Temping as a Nun:
I am sitting in a motel room in Fresno after coming back from temping as a nun for 10 days in a Vipassana silent meditation retreat in North Fork. It is a tiny sleepy mountain town situated in between Northern and Southern California about 4 hours south east of San Francisco in the beautiful mountain range of Sierra Nevada where a fire station shares the space with a local library. What a combo!
The retreat started on 10/29/8 so I promptly missed all the Halloween festivity fiasco and the most-watched-ever Presidential Election of Obama vs. McCain (I voted before I left, in case you are nosy) but I am not feeling like I missed out on the red-hot-drama-rama considering the precious experiences that I had during the retreat.
In the evening of October 29, I checked myself in at the Vipassana Meditation Center to be oriented for the next 10 days of nothing but being in silence. We were to get up at 4 am the next morning to start meditating from 4:30 am to 9:00 pm, clocking about 10 hours of sitting time everyday. But it's not like you do a non-stop sitting marathon for literally all day long between those hours. I was given 2 meal breaks (oatmeal/cereal/fruit breakfast and a vegetarian lunch a day, but no food after 12 pm), 1 tea break, and 1 hour resting period a day. Naturally, my pants started to feel a bit loose after a few days even if I wasn't trying to pull Jenny Craig on my already reduced size hump.
After 10 days of meditating like this while being deprived of the typical human privilege like talking, reading, writing, listening to music, exercising, or anything that would take my attention away from my mind that is accustomed to receiving an incessant flow of external stimuli, the ordinary things that I am experiencing here now in this space, like the smell of a generic motel room, the sight of obsessively colorful signs for the gigantic fast food restaurants outside the window, the sound of cars buzzing up and down the street, the feeling of the cool metalic keyboard of my laptop that was stored away cold in the trunk of my car for the 10 days, make me feel like I am back in my old reality show exactly where I left off.
Feeling Like a New Buddha:
I was feeling like a buddha when I left the center this morning with no craving for worldly things, but at many moments later now, I am already feeling the surge of desire for entertainment cropping up even if I vowed not to check my email and voicemail, or look at the Internet to see who won the Election until I write about what I experienced during the retreat.
So that was the plan. But I started to hear something beeping in my backpack which was sitting on the bed 6 feet away so I checked to see what could be making that weird mechanical noise and found out it was my cell phone screaming to let me know it was running out of juice and needed to be fed. I thought I had it turned off 10 days ago but it somehow got turned back on mysteriously in the bag and was now calling for my immediate attention. So I picked up the phone, and as soon as I saw that little envelope symbol indicating that I have text messages, I couldn't resist. I checked my texts and the next thing I knew I was checking my voicemail, email, horoscope, MySpace, and looking at the internet to see who won the Election despite my vow.
So much for the buddha mind, eh?
Anyway, this is not to say that the meditation retreat didn't work to train my mind to become more focused and sharpen. I got that, too, for sure. But all I am saying is that I still got a long way to go, probably like 2500 more retreats like this before I can be a master of my mind. Haha.
The 10 Days of Mind Boot Camp:
Those 10 days were no easy breeze for a lay person like myself pretending to be a nun for the time being even if I was basically just sitting on my butt almost all of my waking hours.
It doesn't sound much but it is an intense process because I was not merely sitting but consuming so much energy concentrating to stay in the moment so I could train my wandering mind to observe the present reality as it is not as I would like it to be, even if the reality felt like my legs were about to rot with no proper circulation and fall off from the acute pain of sitting on a pancake-thin cushion for two hours without moving an inch like a fake bronze buddha statue that you can buy for $49 in Chinatown.
If you have never meditated before, try to sit comfortably in a quiet space for a few minutes to see what your mind does. I'd bet my mom's pension account that your mind starts to wander off to all directions like a wild boar as soon as you sit because that is what the mind likes to do. It usually takes so much effort to tame the wild mind and have it to stay only in the present moment because the mind always likes to attach itself to something that has already happened in the past or something the mind wants to see in the future in order to validate its existence. I have heard that we experience about 60,000 thoughts a day on average. Wow! What an incessant thinking machine that we have installed!
Anyway, back to the meditation.
So what is it like to be meditating for that long for 10 days? Is it not boring, you'd ask. Of course, I often time observed myself becoming bored out of my sanity and started entertaining all kinds of action plans for my creative projects, thinking about what type of tea I'm going to have for the evening tea break, either a caffeinated one to get through the evening discourse without dozing off or a non-caffeinated one to keep it real, or trying to remember the last name of my favorite sweet shop owner that I used to frequent when I was attending kindergarten in Japan because I didn't like to face the reality of sitting on a floor with 100 other people crammed in a dark and cold meditation hall while having to hear the orchestra of burping, sniffing, coughing, farting and other unindentifiable noises.
But when I caught my mind wandering off like that, I acknowledged the fact that I checked out of the reality and let the thoughts go and come back to the present moment. It is called "mirroring of thoughts" in the world of meditation.
Blissful Benefits of Sitting:
But don't get me wrong. The experience was not all that downer-oriented only as I may be making it sound like.
