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loneberry · 8 months

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Baby's First Meditation Retreat

…attention is prayer. —Simone Weil

It would be simpler—the monastic life would be so much simpler. Wake, pray, meditate, do battle with the ego, eat, sleep—live such that everything inessential is stripped away. Why did you come here, I said, I’m tired of living a distracted life, of going through my days in a fog of unawareness.

In Cambridge, MA I attended a meditation retreat. I signed up on a whim, out of a vague feeling that I have lost control of my mind. I have been meditating very casually for the last nine years, mostly using the Calm app, listening to Tara Brach recordings, and attending guided meditations while a grad student. I had come to the practice out of desperation, in the midst of a debilitating depression that made me feel perpetually tormented by my thoughts. During that time, I would voraciously read every study I could find on depression treatments and tried basically every treatment modality out there: neurofeedback, ketamine, therapeutic yoga, medication, CBT, DBT, fish oil, an anti-inflammatory diet, psychedelics, and the “treatment” that ultimately saved me: intensive psychoanalysis four days a week. Meditation seemed a particularly promising and low-risk way to manage depression and anxiety—and yes, it did bring me some relief, working as a kind of supplement to the psychoanalysis. Even though I haven’t been as consistent about it as I would have liked, I continued to practice it regularly, usually for about 10-20 minutes a day. Not once have I regretted meditating, though when life gets busy it’s easy to tell yourself that you just don’t have the time to sit and do nothing, even though we seem to somehow always have the time to mindlessly surf the internet.

What is there to say. I’m just so tired of living on autopilot, of not having to face the moment, to face myself. There are a million ways to blot out one’s internal monologue, filling up our days with the background chatter of podcasts or social media.

The recrudescence of my Simone Weil mania has forced me to reflect on attention—that rare quality of mind which is increasingly in short supply. And yet everything is a matter of attention—not because attention can be instrumentalized to achieve one’s goals. No. Attention is the end in itself. Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” It’s in that second-to-second awareness that reverence for the moment blossoms. The fog is lifting. Here is the trembling world, a cloud passing, the dancing light on the pavement as the sun passes through the rustling leaves of the tree. Weil: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

I landed in Boston late Friday night and early the next morning was off to the Zen center for the silent two-day retreat. I really did not know what to expect when I signed up. I knew a little about the different schools of Buddhism from studying it in a course as an undergrad. I remember being slightly afraid of “Zen” (or Chan) in particular because it seemed so severe to me. I imagined interminable zazen sessions, without guidance or visualizations; imagined slouching pupils getting whacked with sticks for bad posture or falling asleep. Yet surely if I were to test the Buddhist waters, I should do Zen/Chan since it is a specifically Chinese tradition? My father’s uncle was a Buddhist monk who wandered the mountains of China. I don’t know anything about him, other than his sister (my grandma) was devastated when he died after getting hit by a train. Whether it was suicide or just a manic pixie monk moment, I do not know.

Some meditation retreats are completely secular—they are just like a series of long, guided mindfulness sessions, with the context, rituals, and “religious” dimensions stripped away. This was not really that kind of retreat. There were robes, chants in Korean, elaborate meal rituals, and yes, getting whacked with a stick! Of course it is always possible to opt out of getting hit with the keisaku stick—I thought I would, but in the end I took the whacking almost every time it was offered, partly because it jolted me awake and relieved the tension building up in my body from hours and hours of sitting cross-legged on a cushion. The first couple of times the keisaku whacking was administered, I had to restrain myself from laughing. Oh my God, we’re getting whacked by a Buddhist master! In the orientation the instructor said it was for “tension release” but I did feel that it was something like a ritual of submission to the authority of the teacher, even if it didn’t really hurt. Watching how eagerly D. bowed to receive the stick in the orientation, I wondered if the Zen pupils were secretly sadomasochists.

Constitutionally, I am not a “joiner” and have an aversion to organized religion and anything that emits even a whiff of cult vibes. I’ve always been critical of authority and incapable of following rules, possibly because I didn’t have any growing up. But there was something soothing about how regimented everything was. We performed our actions in sync, chanted about emptiness at 4:30am. The whole experience felt almost militaristic, but a part of me enjoyed the austere, disciplinary atmosphere and the obsessive attention to detail. Not disciplinary in a punitive sense, but disciplinary in the way I imagine Russian classical music training to be: the methodical pursuit of self-mastery (it’s hardly surprising that the Zen master I received instruction from was a classically trained pianist). During the retreat I concluded that more discipline would be good for me.

Most of the retreat consisted of meditating in silence. There was no small talk, no psychobabble, no “now we will get started…”—he just hits the wooden clapper three times, and the sitting session starts. No guidance, no body-scan, no loving-kindness prompts. Just you, seated cross-legged on the cushion in silence, facing the tumult of your chaotic mind, your hands in the Dhyana Mudra position, your eyes half-closed.

