by Harris, Dan
The outfits aren’t helping this little zombie jamboree. Aesthetically, many of these people seem to be cultivating an aggressive plainness—and in some cases, a deliberate oddness. Their clothes are often mismatched or several decades out of style. One guy is wearing pleated acid-washed jeans.
Breakfast is followed by a break, and then the second sitting of the day.
Even though I’ve retreated to my chair, I am nonetheless besieged by screaming back pain. I still can’t maintain concentration for more than one or two breaths. Perhaps because I’m having some sort of performance anxiety, the meditation is much harder for me here than it is at home. I feel like a rookie who’s been called up to the big leagues and just can’t cut it. I cannot believe I’m going to be sitting in this chair, here in this room, with these people, for the next nine days of my life.
During the first period of walking meditation, I’m at a loss. I have no idea what walking meditation even means, so I decide to just take a stroll. There are lots of animals here: salamanders, baby deer, wild turkeys. They come right up to you, totally unafraid. Apparently the “commitment to non-harming” memo has reached the woodland creatures. And the humans take it very seriously. Last night, I saw a guy in the meditation hall make a big show out of ushering a bug out of the room on a sheet of paper rather than squashing it.
The third sitting is even more of a nightmare. My body has now found a new way to revolt: my mouth keeps filling up with saliva. I’m trying not to move, but this situation is untenable. I can’t sit here with a mouth full of spit. So I swallow. Every time I gulp it down, though, my mouth refills almost immediately. This, of course, completely derails my attempts to establish any rhythm whatsoever with my breath. My interior monologue now centers almost entirely on when the session will end.
Did I just hear the stupid bell?
Is that the bell?
No, it’s not the bell.
Shit.
Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit . . . Shit.
When the bell finally does ring, Goldstein clears his voice to speak. This is the first time we’ll be hearing from the Great Man himself. His voice is deep and booming, yet also has the slight nasal twang of a New York Jew, an accent apparently impervious to years of studying meditation in Asia.
Goldstein begins by setting us straight on walking meditation. “It is not recess,” he intones. In other words, no strolling around and taking in the scenery. The drill is this, he explains: stake out a patch of ground about ten yards long, and then slowly pace back and forth, mindfully deconstructing every stride. With each step, you’re supposed to note yourself lifting, moving, and placing. And repeat. Ad infinitum.
Excellent. So there will be no break from the tedium all day long.
And while Goldstein’s laying down the law, he makes another request. When each seated meditation session is finished, he wants us to wait to leave the hall until after all of the teachers have filed out. This, he says, would be more “decorous.”
Over lunch in a room filled with zombies, most of them chewing with their eyes closed, a giant wave of sadness rolls over me. I feel all alone and utterly trapped. The sheer volume of time left in this ordeal looms over my head like a mile of ocean water. It feels like the desperate homesickness I experienced every summer as a kid when my parents dropped me off at sleepaway camp.
Also, I feel stupid. Why am I here, when I could be spending this time on a beach with Bianca? She and I had had a few tense chats about this retreat. She wanted to be supportive of my “spiritual” quest, but it was hard not to be resentful of my using up ten days of vacation to go meditate, especially given how little time off I get. Furthermore, at least when I travel to someplace like Papua New Guinea or the Congo, I can call her every day, assuming I can get a signal. Here, I’m completely sequestered.
And now I’m sitting in this room full of strangers, thinking: I shouldn’t have come here. I’m such an idiot.
As the wash of sadness and regret crests, I am able to muster some mindfulness, to see my feelings with some nonjudgmental remove. I tell myself that it’s just a passing squall. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does keep the demons at bay.
In the next walking meditation period, I stake out my strip of land on the stone patio in front of the meditation hall, then pace slowly back and forth, trying to note each component of my stride. Lift, move, place. Lift, move, place. If a civilian were to stumble upon all of us yogis out here walking in slow motion, they’d probably conclude that a loony bin was having a fire drill.
