As I walked along the beach from my hotel room to breakfast, I thought about my friend who did Peace Corps in Mongolia. He has crazy stories of his host family going hunting in the fall and burying the carcasses, creating their own natural outdoor freezer with the quick coming of winter. When we did a micro-finance project in the Philippines together years later, conducting focus groups on the beach huddled under the palm shade, he asked incredulously, You mean I could've gone here for Peace Corps?!
I had a similar thought this morning, comparing this environment with the austere nature of my first silent meditation back in Hyderabad, and then thinking of myself shivering and wearing my North Face to sleep during my second silent retreat outside Delhi a few years later. You mean I could've gone to paradise to meditate?!
You would think I'd be relaxed as anything this morning, but that's the farthest from the truth. The Buddhists call it "monkey mind" and this morning, it is particularly going ape sh*t. I'm antsy and quick to annoyance and anger (turns out professional meditators aren't particularly organized). But so I usually am before any kind of intense meditation. It's either nervous energy and/or all of my neuroses coming up for the sole purpose of getting purged over the coming days.
Today, my inner voice has been particularly snarky, seeing all the signs not only for Art of Living (the silent meditation I'll be doing with 500+ others), but also its cousin, Transcendental Meditation (TM) -- which I learned only last night has its basis in Hinduism and focuses on concentration (slightly different flavor from the meditation I'm used to like Vipassana, which has roots in Buddhism and focuses on mindfulness). Whenever I'm with folks who don't meditate, I wax poetic about the benefits of meditation. But when I'm with too many hard core meditators, my inner critic comes out to play. And so it is this morning. The whole hotel complex is like Happiness, Inc... Meditators of the world, unite!
My morning goal has been characteristically un-spiritual: get to inbox zero. Kinda a bit random, since I really haven't cared about an empty inbox since I decided to focus on my larger goals of 2015. Yet here I find myself in my three-star hotel room in Bali manically purging email (instead of, say, walking on the beach).
I suppose it's the physical manifestation for what I hope and expect will happen to my mind over the next five days: achieve some sort of gloriously emptiness (and I imagine I'll have more than enough time to walk the beach in silent once we begin). When I did my first ten day silent meditation in Hyderabad, someone referred to Vipassana (the hard-core meditation I threw myself into) as a sort of mental lobotomy. But instead of going under anesthesia, you are painfully, excruciatingly aware of every thought as it swirls through your brain and eventually leaves your head.
Sometimes these thoughts are life-changing, such as deciding I would stay in India after my ten month fellowship. Some are deep yet seemingly out of nowhere, like realizing my intense fear of disappointing others whom I love and respect, which most strongly took the form of my ex-boyfriend's parents. And some are just so dumb that it's embarrassing how much mind share they take: like the time I spent the majority of my day in silence contemplating the finer points of Twilight (I'm Team Edward in case you were wondering).
On my flight over from Seoul, I read
10% Happier by Dan Harris -- which, for his description of his own ten day silent meditation alone is worth the read. Subtitled, "
How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge, and found self-help that actually works -- a true story," it's the story of one unlikely man's journey into meditation. Harris is the co-anchor of
Nightline and basically had a nervous breakdown/panic attack on national television (which he talks about
here), stemming from his cocaine and ecstasy habit, which in turn was a result of his "addiction" to reporting from dangerous war zones. His journey into mindfulness and meditation (which he basically goes into kicking and screaming) is hilarious; he describes his inner monologue of watching his breath as:
In. Out. I wonder if they'll have more of that fresh bread at dinner? Damn, dude. In. (before then describing his ten day silence retreat as the "longest, most exquisite high of my life.")
I've earmarked so many pages for reference that all I can say is if you're slightly intrigued, read it! It cuts through a lot of the new age hippie mumbo jumbo and says it all in plain-speak. For instance: "As best I could understand it, the Buddha's main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won't last." He traces meditation to mainstream, such as Silicon Valley ("where meditation is now increasingly being viewed as a software upgrade for the brain"), corporations (Wired magazine has apparently referred to meditation as the "new caffeine") and even the Marine Corps (apparently some old-school meditation gurus are upset that meditation is being used to make capitalists richer and the army more effective at killing).
But that's the thing though. The edges are dimmed. On my flight back to Bali, I reflected how I've gone from seemingly one end of the universe (NYC) to another (Bali), with barely a 24 hour stop back home to Seoul. Yet as I looked around to all the travelers carrying their yoga mats and gear, it occurred to me that sometimes these two worlds aren't so different after all. The same people who sometimes see themselves as "more enlightened" than Wall Street ambitious types often still compete with one another, albeit in more "spiritual" ways. Once we break our silence, my experience has been that a common intro is: "What's your name and how many of these have you done?" It's like being back in NYC, with the ubiquitous, "What's your name and what do you do?" -- similarly casting you in some sort of mental social hierarchy in whatever it is that that society happens to most value.
People ask if it's hard to be silent for so long. Truthfully, the silence is the easy part. It's sitting alone with your thoughts for 18 hours a day that's brutal.
But without fail, every time I emerge from silence, there's always some insight into myself and into life that makes it all worth it. And except for the first time, where I emerged still deer in headlights (as Tyler puts it), after every other silent meditation retreat, I emerge feeling like I've acquired some new super power: all of my senses are heightened (maybe that's what inspired all the Twilight thoughts?? -ha!) and anything I put my mind to becomes shockingly easy: whether it's running for an hour or cranking out work that I know would have taken days.
It's like a drug and part of the spiritual game is not allowing yourself to get hooked -- to practice what the yogis and the Buddhists call "non-attachment."
But I think this is probably enough talk and soliloquy for one day. So here goes!! The leap into what's been called the last frontier: exploring all that's within. See you on the other side!