It is a profound and difficult experience, having to face your own mind…both utterly banal and deeply disturbing, thoughts flitting from “maybe I should try to find a used bicycle on the OfferUp app” to thoughts of my parents’ mortality. I was warned by the Zen teacher that difficult emotions might bubble up. Thrice I broke out into tears and strained to regain my composure. It began during one of the short breaks, when I was lying on a bench outside looking up at the sky, imagining that a passing cloud was a life appearing briefly before dissipating. It was an unmediated confrontation with the eternal flux of the universe—pure panta rhei.

Weil: “Whatever frightful thing may happen, can we desire that time should stop, that the stars should be stayed in their courses? Time’s violence rends the soul: by the rent eternity enters.” Time’s violence has utterly and completely ripped apart my soul. I wanted to hold onto everyone and everything I love, for the stars to be stayed in their courses, for time to stop, for my parents to live forever. I thought about Mari Ruti’s rapid decline and death, about my recent visit to my older brother in prison, and my trip to my relatives’ assisted living home, where my mother’s cousin has been completely waylaid by the rapid onset of Parkinson’s disease. I thought about my father sitting down in the chair looking out the window at the assisted living home, talking about getting old, how his knees ache now. Time’s violence rends the soul.Will I be strong enough to face the eternal flux, the impermanence of everything I love, with a fierceness that borders on madness, grieving even the eventual death of the Sun? Sitting on the cushion meditating, crying: let go. Will I ever be able to let go with grace? Don’t know. Sink into don’t-know mind. Count the breath. Something passes through me.

What did I see, what did I hear—I heard every exhibit of the Museum of Jurassic Technology: the voice imploring us to follow the chain of flowers into the mysteries of life, the burbling waters of the miniature model of Iguazú Falls, a recording of David Wilson talking about exploding dice, the distant echoes of barks in the bestiary room, the mournful sound of the duduk in Djivan Gasparyan’s “Lovely Spring” playing the Sandaldjian room, Monteverdi’s “Lamento della Ninfa” as I ascend the stairs to the sublime courtyard, Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” in the ‘Ecstatic Journey of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’ exhibit (impossible not to see the levitation scene from Tarkovsky’s Solaris when hearing BWV 639), Mihály Víg’s “Valuska” in The Borzoi Kabinet Theater at the end of the day, and the sound of David’s nyckelharpa reverberating in the garden.

Now the birds of the mind are taking flight.

In, out. In, out. Return to the breath.

The mind opening like a door to the sky

a deep purple flower unfolding in the emptiness.

List everything you see, her feet standing on the lotus.

Clear mind

Don’t know.

(In) 1-2-3-4 (out) 5-6-7-8

Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ ἐλέησόν με

The heart

The spherical heart of the manatee

Thoughts and thoughts and thoughts and thoughts

like waves, saturating the swash zone of the mind…

It’s the weekend of the Perseid meteor shower. Eight years ago, Ed and I watched them from the dock of a Maine pond. We had rented an Airbnb from a man with the same name as a dear poet friend of mine, Dana Ward. (I was dreaming of Dana when I woke up this morning.) A week after the Maine trip, I was at the mental hospital. I had forgotten I had a poetry reading. The woman organizing it called, wondering where I was.

Eight years have passed me in the blink of an eye.

Thoughts.

out

In 10-30 second intervals: nothing. Just the space between thoughts.

There were two states of non-self:

one of calm neutrality—just the is-ness of the world.

The other, something more ecstatic:

a mystical amnesia, when you become the contraction and expansion of the breath.

What is there to say about it? In my stead there was a heaving purple cloud floating in a black room.

Then, the “I” coheres again. Head so full of language, thinking about everything I want to write. “I shouldn’t be so attached to my thoughts.” The teacher says in the interview: it’s not about suppression.

Writers are fundamentally hoarders of thoughts. I try to collect each one, as the squirrel does the acorns. In my head I am writing an essay about the antidepressant withdrawals, my astonishment that I did not relapse as David Foster Wallace did when he committed suicide after tapering off his antidepressant. I remember when my thoughts were stuck on the “I want to die” loop, how Ed installed the ad blocker on my internet browser because he was disturbed by the suicide hotline targeted ads. I do not think such thoughts anymore. Maybe it is true—we are not our thoughts. They pass through my mind like water through the sieve. Did Woolf train herself to observe the stream? Too much thinking. I must be doing it wrong. Wrong again—I’m supposed to suspend judgment.

I hear my friend Tim saying, “the mathematics section is the most mystical part of the library.”

Then Weil says, “As soon as we have a point of eternity in the soul, we have nothing more to do but to take care of it, for it will grow of itself like a seed. It is necessary to surround it with an armed guard, waiting in stillness, and to nourish it with the contemplation of numbers…”

Now I’m thinking about the relationship between math and mysticism, about the Indian number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan, who received, in his dreams, thousands of formulas from the Hindu Goddess Namagiri. Ramanujan: “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”

I remember my poem “Umbra,” in which I reference the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck’s strange book, La Clef des Songes (‘The Key of Dreams’). As one commenter puts it: “It’s a book about God. Grothendieck’s thesis is simple. We meet God in dreams. But we aren’t ourselves dreaming God, rather God Himself is dreaming us. Or better: according to Grothendieck ‘a Dreamer’ exists, an external force who ‘dreams our dreams’ and at the same time dreams us. And this force can only be God. … he declares, in a little footnote that it’s almost hidden, that mathematics wasn’t ‘created by God’ nor by man, but by an aspect of God’s nature that, unique among his attributes, is accessible to human reason.”