Back on the cushion, I’m waging a Sisyphean battle, trying to roll the boulder of concentration up a never-ending hill. I’m straining to focus on my breath, gripping at it like it’s a rope hanging off the side of a cliff. I’m no match, though, for the pageant of pain, fatigue, and saliva. I find it humiliating—infuriating, really—that after a year of daily meditation, I cannot get a toehold here. Every instance of mental wandering is met with a tornadic blast of self-flagellation.
In.
Out.
I wonder if they’ll have more of that fresh bread at dinner?
Damn, dude.
In.
Did someone actually invent and patent the sneeze guard or, like math and language, was it devised in several disconnected civilizations, more or less simultaneously?
Idiot.
Incompetent.
Irretrievably, irrevocably, irredeemably stupid.
By the time the evening dharma talk begins, I’m feeling utterly defeated.
Goldstein and his crew process into the chamber, with Goldstein leading the way with giant, magisterial strides. He sits at the center of the altar; all the other teachers array themselves around him in their meditative positions, eyes closed.
Goldstein is trying to figure out how to put on the wireless headset. It’s the kind of microphone singers wear in concert so their hands can be free as they caper around the stage. Once he has it on, he says, “I feel like a rock star.”
A woman sitting behind me says reverently under her breath, “You are.”
As he starts his talk, I realize he’s infinitely less austere than he seemed in the hothouse of the meditation session. He’s actually funny, with a delivery that reminds me of those borscht belt comedians with names like Shecky.
He’s talking about the power of desire in our minds, and how our culture conditions us to believe that the more pleasant experiences we have—sex, movies, food, shopping trips, etc.—the happier we’ll be. He reads out some advertising slogans he’s collected over the years:
“Instant gratification just got faster. Shop Vogue-dot-com.”
Everyone laughs.
“Another slogan says, ‘I don’t let anything stand in the way of my pleasure.’ ”
“The best one of all,” he says, pausing for effect, in a wait-for-it kind of way, chuckling to himself as he lets our curiosity build.
“ ‘To be one with everything . . . you need one of everything.’ ”
The zombies erupt, as Goldstein lets out a series of gentle, high-pitched honks.
He goes on to answer one of my biggest questions, the one about Buddhism’s vilification of desire. It’s not that we can’t enjoy the good stuff in life or strive for success, he says. The key is not to get carried away by desire; we need to manage it with wisdom and mindfulness. Quite helpfully, he adds that he is by no means perfect on this score. He tells a story about his early years of intensive meditation in India in the 1960s. “My practice was going quite well, and the mind was quite concentrated. And it’s the kind of sitting where you think you’re going to get enlightened any minute,” he says with, I think, tongue in cheek. He explains that, at teatime at this retreat center, the yogis would be given a small cup of tea and a little banana. “So I’m sitting there, about to get enlightened and the tea bell rings.” Comic pause. “Enlightenment or banana?” Another pause. He’s cracking himself up again. “More often than not, go for the banana.”
The humor is a relief.
As is his love for the material. After a day of wondering whether sitting and watching my breath is perhaps the stupidest conceivable pursuit, Goldstein’s talk is a welcome reminder of Buddhism’s intellectual superstructure. His enthusiasm is palpable and infectious. He discusses verses from the Buddha like a sommelier rhapsodizing over a 1982 Bordeaux.
“In one discourse, he captured the whole game in just a few words. These lines, if you heard these lines in the right way, you could get enlightened,” he says, chuckling again. “So here’s your chance . . .”
He’s talking about a verse where the Buddha calls everything we experience—sights, sounds, smells, etc.—the “terrible bait of the world.”
“It’s . . . an amazing statement,” he says. “Moment after moment, experiences are arising, and it’s as if each one has a hook . . . and we’re the fish. Do we bite? Or do we not bite, and just swim freely in the ocean?”
I’m thinking: Yes, right—there is a point to sitting around all day with your eyes closed: to gain some control over the mind, to see through the forces that drive us—and drive us nuts.
