Notes from 10 days of silent meditation
Warning: Everyone’s meditation experience is different, and mine was unusually positive (and weird!). If you’re considering going on a retreat yourself, reading this might distort your expectations or spoil the experience. Proceed at your own risk.
During breaks between meditations, we walk around the grounds — a parking lot, a border of grass, half a dozen trees. What a miserable place!
Another student is circling the lot in the opposite direction. I’m supposed to ignore the other people, behave as if I were the only one in the course, but every time I pass her, I feel my calm turn to panic. How do I look? What does she think of me?
After five loops, I notice something. None of my thoughts are about her. (“What does she think of me?” doesn’t count.)
After six loops: What if she’s thinking “What is she thinking about me?”
In my 29 years, I have never had this thought. I have never passed another human being and entertained the hypothesis that they are as uninterested in me as I am in them.
In the evenings, we watch “discourses” — videos of S.N. Goenka, the founder of Vipassana centers across the globe, pontificating about his Buddhism-inspired doctrines. As the “assistant teacher,” the flesh-and-blood woman seated at the front of the meditation hall, explains, Goenka is the “real” teacher of the course. “Through these videos, he is here with us in a real way.”
That may be. Nonetheless, S.N. Goenka has been dead for six years.
The wind is enormous; the leaves swoosh in pirouetting columns. They dance together, but fall to the ground individually, the silence of touchdown always starker than I expect.
I stand in the wind, bask in the power. If we were allowed to, I’d twirl too. I’d run like I did that day, many years ago, when everything outside sang “spring!” and everything inside joined in the song — until the child I was became a sprint of joy around my home.
What a miserable place…
Until I start to notice. A glint of spiderweb in the setting sun. The coarseness of tree trunks. Each blade of grass nodding in the wind.
A glint of spiderweb in the setting sun… Then another, another, another… The whole lawn is a glistening tapestry, a portal into a new dimension.
By day 2, I suspect that this miserable parking lot contains more beauties than I could ever count.
I was a child with a backyard once. Of course a few square yards reveal a new treasure each day.
So this is happiness? Just a return to childhood? Wasn’t there something more, some promise my parents saw in me that I have yet to fulfill?
The toughest thing about not being allowed to speak is roommates. One of mine sets her alarm to snooze, then goes to the 4:30 AM meditation. When the damned thing goes off, I don’t know how to silence it without taking out the batteries. A few minutes later, she’s back, putting the batteries in and starting another round of earsplitting beeping. As if that weren’t enough, she decides that this is the perfect moment to take out her can of nauseating “air freshener” and spray it vigorously throughout the room.
There’s no way I’ll fall asleep now, so there’s nothing left to do but mutter “are you kidding me?!” under my breath and storm out to the meditation hall.
“Let go of anger; it only hurts you,” Goenka had said. I hate this advice so much. It punishes me twice: first I have to suffer the air freshener, then I have to deprive myself of the satisfaction of anger. It’s not fair!
Fair or not, following Goenka’s instructions is what I came here for. I try to make myself comfortable on the cushion, coax my mind towards the breath. Behind me, someone repeatedly shifts their position. They must be so angry at me for sitting so damned straight!
Breathe in. Breathe out. Someone coughs. I hate them with every inch of my being.
As soon as I catch myself, the anger evaporates. People were coughing all day yesterday, and I hardly noticed. So this hatred, this suffering — this came from me?
I think of every argument I’ve ever had, every argument that I didn’t start. Now, there is no one else to blame.
Towards my roommate, I feel only gratitude.
The visions start with trees. I close my eyes to meditate and see a pine swaying in rainy wind, the color sapped by soft mist. It’s like something from Planet Earth, only realer. There is so much space it takes my breath away. Except… the breath is what I’m supposed to be focusing on.
Goenka had said to meditate and ignore thoughts. That I can do — but what about visions? Didn’t he also said never to meditate with our eyes open, because it’s too distracting? What if my eyes remain open to sights no matter how tightly I shut them?
“Can we follow the breath?” I had asked my brain. “Boring!” it had answered. “I’ll turn on the TV.”
I am happy here, and peaceful, but I’m starting to get impatient. Why am I looking at spiderwebs and grasses? Wasn’t I supposed to be figuring out my life? Taking this time to think about how to be a better person? Learning about my values, what I want to accomplish in this life? Finding my fatal flaw, the hidden part of me I keep tripping over?