A week ago, I was telling Alex about Oppenheimer’s mysticism, his proficiency in Sanskrit and intensive study of the Bhagavad Gita, his “feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog.” I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer biopic with Alex—a mathematician/mathematical physicist—and my father—an almost-physicist who immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan to do a physics PhD in Wyoming but dropped out after his first year to move to NYC to wait tables at a Chinese restaurant. After the film, we watched a documentary about Sir Isaac Newton’s heretical theology and alchemical studies, how he read the Bible as a cryptogram and determined the world will end in 2060.

Could there be a connection between mathematics and the capacity for the divine, between the abstraction of mathematical thinking and the ability to sense the invisible, to see the hidden points that connect disparate realms? Wasn’t Einstein a Spinozist?

Scraps of language jostle around in my mind like a shaking bowl of coins. Stupid thoughts like, “Lacan is to psychoanalysis as Zen is to Buddhism.”

I see myself thinking about the news, about geopolitics and the madness of nation states. China is preparing their population for war, as are we. A kind of nausea overcomes me, as I see the whole nuclear age unfurl before me.

We dwell on whatever we expose ourselves to, the articles we read, the people we see, the people we lurk online, the reflex to compare, to repeat the name of the Other like a mantra.

Everything you think you need, you don’t actually need.

A butterfly has somehow flown into the Dharma room. It flits on the floor in the middle of the room. The teacher scoops it up and brings it outside. She corrects my dreadfully sloppy attempt to perform the meal ritual. I panic because I’ve taken too much food and must eat every last crumb. The pear is not ripe, and it is a torture to eat the whole thing. The pear is not ripe—a Zen lesson! Mastication of the unripe pear, a kind of koan.

There was a short break. I decided to walk around Central Square, without a wallet or phone or headphones.

How can I describe the sense of aliveness I felt in that moment, that alert receptivity, when I looked at the sky and saw the birds of Central Square taking flight above the Greek Orthodox Church? I walked up the stairs—some ceremony is taking place inside. Down the streets, there’s a brunch spot I never knew about in the seven years I lived in this town. There’s the sound of a busker, so sweet, and a flower shop I wandered into. There’s the bus stop I would wait at on my way to psychoanalysis. I cross the street. Emanating from a building on Mass Ave is the rhythmic thud of Latin American music—it must be the music-dance sessions my ethnomusicologist friend told me about years ago.

Before dawn on the second day, we perform 108 prostrations. It turns my legs to Jell-O. When I walk up the stairs to use the bathroom, I have to grasp the banister to drag myself up. A few days later I can still barely walk from the soreness caused by the rapid-fire prostrations. Was there something off about my form? I noticed that the others relied more on their arms to hoist themselves up, while I relied almost exclusively on my legs.

And yet I quite enjoy prostrating myself. Outside of any religious or ritual context, I sometimes find myself spontaneously performing prostrations—to what or whom, I do not know. To the earth? I like to kiss the ground, to give thanks to this marvelous rock on which we all dwell.

The interview with the Zen teacher takes a bizarre turn: she asks me questions about DeSantis, in a ‘liberals-trying-to-commiserate’ kind of way. My hatred of DeSantis is bottomless—I had just flown in from Florida the night before the retreat. Please, anything but a DeSantis koan! She asks me if it annoys me that she has been correcting my attempt to execute the meal ritual. I say, No, I don’t mind being an amateur, and crack a joke about being an adult music learner. When the short interview is over, I return to the silence of the Dharma room.

Sitting in silence for long periods is much harder than it looks. Yet the second day feels easier than the first day, despite being on day three of almost no sleep. Toward the end of the retreat, I stare at a spot on the floor, convinced it is a moving bug. It jiggles and jerks, walks in a circle, but always seems to return to the same spot. I can’t stop observing the bug. At the end of the sit, I lean in to get a closer look only to realize it’s not a bug at all, but a dark spot in the wood flooring.

When the retreat is over, there’s the shock of hearing everyone’s voices, of realizing you had projected otherworldliness on people who are just people in the way you are just a person. We sit in a circle and take turns sharing our experiences. I say, “I came on a whim…because I watched YouTube videos about Buddhism with my dad.” We eat vegan pie at the table. The girlfriend of the man sitting next to me has come to meet him, with roses.

I grab my backpack, put on my Blundstones, and leave the center, in the soft afterglow of the mind’s clearing. What did it feel like: I had no desire to look at my phone. Turning on my phone was almost painful, and yet I needed to call the friend I was staying with. I met up with the religious studies poets, felt more present with others, more natural. We tried to go to the Harvard Film Archive to watch Ozu but were turned away for arriving late. We sat on a rooftop terrace to watch the sunset, with a view of the two spires of Harvard Yard, Memorial Church and Memorial Hall. Sun through the leaves, perceived crisply, as though a layer of mediation had been removed.

#meditation #buddhism #Zen Buddhism #mysticism #chan buddhism #mathematics #Simone Weil #attention

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