 |
| Wat Pradhatu Sri Chom Tong, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand |
Yesterday, I walked away from Wat Chom Tong's Meditation Center in northern Thailand after completing a a grueling 21-day vipassana meditation course with a lot of new insights and about 10 less pounds than when I had started. I've never been to jail, but I would imagine the feeling is similar; re-entering the world after facing the reality of never-ending days and countless of hours to contemplate everything.
Happiness, sadness, fears, dreams, hopes, memories, excitement, bliss, pain, agony, anxiety, inspiration, depression, you name it, I experienced it in the course of the past 3 weeks. But why? What drives a person who goes into a situation like that to experience the full spectrum of human emotions in a seemingly unstimulating environment? Usually, it would take a changing external environment to produce such adverse internal reactions, but as we find, the constantly changing condition of the mind is enough to produce polar opposites and extremely intense emotional experiences all on its own.
To me, that is a scary thought. It seems that going to a quiet place for 3 weeks should be relaxing, not terrifying. It should be a time for simplicity, reflection, and living in the moment. Which in a way, it was, but it comes with a price, and for me anyway, the price of finding internal peace in a stimulus-free environment came at the price of having to hit rock-bottom first.
I don't know how many times I had to bang my head on the wall before I had enough sense to realize what I was doing. And, I don't know how many times I had to have the same insights before knowledge became wisdom and I was actually able to act on them. So for me, finding the middle way meant to push myself until I broke, and then to pick up the pieces and put them back together again.
Strength or weakness? I still don't know what the difference is! The more I resisted everything I was dealing with, the worse it got. But don't get me wrong, I don't want to make it sound worse than it was, I did have a "good" day pretty much everyday, but on very few days was it good all day. And when those hours drag on as they do, having a bad morning, afternoon, or evening is enough of a dead weight that it can really be a hard thing to walk away from.
The physical pain on its own was hard enough to deal with, but it was the mental pain that really tore me down. Or, I tore myself down I should say. The fluctuations of the mind are enough to drive anyone who is watching to insanity. And that's all there is to do, there's nothing to occupy, or distract the mind, and the only thing to do is either completely lend yourself to it, or take up the brave intention to observe it. If you observe it, you'll be engaging in a tug of war between being lost in this mental activity and then returning to the present moment, which usually enables you to realize the content of its recent activity.
So every time you "come back," you are faced with the reality of what state of mind you have just returned from, and that aspect takes finesse to cope with. The tendency is to react negatively to the content of the mind, because for the most part, it tends to be quite ridiculous. The initial feeling is unpleasant and then the mind kicks back in with the judgments of, "Why can't I focus, why am I thinking about this now?"
At a retreat I did in Colorado about a year ago, the teacher, Steve Armstrong told us a story of a retreat he had taken shortly after graduating from University. It was before they used calculators and so he had to crunch the numbers in his head. At one point during meditation, he "came back" and realized that he had just been sitting there for who knows how long, obsessively crunching random numbers as if was solving some difficult math problem.
"Do I really need to be doing this now?" he asked himself.
This is quite common, from what I understand, that whatever has turned the gears in our minds before we go to sit, will carry that momentum and continue to turn the gears until we shine the light of awareness on it enough times for it to lose it's power over us. But just by standing in front of your train of thoughts, doesn't mean that it will stop. It's almost like you have to go into the engine room and start draining the fuel. Or, you just have to wait until it runs out.
On day 12, I had my first experience of "letting go" that really changed the course of the rest of my stay at the monastery. I had actually been doing pretty good up until that point, I was getting in over 10 hours a day on most days and I was still carrying some of the initial drive that I started with. But my fire went out, and I hit a wall. And instead of turning around, I proceeded to ram my head against that wall over and over again until I fell down and hit rock bottom. It all happened so fast too, and that was one thing that made it such a strange and scary experience. I was having a great morning, and when I went into the daily meeting with the teacher, she said something like, "Good, keep going like this, your practice is good." I walked out of her office with a smile on my face, and within 30 minutes after returning to my room, I was in the middle of a complete mental breakdown.
"What is wrong me with? Why am I suddenly feeling so bad?" I wanted to jump out of my skin. I wanted to scream, I wanted to break something, and if nothing else, I wanted to get the hell out of that place and never look back. "You've already got in more than 10 days, just call it good and go enjoy yourself," I was trying to convince myself. I still don't really know what sparked it, I guess I just lost all sense of wanting to continue and then couldn't bare the mental self-judgments that began to rain down on me. So what I did was hop up and get myself out of my room. I went for a walk, and decided I was just going to take a couple hours to collect myself and try to decide what to do next. "Just chill out man, you don't need to do anything harsh here, nothing really even happened, you just got worked up all of a sudden and you just need to cool off."
So after a couple of hours of thinking something like,"I seriously don't care what happens anymore, none of this is worth beating myself up over." It's like a quote that I used to have on my fridge in University that said, "It's OK to fail." I swear, that quote was what got me through all my classes with such good grades. If I believed the opposite, than I would have never made it. "Forget about the meditation, and the course. If you don't want to be here anymore, just leave. No one is expecting anything from you, it's just you here. No one will think less of you, you've already done a good job."