When I close my eyes to meditate, I see a dozen signs, broken into pieces.
They all say “THINK.”
95% of the words I hear here are hypnotically repeated by a dead person.
“PA-tient-ly and per-SIS-tent-ly,” Goenka reminds us in a singsong voice at the start of each meditation.
During the evening discourse, he insists that what he is teaching isn’t a religion. “This is not sectarian! This is universal!” he articulates.
As if that settled it — as if any sect thought its beliefs something other than universal.
“What are my values?” I wonder again. Goenka is stuck in my head: “This is not sectarian; this is universal.”
Suddenly, I understand. I thought I was free to pick and choose my values; I had wanted to stamp my name on everything, even on morality: to be not just good, but good in my own special way. But there is only one morality, and it is universal, captured in the phrase: May all beings be happy.
But how to follow that phrase? I hardly give a thought to morality in my life. I’m not altruistically motivated. I fear I’m not a very good person.
Another thought comes. Don’t be good. Just be. Do good.
We focus on our breath. I have visions of tunnels: long, profound, and with light at the end. If they didn’t always come in pairs, I’d think they were the path to enlightenment.
As it stands, they are probably nostrils.
What do I want from this life?
In my heart of hearts, I know: I want to be special. To accomplish something utterly unique, be unquestionably best.
There are 7.5 billion people alive on this planet. Billions more came before, there are trillions to come. Me — special? Best at anything?
I realize I have been hiding this fact, the fact of the world’s populousness, from myself. Now, face-to-face with this terrifying reality, I am flooded with a wave of… relief, happiness, love.
7.5 billion people, billions before, trillions to come. Not one of them any less important than me. Is anything more beautiful than this?
In the breeze, each leaf is a hand: waving, flicking, twitching. How have I never noticed? Had my brain been editing out all this, fabricating a static, stabler world for me, for fear I couldn’t handle this much change? Had I said, thought something that made it believe I wanted that? “I’m a painter, edit out the motion?”
What had that static world been like? I search through memory and come up empty handed. The breeze, the sum of the leaves’ flapping — but not the flapping… What was it that I saw, before I could see?
We focus on our breath. I feel every one of of my nose hairs. I see a statue of a Buddha, an index finger stuck up each nostril.
I expected to be bored here: sitting motionless and with closed eyes for ten hours a day, talking to no one, circling a tiny parking lot. In fact, I am overwhelmed, overstimulated. When my eyes are open, every square inch of my visual field is crowded with beauty. Closing them is even worse; that’s when the visions happen.I am sick of beauty; I only want a scrap of rest for my eyes. I sit under a tree and direct my eyes to the most boring thing I can find: a patch of dried grass.
The grass, strewn with warm-colored, richly corrugated leaves, twists all in one direction — as if someone had carefully combed through a head of stiff, golden curls. It takes my breath away.
You don’t always get what you want — but maybe you do get what you need.
We focus on our breath.
In the left half of my visual field, there is an otter. Slowly and perfectly peacefully, it’s turning its face from left to right. Its nose, majestically lifted to the heavens, twitches like a rabbit’s, encircled by a halo of the most spectacular whiskers I have ever seen.
The vision is so insanely beautiful, so beautifully insane, that meditating feels futile. Instead, I uncross my legs and bask in the glow of those whiskers.
Touché, brain, touché.
During a rainy walk, I realize: I’m always waiting for a purpose, always dreaming that, like Proust or Van Gogh, I’ll snatch my uniqueness from the jaws of death, prove myself worthy in the nick of time.
Every time I check my inbox, every time I avert my eyes before a stranger, I’m hoping they will hand me my purpose, waiting to be told I am justified and fearing that I am not.
Sometimes a message in the inbox briefly resembles that hoped-for justification. An essay is featured on Medium’s front page. “I’m awestruck by your career as a Harvard PhD student,” a friend of a friend writes.
Inevitably, reading these messages leaves me emptier than I started. Maybe I inflate for a moment — but this balloon is riddled with holes.
I am looking in the wrong place.
I don’t need a justification. I am not the sort of thing that could be justified.
The thought is as clear and beautiful as the rain. I take off my hat; the downpour bursts into roaring all around me. Each leaf on the ground is its own crisp thing. In this world, so full of being, I don’t need a justification.
