “done,” drifted in and out of my meditations all day.

In between meditations I found it difficult to walk around the campus, but I didn’t let myself nap after lunch because I was terrified of lying awake in bed at night. “I need to be nice and tired,” I reasoned in my journal, “Then I’ll be able to drop right off without thinking or feeling anything.” I kept myself awake by writing, putting everything in my mind on paper.