As he deconstructs various parts of the Buddhist scriptures, it strikes me that Goldstein is what you get when a brainy, intense Jew like my father decides to build an entire career out of Buddhism. I assume Goldstein’s parents would have preferred him to be a lawyer or a doctor, but instead he’s basically become a Talmudic scholar of Buddhism. And somehow, that accent, so much like my dad’s, makes me like him even more.
As the speech goes on, however, he starts to lose me. Earlier, he was joking about enlightenment, but now he’s speaking without irony about rebirth, karma, “purifying the mind” and achieving “liberation.” He closes by saying that the dharma “leads to calm, ease, and Nibbana.” (An alternate pronunciation of Nirvana.)
Oy. Way to ruin a great talk.
At the end of the last sitting of the day, another unpleasant surprise: more chanting. This time, it’s the metta chant, where we send “loving-kindness” to a whole series of “beings,” including our parents, teachers, and “guardian deities.” We wish for everyone to experience the End of Suffering.
It occurs to me that perhaps the quickest way for me to achieve the End of Suffering would be to go home.
Day Three
I have a line running through my head from Chappelle’s Show, indisputably the funniest show in the history of television. In one of the sketches, Dave Chappelle appears in a “Hip-Hop News Break” as “Tron,” a “Staten Island man” who has been brutally attacked by members of the rap group the Wu-Tang Clan. Lying in a hospital bed surrounded by reporters, he says the rappers had sewn his anus shut and “kept feeding me and feeding me and feeding me.”
“It was torture—straight torture, son.”
That phrase—“straight torture, son”—keeps bouncing through my skull as I rotate, with the rest of the zombies, between sitting meditation, the Ministry of Silly Walks routine, and waiting in line at the dining hall to fill our bowls with grains and greens. I’m flat-out loathing this experience.
Late morning, I’m lingering, bored, in front of the message board in the foyer outside the meditation hall. With a frisson of excitement, I notice there’s a note for me. It’s from Goldstein. In neat, handwritten script on a small, white sheet of paper, he suggests we meet in about an hour. As the note explains, yogis are supposed to have regular interviews with the teachers, to discuss our practice. Since I didn’t get on his schedule today, he’s carving out some extra time. Around here, this is the closest you’ll get to a thrill.
At the appointed hour, I’m at the main office, taking off my shoes and pushing open the screen door. I pad into the carpeted room, where Goldstein is using his unreasonably long arms to pull an office chair directly in front of the big, fluffy love seat he’s planning to occupy. He pats the office chair, indicating I sit down.
One-on-one, he’s even looser than he was during the dharma talk. As is my wont, I pepper him with biographical questions. Turns out he was raised in the Catskills, where his parents owned a hotel for Jews from New York City. This explains his comic timing; he literally grew up in the borscht belt.
I feel privileged to have this audience, but also mildly stressed. I have a million questions, and yet I don’t want to overstay my welcome. He has a clock prominently displayed on the little table next to his chair, just like Dr. Brotman has on his desk.
I start with the most acute problem. “My mouth is filling with saliva all the time and it’s messing up my ability to concentrate.”
He laughs and assures me that, for some reason, this seems to happen to a lot of meditators. I find this enormously comforting. He suggests I give myself permission to swallow. Don’t fixate on it, he advises, or it’ll get worse. He says his mother—“a very intense woman”—used to have the same problem, except she refused to swallow, not wanting to cave to her urges, and would let it all run down the front of her dress. I am dying to hear how he convinced his Jewish mother to meditate, but I don’t have that kind of time.
He asks how my practice is going, generally. Not wanting to reveal the full extent of my despair, I allow that I’ve had some low moments, but then add that even as I was experiencing those moments, I knew they would pass. He smiles wide, slaps his knees, and says, “That’s the whole game!” It’s another useful reminder of why we’re here: to learn how to not get carried away by the clatter of the mind.