I squat under my umbrella, amid the roaring rain and glistening leaves — and weep with joy.
In one of the puddles, a miracle is happening. Rain rebounds from the surface, forming fountains strung from individual drops. It’s as beautiful as a nature documentary, as detailed as Edgerton’s milk-splash photographs. My eyes can do this? Why didn’t anybody tell me?
I had wanted to be like some tropical fish, justified by its uniqueness. Does the stonefish wake smiling to know no one else is as venomous? Is the sunfish any happier because it’s the biggest?
I turn the thought around in my mind: I don’t have, couldn’t have, don’t need a justification. One side of the thought looks like nihilism: my life has no purpose. If I were religious, I’d call the other side grace, God’s unconditional love.
Nothing matters: no matter what, we are worthy.
I dream that, needing rest, I book a vacation in an unfamiliar Chinese city. When I arrive, I don’t have a hotel room, don’t speak the language, don’t have the eyes to see the sights — and only want to sleep.
When I wake, the dream is every one of my vacations: “resting” by going somewhere new and overwhelming. And the newest, most overwhelming place yet is… right here.
My brain: the most foreign city of all.
We are focusing on the sensations on the strip of skin between the nose and the lip. I feel a pattering of sensations, tingles erupting in tune with the sound of rain which streams in from the window, and I remember that Paul Simon lyric:
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I.
Then I understand. It’s not just that I’m not a lawnmower — but that I thought that I was. That was the insight.
I honestly and truly hoped that an angel would come down from heaven and tell me: Thou shalt be a lawnmower. And then, finally satisfied, I would mow off into the sunset.
I thought I meant something more reasonable when I wished for a purpose. But there is nothing else a purpose could be. Maybe on my wiser days, I hoped not for an angel from heaven, but for self-determination: the power to create my own purpose. But that doesn’t make sense either: that would be willing myself to be a lawnmower.
After breakfast, the lawn has strutted into high society. Each blade of grass, each thread of spiderweb wears its own freshly strung, limited-edition necklace. Clovers balance their pearls precariously on the edge of their hats, each arrangement more impossible than the last.
The costumes all astound me, but I give first prize to the caterpillar sporting a glamorous cape of droplets over his striped and fluffy suit. He turns to face me, and I can’t stop the wave of disgust: his mandible is enormous! “Perfect equanimity,” Goenka says in my head.
The caterpillar chomps on — with that glorious, awe-inspiring jaw.
Some part of me is unhappy with the new eyes. I’m an artist, but so much of this new beauty is unpaintable: the particularities of motion, the tiny detailed spiders and caterpillars. It’s more suited to the camera than to my impressionistic brush; more scientific than artistic.
I thought I noticed a lot. Maybe I noticed more than the average person, but that difference is nothing compared to how much I see now.
I thought I was sensitive, a good appreciator — but there is no such thing as being a good appreciator. You can only learn to pay attention, humbly and without expectations; appreciation, if it comes at all, comes on its own.
Gloomily, I look up at the branches overhead. I love, as I always have, the stained-glass glow of their red and orange leaves, but there is something new too: the lead frame of the stained glass, the dark twisting particularity of the branch.
Another student walks by, sees me rooted to the spot before the tree. “I’m such a great appreciator,” I think instinctively.
The visions become something from a cheap horror film. Bats. A long-nosed witch who turns out to be an embarrassing caricature of one of the students. Swarms of cockroaches — with no disgust attached. Cemeteries. Crosses, imbued with a significance I hadn’t felt since my Catholic childhood.
Then: a pile of loose teeth.
I wanted to have a purpose, to be special. I see how self-centered that is now — but where did this egotism come from? Being the top student in my class? Having parents who thought I was special?
But whose parents didn’t find them special? What if what is making me egotistical is simply the human condition? What if I’m self-conscious simply because I want to be liked, self-centered because “at the center” is where my point of view places me — and where everybody’s point of view places them?
I feel disappointed. I was happy to accept that my flaw was egotism — as long as it was my own special brand of egotism. I could have a tragic flaw — as long as it was my very own, special flaw; as long as I was still the hero of the play.
I ask the teacher about the visions. She says they’re a sign I’m very focused.
The last thing this ego needs to hear is that it’s a good meditator.