On the contrary, it was more like receiving a plateful of gracious and delicious food for soul that nourished and straightened out my entire being physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Otherwise, why would I have gone back again after finishing my first 10 day retreat back in 2006 where I experienced so much mental and physical discomfort like ungodly pounding headache due to caffeine withdrawal or something to that extent, the knee pain that made me feel completely numb from the waist down, or the undeniable but systematically denied urge to communicate with others to share the agony of sitting for 10 hours a day?
What was it that I was craving for so much that made me go back for even more after having all these seemingly unbearable and undesirable side effects?
I didn't know the answer to this zen-koan-like conundrum before I checked myself in for the second round but it popped up to the surface of my consciousness during one of the 4:30 am sessions.
It was the occasional moment of the piercing silence that reminded me of my own divinity when all the meditators in the meditation hall were in a perfect synchronistic stillness being completely submerged in NOW and experiencing the profound sense of peace and harmony that reside in each one of us no matter how deep it may be buried ordinarily. To be immersed in this timeless piecing silence and to go back to the infinite and celestial Void that I came from was the main reason I went back.
Silence is God and God is silence. It is only in this piercing silence that I find solace in my existence, I glimpse on the glaring clarity shining on my path, and I take refuge in the mystery of the Universe in awe.
Nothing else gets me off like this. Nothing.
What is Vipassana?:
So, what is Vipassana meditation anyway? According to the pamphlet that I got from the center, it is one of India's oldest meditation techniques that was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. Even if it sounds like a Buddhist ritual of some sort and it is from the Theravada Buddhism tradition, but in its pure sense it is kept as a non-sectarian practice and no conversion effort is made during a retreat which works for me because I have little interest in organized religions in general.
"Vipassana" is a Pali (the language Gotama the Buddha spoke) word that means seeing things as they really are, meaning everything that we perceive as solid objects including our bodies are actually just pure energy that is vibrating in and out of existence at a very rapid rate so that our mind thinks that they are solid when it actually never stays the same and it is constantly changing its form.
This concept of impermanent nature of reality is beautifully articulated in one of the most beloved and my personal favorite Buddhist sutras, the Heart Sutra:
"Form is emptiness and emptiness is form."
Vipassana is a tool to purify one's mind through careful self-observation of the senses to have a first hand experience to realize this fact, not as a mere intellectual understanding.
Vipassana also teaches you to maintain a perfect equanimity, which means not to have craving for or aversion from any particular physical or mental sensations that you might experience while meditating because everything is just a transitory phenomena and it seems silly to feel attached to something that impermanent. This realization can be applied to any other situations in life as well and I try to practice it every moment although I find myself out of the loop from time to time.
And I feel okay about it. I am not being attached to producing the condition and that is my excuse. Haha!
During the 10 days of sitting, when I got a blissful and tingling sensation of energy flowing freely through the body from time to time, I could feel my mind trying to grasp onto the pleasant sensation. But when I felt stabbing pain through my legs and butt from sitting for long hours, I could observe my mind wanting to stop the painful experience. But the whole point is to train your mind not to be attached only to pleasant sensations while avoiding unpleasant sensations at all cost because that would create another round of sanskara, which is the cycle of karmic bondage of action and reaction - the bondage of suffering human existence.
So I kept on suffering to break the cycle of suffering.
The Silent Obeserver:
This may sound bizzare to some folks, but it was an empowering experience to continue meditating while calmly observing my mind desperately wanting to bail out of the agonizing pain that was happening in various parts of the body simultaneously but if I didn't react to the craving by moving the body, often times the pain would disappear mysteriously no matter how excruciating it felt before the disappearance.
After having experienced this psychosomatic nature of physical pain, I felt like I had an epiphany, like I have finally seen the man behind the curtain who is diligently, perfectly, and constantly conducting the Dance of the Universe alone. I realize that I was witnessing the Law of Nature in action, that everything is truly impermanent. This experiential awareness would help me maintain equanimity through challenging situations that may surface in life.
Be in Now and be in a perfect equanimity. It is as if I have found a silent and detached observer of my own mind.
Experiencing everything as a silent observer, not being attached to things one way or the other and accepting the reality as it is a beautiful place to be because nothing can go wrong in life when you are in this space no matter what happens. You realize everything is just impersonal happenings and this, too, shall pass. By having this realization, you can enjoy and appreciate everything and everyone in life even more while you are around them knowing you will not be around them forever.
Mastery of Love:
It sounds very aloof, I know. But I feel it takes this level of awareness for detachment to be a true humanitarian who loves everything and everyone as you love yourself, unconditionally and without expecting anything in return.
Being in this clear and spacious consciousness of unconditional love and living from the moment to moment without being distracted by my mind's chatter even when I am bombarded with a continual flow of information, is the ultimate state in where I want to reside. That would afford me to always be "anchored in peace and harmony" as one of the spiritual teachers whom I highly respect, Ramesh S. Balsekar, said in his book called "Peace and Harmony in Daily Living." My dearest friend, Erin Reese, gifted me the book before she departed for India again last August. Thank you, Erin.
So herein lies my biggest attachment:
Mastering to authentically love everything and everyone as I love myself with a perfect awareness of the Law of Nature that everything is impermanent while being anchored in peace and harmony every moment.
Thank you for being here and may you also be anchored in peace and harmony every moment through this timeless journey.
In Love and Gratitude,
Marina Saga
