In mid-April I went back to school for the sesshin (silent meditation retreat) we are required to do each year. This one was seven days. On the plane, I was sitting in the last row, which might be safer, but any sense of security was somewhat eroded by being able to hear every word the flight attendants said to each other, which turned out to be about how much they hate turbulence! One said, “It lasted for thirty minutes. I was in the galley praying.”
Arriving in Albuquerque, I thought of something a teacher said in a dharma talk last year: “We want the entire web of causes and conditions from beginningless time to be different so our elbow won’t itch.” I want everything from beginningless time to be different so the air won’t be bumpy, but the truth is, the air is bumpy, and tensing up doesn’t make it less so. This time, I thought, “So it is. If these actually are my last few minutes of life, how do I want to spend them? Can I relax in this situation of turbulence?” I decided to spend them listing the things I am grateful for, the things I love. (I also reminded myself, “I will not infect others with fear.”)
The next day, sitting on my cushion in the zendo, I wondered why I have to think it’s my final five minutes of life in order to devote myself wholeheartedly to gratitude practice, or to metta, or to accepting what is. What’s stopping me from doing that even if I have years to live?
Also, I realized that I probably haven’t been taking refuge in dharma literally enough. I think of dharma as the truth—how things actually are; what a lovely idea!—but I then don’t recognize the pain in my shoulder or turbulence while flying as instances of how things actually are and instead categorize them as aberrances or interruptions of some sort.
Last year, I sat on a folding chair with no cushion, which got to be painful after a day or two, so I spent some time in the intervening year trying to find the right cushion for sesshin. The custom sewing person at a meditation supplies place agreed to make me a cushion, which turned out to be perfect. That part of my anatomy was free from pain.
Despite not getting anywhere near enough sleep during sesshin, I made a point of getting up early enough to stretch for 20 minutes or so before the first sit (which began at 6 a.m.), and so there were only two or three sits where I had significant physical pain, and I noticed that I could tune into the vibrating or pulsing nature of the pain immediately, which has sometimes in the past taken days to notice. When I can feel that something is pulsing, it means that it’s “Worse, worse, worse” but also and equally “Better, better, better.”
In the morning on the second to the last full day of sesshin, after many, many neutral to unpleasant moments of sitting, there was suddenly a light, buoyant feeling in my body, which once again reminded me that the suffering is not in the sensations but in the effort to ward them off. Once the mind has softened enough to accommodate whatever is happening, the suffering is gone. Naturally, as soon as I had this experience, I expected to have it at every sit for the remainder of the sesshin, and of course did not. Nonetheless, it was such a powerfully expansive experience that it completely made up for everything else.
As always, accepting what is was a challenge. As I traveled to school in a shuttle, the driver pointed out a controlled burn ahead, deliberately set to decrease the possibility of wildfire. This burn plunged us into about 18 hours of thick smoke, much worse than anything I’ve encountered in San Francisco the past couple of years, which sends me running for an N-95 mask and firing up my HEPA air filter. I was glad when the smoke cleared the following day, and chagrined when I returned the house where I was staying to find it full of smoke: incense lit by fellow students. Thankfully, one of our teachers said he would ask them to refrain, but by then, others in the house had warmed to the idea of burning incense, and I had to ask two other people to stop. One of them was a 15-year-old who was there with his mother. One evening, someone did laundry late at night and the washer malfunctioned, making a terrible noise and setting off a repeating beeping signal. I got up to ask the launderer (the 15-year-old’s mother) please to do laundry before sleeping hours.
When I met with one of the teachers for a practice discussion, I said that I was feeling miserable: tired, cold, and like a bad person for so frequently finding myself incapable of not telling another person not to do something. I confess that part of me seriously thought my teacher was going to say, “You are a bad person! Stop telling people what to do!” Instead, he kindly observed that I was also treating myself with unkindness, and gently advised trying on grandmotherly mind. In regard to feeling miserable, he reminded me about Frank Ostaseski’s advice to ask ourselves, “What else is here?”
That was really helpful. I had started the sesshin using the sensations in my feet as my anchor. That was right for that time. But later, it began to feel too constricted, and it seemed to exclude noticing emotions—to be a form of aversion—so then it was right to open up to the rest of my body, and to emotions. And then at some point, that was too much stimulation, and it was right to ask myself what else was here and to let my attention rest on more neutral areas in my body. It was a good reminder about upaya—that what is best changes from moment to moment. (That word means “skillful means.”)
As for my misbehaving fellow yogis, I wrote the 15-year-old a note saying I hoped I hadn’t made him feel bad. After he read the first two words, he threw his arms around me and gave me a long, long hug. His mother was entirely kind and apologetic about the laundry noise. The other incense burner gave me a card at the end of sesshin apologizing for not always being careful about the rules and saying she hopes to do better. Instead of people hating me because I asked them not to do this or that, I was showered with love. It was a humbling, powerful experience of sangha.
For logistical reasons, we had our oryoki meals in the dining room instead of in the zendo. We sat in groups of five or six at tables, which went surprisingly smoothly, and afforded a nice family feeling. Last year, I particularly hated oryoki, I think due to the constant feeling I was doing something wrong (and partly because of the fear I would choke on a piece of spinach). This year, with more familiarity and with the family seating, I found the meals quite enjoyable.
The person sitting across from me got about ninety-nine percent of it wrong, often seeming petulant, and often failing to bow to me when she was “supposed” to (never mind holding her hands in gassho while I was applying gomashio to my food; in vain did our table leader, a resident at the center, try to get her to do that). One day, our leader was trying to help her tie up her bowls for the umpteenth time, and I saw that the end of her cloth was pointing toward herself rather than away, which meant her bow would fail. I reached to gently tug the tip of her napkin into workable position, and she whisper-snarled at me, “He’s my teacher!” After the end of sesshin, someone else who had sat at that table said she had felt challenged by this person’s attitude. I was pleased to be able to say, honestly, that she really didn’t bother me. I could see she was doing the best she could on all fronts, and obviously her behavior was not about me. While she might conceivably have appreciated my trying to help her get her bow right, it was also true that my help was unsolicited, so I didn’t take it to heart.
This same person was sitting next to me in the zendo and was a perfect neighbor. She rarely moved a muscle, she was utterly silent, and she did not emanate any kind of displeasing smell (e.g., laundry detergent). When I thanked her at the end, she just gave me a strange look and didn’t respond. At the closing council, when I asked for forgiveness from anyone I had harmed, I noticed she was smiling a little smile and got the feeling she was thinking, “I’m glad you apologized for all the terrible things you did to me!” Who knows what she was actually thinking? People are funny, aren’t they? Thinking of her, I smile. In the end, the sesshin was about people: the ones I liked, the one or two I didn’t, the ones who annoyed me, the ones I annoyed, and the qualities of forgiveness and generosity that ultimately enfolded us all.
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