When I sit cross-legged, my legs and feet go numb almost immediately. I quickly learn that this numbness isn’t actually painful — and if, after shifting my position, I stay perfectly still and watchful, neither is the return of sensation, which I experience simply as a tingle.
This time, though, I’ve let my attention wander away from my awaking legs. Suddenly, I feel a pang so sharp that I barely stop myself from screaming.
Sharp, but not painful. In the middle of the intensity, there is a strange… emptiness.
It’s the “strong determination” session; I’m supposed to remain entirely motionless for an hour, scanning my body for sensations. I have a horrific backache.
The shoulder, the elbow, the hand. “Pay attention to me! This is urgent!” my back screams. I ignore it with all my might. The neck, the chest, the belly. When I finally, finally get to the lower back, I try to find the pain. Where is it, exactly? What, exactly, does it feel like? I subdivide the back into tiny patches, examine each one carefully. The harder I look, the less I find — until suddenly it’s like someone has spread a minty ointment over the entire area, which erupts into tingles.
The sensation is staggeringly powerful — but without a trace of suffering. I’m plunged into a storm at sea — a sea of pure power, far beyond the land of pleasure and pain.
My worldview is collapsing. I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.
In bed, my feet cramp in a tangle of knots. The pain which is maybe an illusion keeps me up for hours.
In my dream, I run through long, white, twisting corridors. They take me to an enormous room, its floor packed with colorful balls — like one of those ball pits for children. Above the balls, the room is tall, spacious, wonderful.
The dream comes with a certainty: I am inside my mind.
In the morning, I think of misery, misery, misery. I had been staggeringly less happy than I thought. I had been drowning in the ball pit of my mind, only seeing the world through chinks in my swarming thoughts. I thought I knew beauty, peace, joy… but that had been only a drop in the ocean of happiness that could be mine. And how many more people are like this: run to the ground by their own habits, spending their lives chasing power and glory, fool’s gold worth less than the spiderwebs in their own yards!
I pity not just the poor, the oppressed, the victims — but the millionaires, the oppressors, the perpetrators. May they find their way, as speedily and painlessly as possible, to such joy as I am feeling now; may all beings be happy.
The teacher meets with the students one by one and asks them if they were able to sit still for an hour. No, it was so hard! No, so painful! So miserable!
I feel my chest swell with joy. I’m a better meditator!
Crap.
What we’re all practicing here is detachment; I’m starting to feel uncomfortable about this fact. Specifically, I’m worried about love. Can you have love without attachment? I always suspected that you couldn’t.
Which is ironic, considering that I’ve had this feeling of unattached love, in one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.
I had only been dating my partner for a few weeks when I knew. Knew not just that I loved him, but that I had already loved him for some time. It was like waking to a bell and knowing you’d been counting the beats in your sleep: love had run out ahead of its knowledge. Slowly, it had been flowing in, easing me in, filling the room around me — and when I awoke, I was submerged in certainty.
That moment of realization was perfectly self-sufficient. It was so early in the relationship; I knew nothing was certain. Maybe tomorrow he’d leave; maybe I would. That was completely irrelevant.
This, now, would always be beautiful.
I see a derpy fish, slack-jawed, eyes half open, mouth pointed to the sky. It’s a perfect caricature: I’m meditating so intently that my eyes have rolled back in their sockets and my mouth hangs open.
People complain that love weakens with time. Relationships may strengthen over the years, but feelings are flimsy. Two years into it, or twenty, the commitment may be there, but the feeling isn’t what it used to be.
What if it’s not like this? What if, like tingles on your skin, like spiderwebs crisscrossing your lawn, like the highway by which you’ve built your house, your love is always there, as loud and strong as it’s ever been? What if you’ve simply grown numb to it — precisely because it is always there?
I see a stately dog, nose pointed exaltedly to the sky, curly-haired ears flapping in the wind.
Were the visions of the saints and mystics like this? Something less out of a painting and more out of a nature documentary?
They say that when God created the world, he made things one by one. When he was finished, he looked over all he had made and saw that it was very good.
Here, new things are made for me each day. Just now, it’s the tininess of a spider’s abdomen, like an eye of a needle too small for me to thread. Then, the hoppitiness of cicadas, ten minuscule creatures jumping every second where a day ago there was only grass. Then the multiplicity, the sixness, of an ant’s legs.
