Updates:
23.5.07: If the issues touched upon here resonate with you, I urge you to go and read a wonderful piece by a rather new blogfriend of mine at Smoke and Ash. The work of a talented writer and drawing on her professional expertise, it is also searingly personal and immediate - one of those blogposts that fill me with recognition, with a sense of being met, and with renewed joy that I happened to stumble into this particular corner of the online world.
24.5.07: and more (!) by another fine writer, Lucy at Box Elder, who writes movingly about her personal history in a related, but quite different, vein. This is why I blog. Thank you both for reminding me!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't look for anything 'special' in meditation. Pretty much from the first time I did it (or sat down and stopped doing) it just felt like something I could and should be doing, like eating and sleeping and talking - now I knew about it, a vital and natural part of life. Sure, I knew about djannas, states of enhanced pleasure, ecstasy, supposedly accessible to those who meditate a lot. Once or twice, as a beginner, I seemed to come close to a 'blissed out' state. I remember one time in particular, a hot summer day and I had a wretched cold; for a few moments I seemed to emerge above the discomfort and fever, and thought, 'Wow!'. But it really isn't about the wow factor. As time passed I had fewer moments like that, or else I got used to them and didn't pay much attention. So I don't want to say that last week's retreat was 'good' or 'bad' meditation, more or less significant than usual. Evaluation implies a standing outside my own experience, a dualism, separation, of which meditation is the very opposite.
Nonetheless, I wanted to try and articulate something about it, because it was something. The weather, the countryside were not it. They surrounded and held it. They were the container around the container which was people, but which wasn't it either. I don't want to say that this was the best, was progress, a culmination, after nearly a decade of a daily sitting practice that comes and goes over the months and years and of going away a couple of times every year to short, weekend or week-long retreats. I don't even want to say that this was a new stage, a clearer view.
So what can I say? Well, the retreat was led by a teacher new to me, Maura Sills, though I'd long been hearing about her work - a teacher whose primary emphasis perhaps comes the closest yet to what brought me to the practice and keeps me there. At the very beginning of her opening talk on Friday evening, Maura said something that made my ears prick up. The teachers' talks, I must admit, are not usually the heart of a retreat for me, although I value the wise and gentle words of all the many Buddhist teachers I have met at Gaia House and elsewhere, their ability to speak without notes because, however much they've thought about it beforehand, it is from the heart, from this moment. My life is nearly all words: reading, writing, thinking, processing, talking - whatever it is, I've read a book about it... or I'll go and read one right now. Meditation is beyond words. It's the one thing I have apprehended mostly non-verbally, experientially. So it's sitting with others, or with a teacher, that I value more than the teacher's words. But Maura's opening words made a deep impression on me. She spoke of her mission to teach us how to open up to our capacity to be affected.
Shock waves ran through me. All my life I've been told, and told myself, over and over, that I'm too much, too easily, affected; that this is a misfortune, an overwhelming disability when it comes to surviving, never mind thriving on the bombardment that is modern life. As a small child, I screamed. The 'terrible twos' went on and on. The will and the demands of my mother affected me so much, I couldn't turn them off, couldn't turn away, couldn't let them wash over me as a more resilient child might have learned to do. As I grew, everything affected me strongly. I raged and raged and then, one day, tired of it all, grew quiet and turned to passive resistence. My teachers, I imagine, saw a bright child who couldn't cope, too overwhelmed by life to summon the grace and ease expected of a bright child, who glared back in stubborn distress and metaphorically placed my hands over my ears - too affected by everything to function. "It's such a pity about people like you", said one exasperated form teacher. Too much affected. It took me well into middle age to stop trying to be different and start trying to do better at being myself: well, what is being too affected good for, then? for dreaming, writing, meditation, being a good listener - quite a few things, in fact.
A word, a concept, then, that makes me sit up and take notice. I was sitting up already, on my meditation cushion, when Maura said it. She went on to speak of things I've heard many a Theravadin Buddhist teacher speak of, each in their own way, of the cultivation of mindfulness, of the strength, compassion and healing to be found in pure awareness. And then she spoke of that awareness as a capacity to feel, to be together, to be affected, of awareness of the body and this moment and the ground beneath you that perhaps - not through effort, but through the awareness itself - may touch the awareness of the person next to you, of all those around you. She spoke of the awareness we all share, which she called the 'relational field'. I gulped. She was talking about trying to open up more, not less. Not opening up through social skills, the right words and actions. Opening up through the senses, the awareness, the capacity to be affected. I gulped.
We sat some more. We went to bed. We got up early and sat again. I spent an hour scrubbing earth-encrusted potatoes straight from the garden and still have a callous on my index finger to prove it. We passed the weekend sometimes sitting quietly in a big circle of all twenty-five of us, sometimes sitting in pairs, or walking in pairs, or sitting in smaller circles, placing our attention and goodwill in our bodies, in our grounding, in the space we shared. Shared silence is always powerful. Other people meditating around you is always powerful. This time, we felt outwards towards one another and into our shared space just a bit more intentionally than I had ever done before. I wasn't sure if anything was going on. I tried not to speculate, not to try too hard, to suspend disbelief, like when reading a novel, but not to tell myself a story, to suspend the story-telling too.
The weekend seemed longer than two days, or out of time. Retreats at Gaia House are always in silence, from the first session until the last meal. It rained and the sun shone, rained and the sun shone. I scrubbed more potatoes and chopped some tofu into cubes. So hard. So soft. We sat, separately, together, in silence, and the sun and the clouds were alternately reflected through the tall windows onto the floor of the meditation hall.
In our final session together, on Sunday morning, we split into five small circles, and each of us, while we sat in meditation, took a turn at sitting for a few minutes in the centre of our circle. Not much was happening. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes, I could feel the others around me. Sometimes not. I took my turn in the middle, and came out again. As the last person moved into the centre, I was - well, affected, I suppose. A whoosh of energy.
Sometimes I feel this gently in my head, between my eyes, during sitting meditation. A clenching and unclenching. All my cells shifting. For a moment: pure energy, then solid again. I've felt it more strongly when receiving cranio-sacral therapy. The tiny touch of the therapist's fingertips - no heavier, they say, than the smallest coin - and a rush of something shifting, not beneath the touch, but elsewhere in the body. My jaw realigned itself once, by what felt like half an inch, at the lightest of touches on the opposite temple.
This was something like that, but in my heart. A flash, a strong sensation of pressure, a distant cry of "Mummy! Daddy!", something long frozen and blocked rushing briefly into hot life and connection, my heart beating furiously, then subsiding into quiet tremors. We took a break after that, but I was still sitting there.
I have a dreadful urge to say something cynical or deflating at this point. I'm resisting. I want to do this again. This is not weird stuff. It could be just... normal, if priorities were different.