After fifteen minutes, I figure I’ve used up all of my time. The meeting was brief, but hugely satisfying. This guy really is a gem, a mensch. He’s like an emissary sent down every back alley and cul-de-sac of the mind, so that the rest of us can tell him our problems and he can say, “Oh yeah, I’ve been there, and here’s how you deal with it.”
This era of good feelings is brief. In one of the midafternoon seated meditation sessions, a teacher named Spring takes the podium and announces that today “We’re going to try something different.”
Spring, who appears to be in her thirties, is the embodiment of everything that most bothers me about the meditation world. She’s really working that speaking-softly thing. Every s is sibilant. Every word is overenunciated. She wears shawls. She’s probably really militant about recycling.
She says we’re going to do metta or loving-kindness meditation, which sounds like it will fall foursquare into the category of Things I Will Definitely Hate. Here’s how it works: we are supposed to picture a series of people in our minds and then, one by one, send them well wishes. You start with yourself, then move to a “mentor,” a “dear friend,” a “neutral person,” a “difficult person,” and then “all beings.” Interestingly, she says not to pick someone to whom you’re attracted. “Too complicated,” she says. So I guess Bianca will not be on the receiving end of the good vibes.
I am immediately convinced that this exercise will never, ever have any meaning for me. Even Saccharine Spring acknowledges it might feel a little forced, although she insists it has the potential to “change your life.”
The one good thing about metta meditation is that, since we’re supposed to be physically comfortable while generating these good vibes, we’re allowed to lie on the floor. I would treat this as a free period, except I really did promise myself to play full-on. I lie down and prepare to love hard.
We start with ourselves. Spring instructs us to generate a vivid mental picture of ourselves, and then repeat four phrases. As she says them aloud, her speaking style elevates to an entirely new level of cloying. She draws out the last syllable of every word in an almost Valley Girl–esque drawl.
May you be happy.
May you be safe and protected from harm.
May you be healthy and strong.
May you live with ease.
I get that, just like regular meditation is designed to build our mindfulness muscle, metta is supposed to boost our capacity for compassion, but all this exercise is doing for me is generating feelings of boredom, disdain, and insufficiency. It makes me question m
y generosity of spirit. If I was a good person, wouldn’t I be suffused with love right now? If I was a good husband, wouldn’t I be on the beach with Bianca? Thank you for that, Spring.
Day Four
Today is my thirty-ninth birthday. I am confident it will be the worst birthday ever.
The morning meditation is an epic battle with sleepiness. I can feel fatigue oozing down my forehead. I am overcome by the desire to burrow into this fuzzy oblivion.
The next sitting is a festival of pain, saliva, coughing, and fidgeting. My heart pounds. I feel shame and anger as I swallow, snort, and shift in my chair. Heat rushes to my cheeks. I must be driving the people near me crazy. I try to be mindful of it all, but I’m starting to forget what mindfulness even means. Straight torture, son.
Off the cushion, my misery is also intensifying. Most of my thoughts center on how I can possibly survive six more days here. I recognize that part of the goal of a retreat is to systematically strip away all of the things we use—sex, work, email, food, TV—to avoid a confrontation with what’s been called “the wound of existence.” The only way to make it through this thing is to reach some sort of armistice with the present moment, to drop our habit of constantly leaning forward into the next thing on our agenda. I just can’t seem to do it, though.
I wonder if the others can tell that I’m struggling. Everyone else here seems so serene. I mean, there are some ostentatiously mindful people here. There’s one guy staying on my floor who I have literally never seen moving in anything but slow motion.
I really thought it would be easier by now. This is way worse than jet lag. I’m starting to worry that I’m going to have to come home and tell everyone—Bianca, Mark, Sam—that I failed.
I do the last walking meditation session of the night in the upstairs area, above the meditation hall. I’m struggling to stay focused on lifting, moving, placing, with my mind wandering variously to thoughts of watching TV, eating cookies, and sleeping. At the end of one back-and-forth, I look up and see a statue of the Buddha. Silently, I send him the following message: Fuck you.