Things are made for me one by one; I see that they are very good.
It used to make me so sad to think of all the people who gave up their lives for false religions. But what if the ascetics really gave up nothing at all, and gained the beauty of the world? What if even the martyrs felt not suffering, but intensity?
I wept with joy when I understood that I wasn’t a lawnmower. Then I learned that pain is maybe an illusion… and shrugged my shoulders.
Until, that is, I thought of grief. If a stupid backache is a thing of sublime power, then how much more sublime the pain of losing a loved one must be!
I catch a faint outline of this beautiful feeling: a grief without a trace of self-pity. A grief fully concerned with the departed and the relationship, and not at all with the one who remains.
A grief that, in the end, is only another form of love.
The visions turn kaleidoscopic. Vivid geometric shapes tessellate with body parts. Meditators form paper doll chains. Then they are only legs, connected by long wooden planks, walking, walking, walking…
It’s raining again. On the uneven parking lot, the puddles turn to streams. Motion piles on motion: swaying curtains of rain running raindrop-feet across rivulets, joining into wind-ruffled rivers.
I know that I am like the rain — flowing, flowing, flowing…
If love is a sea, then grief is a storm at sea.
And if the storm comes — when the storm comes — let me be there fully. Let me not hold my head under, let me not fight the waves — but only feel them breaking against my skin.
This is what I’m practicing for.
Goenka warns us not to get too attached to the pleasant tingles. This surprises me. Pleasant? I find the feeling interesting, but emotionally neutral. (Occasionally, when it keeps me up at night, it’s mildly annoying.) The sensation itself is very similar to the feeling of my feet waking up from numbness…
What if that’s exactly what it is? The feeling of being alive, of blood circulating in my veins — normally noticed only after the flow had been cut off, but really always there?
What if love is like this too? What if I had always felt the love I discovered at the start of my relationship? What if it’s always the same love: the love for our parents we are born with? A love we can redirect and multiply, but never lose?
What if we are born into love and die in love?
What the hell would that even mean, that “it’s always the same love”? Isn’t love just some cocktail of neurotransmitters, anyway?
Okay, so I’m probably wrong. How calmly this thought comes! I am learning humility and patience; yesterday’s profound insight is today’s idiotic nonsense, but it may also be the seed of tomorrow’s wisdom.
For the moment, what is sprouting from this broken seed is curiosity. What is love, scientifically? What about pain? What happened in that meditation room, when my pain turned to tingles — was it something in my brain, in my back, both? Is pain built up of tingles, the way an image on a screen is made up of pixels? Or did I somehow use my mind to give myself a massage, the way a cat can soothe herself with her purring? Is purring a form of meditation? How do cicadas make their music? When an ant walks, in what order does it move its legs?
When have I last felt this curious? When have I wanted to know not because it would be the missing piece of my brilliant argument, not because one ought to know, not because it was difficult — but simply because it was interesting?
This answer, too, comes calmly. I never wanted knowledge; I wanted to be smart. Even the logic puzzles from childhood: I loved the thrill of solution less than my dad’s admiration. And now? What sort of person goes to Oxford, then Harvard, to study mathematics and philosophy, maybe the purest of disciplines? Who locks herself into a degree with no career prospects beyond academia?
Someone who loves knowledge for knowledge’s sake? Someone who wants you to believe that.
God help me, I am appreciating the asphalt… So much texture, so many little different stones! On top of this: the glorious randomness of scattered acorns, their shadows in the evening light long and blue, their caps as dappled and detailed as the ground.
What if everything is beautiful?
It’s the last session of the day, and I am collapsing with exhaustion. I give up, uncross my legs, give in to the warm woozy feeling.
I see kittens and puppies wrapped in soft blankets.
If my hallucinations reveal anything about my subconscious, it’s that I really love adorable animals.
I dream that I’m on a bus, falling asleep. I awake to the blank confusion of an unfamiliar bed.
Then I understand: I woke from the dream, not in it.
I see a squirrel drop an acorn in bewilderment, startled by a compatriot. I startle too, because suddenly they are also my compatriots — enough mind in each tiny body to see the world with, to lose in thoughts, to find in blank confusion and in the gaze of another.They chase each other through the treetops, all balance and exhilaration. Before the jump, they accelerate, the springboard-branch bouncing back beneath their feet — and I am almost flying through the air with them.