Without this shift in my mental self-reflection, I probably would have called it quits. But be it as it was, that sort of weakness turned into my strength, and in another instance I had hopped up and was determined to go into the main meditation hall, which I had hardly used on account of it being somewhat busy, sit down, and not get up until I had solved my problem. The sort of attitude here is crucial to understanding how this process works. It's the attitude of a spiritual warrior, but not necessarily easy to cultivate. In that moment, it just happened--all the conditions were right--and I was able to pull myself out of an extremely dark place.
I sat on my cushion, found a comfortable position, I vowed to not move my hands or legs until I was completely defeated.
Does this make any sense?
It was the aversion to the situation that I had found myself in that led to me having a breakdown in the first place. Now, in order to overcome that aversion, I needed to meet with it head-on until I just couldn't fight anymore. So the aversion, in a typical sense, is what we think of as a strength. It says that when you get into a situation you don't like, you do something about it. You change it until you like it. You stand up for yourself and your rights and and you fight. But in meditation (careful not to get attached to my choice of vocabulary here), this sort of fighting is in fact your worst enemy. So we have to completely reverse the normal sense of what we need to do to solve a problem.
In a word, it's called surrender. And surrender is the ultimate display of weakness. Surrender says, "Okay, you win, I can't control everything, I am weak, and I allow you (unpleasant experiences) to run your course on me." So I sat there for 2 hours without moving, and the physical pain was unbearable. What I would normally do in such a situation is shift my position and avoid the extreme pain. But I didn't. I didn't allow myself to get off that easy. If you think this sounds like strength now, it is, in a way, because it would be much easier to just get up and go do something else. This interplay here between strength and weakness is really the most important thing, I guess it's finding the balance that gets the job done.
As I sat there, with excruciating pain, the experience was incredible. When you have this pain, the mind latches on to it like the reigns of a horse and the ride is wild. But, if you can manage to stay present with the pain, and not get entangled in the story in which the mind casts itself as the hero (and the victim), you can find something infinitely more beautiful than can be seen with the human eye. If you can push past the pain, as I did in that experience, your whole world opens up. Although I was still aware of my body, it began to vibrate and become very light, almost like it dropped away completely or like I was floating in outer space. By acknowledging that this body isn't me, the pain isn't me or mine, and that nothing I am experiencing is me or mine, I was able to find so much freedom from the pain that my experience became one of pure bliss. But as soon as my mind would slip, I would go back to feeling the pain. So back and forth I went, from bliss to pain and back to bliss. In those moments, I could really feel the difference between identification and non-identification with my body and my mind.
The more we are able to non-identify with that which is impermanent, the less we suffer. Yes, the pain was still there, but my suffering was gone. The experience was incredibly beautiful, and after 2 hours, I got up with a smile on my face and a feeling like, "No matter what happens now, I know I've already lost, and I am no longer scared of any experience that comes my way." What it really comes down to is that I stopped believing the mind and started to see the and body for its impermanent nature. The rest of the course was much easier, as I felt like much lighter and more freed from the confines of my mind.
But the challenge wasn't over. On day 16, I hit another wall. and this time, I only banged my head on it a few times instead of a few hundred. When I was able to "come back" and see that I was in fact banging my head on the wall again, I knew what needed to be done, and I realized that surrender is something that needs to happen in every moment,
you can't just surrender once and you're good to go.
So this time, I noticed that I was feeling lazy after lunch and didn't want to submit myself to one of the walking meditations that they have you do before a session of sitting. Basically, the whole day is walk, sit, walk, sit, walk, sit, and try to not blow your head off. When I realized that I was having aversion to walking, I took a minute to regroup and decide the best course of action. Almost sadistically, I decided I needed to step it up. Although I started out with 20 minutes walking, 20 minutes sitting, I would gradually increase the time increments and by that time, I was doing 60 and 60. So I said to myself, "Oh, you don't want to walk for an hour? Now you're gonna walk for 3 hours!" So I walked for 3 hours, and guess what? I had a pleasant experience! I was having miserable experiences walking for one hour because the mind was resisting it. But as soon as I let go and said, "I can't possible resist for 3 long hours, that will be too much to bear," I let go, and I really got into the walking meditation like never before. Every step was fresh and my body was light and pain-free. When the bell rang to sound the end of the 3 hours, a huge smile swept across my face and dropped to my knees to praise the beauty of the moment. I felt like I had just reached the summit of a huge mountain, and that through my weakness, my true strength was displayed.
"Break the will of the ego and discover the will of the heart."
"Okay, so now what to do with the sitting meditation? If I sit for 3 hours, I'll surely be waiting for the bell to sound as I now feel like I know how long 3 hours feels. I better sit for 4!" So I set my timer for 4 hours and thought, "I'd better get ready for this, because if I am fighting this one at all, it's just gonna kill me." And with that kind of mental preparation, I succeeded in completing the longest meditation session of my life, and for the most part, it was resistance free. So there it was, I practiced for 7 hours continuously and had such an eye-opening afternoon, that at the end of it, I was only filled with humility and gratitude. I wasn't proud of myself, I didn't feel like it was me who had accomplished anything. If anything, I felt that I had succeeded in killing a part of myself off and just letting the part of me that is one with the universe be engaged in the present moment. I had taken "myself" out of the equation and by doing so, I took out the suffering as well.
"Pain, pleasure, failure, success--don't take anything personally."
Stay tuned for more of my personal experiences from this course, more pictures, and also a more informative post that will help you decide if Wat Chom Tong is right for you...
No comments:
Post a Comment