So this is where I live: in a world sliced into endless points of view, a world of worlds!
“Clearing my mind” had sounded scary, as if my brain would end up bland and empty. But it doesn’t feel empty; it feels spacious. Like a great meadow capable of holding the squirrels and the caterpillars — and, one suddenly-possible day, each one of 7.5 billion people.
I feel physically lighter, like someone had taken a ton of bricks off my head. Goenka says that there are 99 tons left. I don’t believe him — and yet I didn’t notice the first ton until it was gone either.
Goenka wants us to meditate during every waking moment of the next two days. “When you’re not sitting in the hall, always remain aware of some sensation in your body.”
I am resentful when I hear this. I was going to look at so many squirrels, so many dappled leaves with my new eyes! I can’t do that and pay attention to bodily sensations… But when I leave the hall, I try it out anyway: staying inside my body for a moment longer. I take a step.
The ground against my foot — the softness of the carpet, the hardness of the floor — is like inheriting some great fortune. Like finding that the shapeless box I have been using as a doorstop is a chest of jewels or a precious book. So this is what it’s like to have a body?
The highest spiritual truth: the ground underneath my feet.
I keep walking. I feel the pendulum swing of my arms, the way my hands brush against my hips. So this was always here?
I remember the branch bouncing back under the squirrel’s nimble feet, and I realize that, rather than a chore, Goenka had given me a gift.
I knew the grace in a squirrel’s body before I knew it in my own.
One of the meditation instructions I followed before coming here told me to “pay attention to my body as a whole.” I never understood what that meant.
Now I do. It feels like arrival. It feels like inheriting the earth.
This body is my home.
At this thought, my rib cage expands in a storm of vibration, of emotion. I have never felt it like this: a hard tube over a soft inside.
This body is my home — and all these years I have been squatting in the attic somewhere… I never knew about all this space down here — and yet it was me who had piled the floors so high with junk that I had had to move out.
What was that vibration, that powerful feeling? A single gasping sob.
Aged 29, born again.
Each sip of morning coffee whooshes down my throat with astonishing speed, as if I had just poured it vertically down a well. I feel the warmth follow, descending down my gullet and spreading across my abdomen. What a marvelous machine!
That heavy tome I’d been using as a doorstop? It must have been the instruction manual for this brain.
Instruction manual? So I am a lawnmower? A lawnmower towards enlightenment?
I suddenly know that my PhD thesis is wrong. I have been like the blind man grasping at the tusk of an elephant, dreaming up an ivory body for it, spending years arguing with other blind men about whether elephants are rough or smooth, sharp or blunt. I thought beauty was an experience, the creation of the sensitive mind. Now I think aesthetic experience leads out of itself, to a land where maybe, just maybe, the Beautiful is the True, is the Good.
I came here to learn better focus, to finish that damned dissertation. Well, I got more than I bargained for.
Everyone in the meditation hall appears to have a cold. The coughs come a dozen a minute, and I feel each one in my body, a startling stab coming from the direction of the cough. How do you not move under such circumstances? Each minute is an eternity.
When the gong finally rings, it too goes on and on. What if no one in the hall is actually sicker than they were yesterday, the sharpness of the coughing caused only by sharper ears?
I spent a year looking at sunsets, and still I’ve never seen it like this: the clouds not just pink and orange, but also swirling and floating. But the real gift comes out of the corner of my eye: the sharpness of each individual feather; flapping that isn’t a blur, but real, blissful motion.
The birds fly across the sky — like something spilling.
The coughing is equally loud this session, but where before I felt a single stab, there are now two sensations: an emotionally neutral bodily tension followed by a flinching away. I stop flinching; the coughing doesn’t bother me anymore.
I sign up for a meeting with the assistant teacher. I want to talk about my doomed dissertation. Not because it hurts to be wrong — it doesn’t — but because my time here is ending and I don’t know how to talk about it to my professors when I return.
Half an hour before the meeting, I am drowning in fear. Why did I sign up for this, ask such a stupid question? What could she possibly know about academic philosophy?
Eight days’ worth of insights vanish into thin air; the world is unmanageable again. So this is how it will be when this is over? Every meeting as terrifying and overwhelming as it’s ever been?
I don’t need to worry about that just now. I take a breath, close my eyes. My heart is a caged bird trying to escape. I observe the feeling. It’s no different, I realize, from the way my heart would thump after a sprint. By itself, the feeling doesn’t mean anything, except that it must continue for a little while, then die down. I am not a caged bird.
The teacher tries to be helpful, but — she apologizes — she knows almost nothing about academic philosophy.
It’s exactly as I feared; it isn’t scary at all.
On day 10, we can talk again. But first, a new type of meditation.
In theory, loving-kindness meditation is a balm for the soul. In practice, it’s Goenka’s hopelessly vague instructions (“send out feelings of love and happiness to all beings”) followed by a chant of “Looove” in a terrifyingly crackling voice. In practice, it’s nine days’ worth of openmindedness starting to escape me.
In theory, when we exit the hall, our new love and compassion will shine through our voices. In practice, the first person to use her voice does so to exclaim:
“How the hell am I supposed to send out love to all beings if I don’t know how to even feel love for myself?!”
We form smaller groups and share our experiences.
Horrific flashbacks. Thoughts spiraling inwards and downwards. Incredible difficulty. For 4 of the 9 days, I wanted to leave!
My heart sinks — but not because I feel sorry for them, these women whose retreats had been so much harder, so much less joyful than mine.
Why, then?Same reason as that of any sadness: I wanted something; I didn’t get it. I had been hoping to excitedly exchange the joys of the retreat. Instead, they ask me “What was the hardest part for you?” and I frantically search my memory for something that won’t make them feel jealous.
And another thing: I am, apparently, the happiest meditator in the group. That I had wanted — but when I get it, the gift turns bitter and lonely.
I am, once again, the most tropical fish.
It’s the last morning, before sunrise. The sliver of a moon is as luminous as it’s ever been — but what really astounds me is the dark side, its edge perfectly set off from the sky, the shape of the dark-light whole visibly spherical.
Inside the dining hall, the air vibrates with kindness and conversation. I join a table, excitedly exchanging the joys of the retreat.
I walk around the parking lot. Another student is circling the lot in the opposite direction. I smile; she smiles; we don’t have to ignore each other anymore.
The smile is like nothing I’ve ever seen. As grand and generous as the sun, it holds nothing back. Her whole unique being is there at the surface, summoned by the smile to greet me.
Bathed in its warmth, I realize: I’d been so afraid, so busy worrying what people thought about me that I never bothered to look up and check. I’d walked the streets with averted gaze, casting glances only long enough to confirm that no one meant too much harm. Extracting the fact of the smile but not its warmth, not its perfect individuality. Leaving the gift unopened; not giving.
Suddenly, I remember. I have seen this smile before. Only that stranger had been… a baby.
But then what has this been, if not ten days of rebirth? And who are we, if not two infants on the shore of a new world, trusting?
Coda
On the bus ride home, a bleary-eyed woman spills iced coffee at the feet of a fellow passenger. By the time I consider hesitating, I am already handing them a box of tissues. A moment later, the two travelers are night shift workers bonding over their shared experiences.
Would their interaction had gone differently if I hadn’t intervened? That’s not the point. The point is I never used to be the person handing out the tissues. By the time I’d make up my mind whether to say “do you want a tissue?” or “would you like some tissues?,” they would already be soaked with coffee and dripping with anger and defensiveness.
After nine days of ignoring other people, I have learned to see them.
Home, I turn on the music player.
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I
Suddenly, I am singing. I startle at the sound of my own voice: deep, confident, powerful.
In first grade, my music teacher had mocked the low tuneless rumble that came out when I tried to sing. Then my dad got me a piano keyboard and I spent hours matching my voice to its tone. The next year, the teacher declared that a miracle had happened: I could hold a tune — and so high, too, like those other girls, the angelic sopranos!
From then on, I squeaked along with my second-hand voice, an alto (if she dared sing at all) playing at a soprano.
As I sing — beautifully imperfectly — I let all that go. I don’t need to be angelic. I don’t need to be musically gifted; I don’t need to sing in tune. I don’t need to be good at everything. I don’t need to be good at anything.
And so, after ten days of letting go — of any claim to uniqueness, of everything I thought was mine, of the very notion of “mine” — I have found my voice.
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Eve Bigaj 
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