by Jaimal Yogis
“I live here,” she said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
She laughed and gave me a friendly punch in the gut.
Vella was a fast-talking, bald-headed New Yorker I’d done a yoga-teacher training with a few years earlier. The training was at an Orthodox ashram led by the great Indian yogi Baba Hari Dass. And at the time, Vella had just been testing the whole yoga scene. Now she looked to have drunk the Kool-Aid: sandalwood malas wrapped around her wrists, a Tibetan shawl draped over her shoulders, the standard red string around the neck that meant you’d been blessed by a high lama.
I teased her about her new look—“No Sanskrit tattoos yet?”—but Vella looked fantastic. Her dark eyes had that shimmer of depth and true health. Her smile beamed. Even her skin was radiant. But she hadn’t lost her wit.
“You look amazing,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said. “You look awful.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Tough times,” I said.
“Ladies?”
“What other force could be so destructive?”
(Vella was gay, which made me feel like she could relate to my problem even more.)
“You need tea,” she said.
We wove around a crowd of prostrating pilgrims, then descended the stairs to a small tea house, part of the monastery, that smelled like fresh noodles and cardamom. Over dumplings and chai, Vella summarized her story of the last three years. She’d thought she was going to the yoga-teacher training to get some work-life balance from her stressful finance career. But yoga had introduced her to meditation, meditation to Tibetan Buddhism, “and now pretty much all I do is follow lamas around Asia,” she said. “Yep, full-time junkie. No job. No relationship. Nothing. And, Jaimal, I am so, so, so happy.”
I believed Vella. Her face said it all. And as I listened, I had the peculiar sense of looking at the me that could have been.
About three years earlier, when we’d done our yoga training, Vella had been the one in class asking questions like, “How do we find time to do yoga and meditate every day? I mean, I work hard.” Or, “Is it OK to drink coffee before and after yoga?”
Meanwhile, I had ended up at the training to find a way to readjust into the world after living in the Ch’an monastery. I felt grateful I didn’t even comprehend Vella’s stress. But three years later, here I was hustling to get credentials for a journalism career and to chase Sati. And though I was doing a bit better since meeting Sonam, on balance, I still felt fairly awful. According to Vella, I also looked half-dead. Vella had done the opposite, and she looked like she’d been drinking from the same grail as our old guru Baba Hari Dass. In his nineties as I write this, the man still looks like he should be modeling for anti-wrinkle cream ads.
I told Vella about Sati, and refreshingly, she didn’t give advice.
“Relationships,” she shrugged. “You need to go on retreat. Now.”
I didn’t see Vella after that brief tea. She was shipping off to be a translator for a lama in Nepal. But much of my family hails from New York, and something about Vella’s hit of spiritual Brooklyn made me trust her. The very next day, I went on retreat.
The Vipassana meditation center I went to was run out of a yurt in a smaller town above McLeod called Bhagsunath. It was as basic as it gets: dirt floors, a single image of the Buddha on a wooden table, old military-style canvas tents with cots to sleep on.
Based on the Buddhist system of dana (giving), the retreat center also didn’t charge a dime for food or lodging, which helped me breathe easier the minute I walked in. The funds from my student loans were so low the one-dollar-per-night charge at Radhika’s was starting to make a dent.
Vipassana—which means “insight” in Pali—is a system of meditation built on the Buddha’s teachings in the Satipatthana Sutta, a text from which the notion of mindfulness seems to have originated. The opening lines summarize the thrust:
A monk, having gone to the forest, to the foot of a tree or to an empty place, sits down with his legs crossed, keeps his body erect and his mindfulness alert. Ever mindful he breathes in, mindful he breathes out. Breathing in a long breath, he knows, “I am breathing in a long breath”; breathing out a long breath, he knows, “I am breathing out a long breath”; breathing in a short breath, he knows, “I am breathing in a short breath”; breathing out a short breath, he knows, “I am breathing out a short breath.”
In other words, you witness what’s in front of you— breath, sensation, thoughts, feelings—without trying to change what’s in front of you. That sounds almost ridiculously easy, so easy it would be pointless to mention. But scientists now know that doing this simple act every day has an incredible number of great side effects: it increases immune function, decreases pain and inflammation, increases positive emotion, decreases depression, and on and on. Doctors are now prescribing mindfulness for everything from back pain to postpartum depression. But for early Buddhists the point was not only getting better grades, fewer colds, and feeling a little happier. It was to actually end suffering—like, for good. Thoughts create our reality, went the thinking, and suffering is an experience in the mind. Master your thoughts—or simply let them be without constant reactions and identification—and you master reality. You master being.
I liked Vipassana and the Theravada school of Buddhism it arose out of. This early sect of Buddhism laid the foundation of all Buddhist meditation. But Theravada—which means “way of the ancients” and thrives especially in places like Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia—tends to be slightly more relaxed than that hard-core Chinese approach I’d been trained in. Chinese culture prides itself on the ability to endure hardship, and I had a wee chip on my shoulder as I strolled into this mountain yurt. The schedule called for eight hours of meditation per day, and sitting practice finished at 9:00 p.m. This is a lot. But compared to our old Ch’an schedule, it was like running a half marathon instead of the full twenty-six.
I’d forgotten, however, that when you’ve been running around in the bustle of everyday life—movies, emails, friends, family, music for distractions—stopping those distractions cold turkey is shocking. Suddenly you’re alone in a strange place—your mind. For what seems like way, way too long.
The moment the retreat bell dinged, my mind came up with infinite excuses about why I should be anywhere but alone with it in a yurt at eight thousand feet in India.
“I should be writing!” I told myself on day one. “I’ll never get into grad school now! Sati will have been right to leave me—a failure.”
On day two, my Ch’an ego took the wheel again: “These teachers are weak. I should be in China, not India.”
On day three, I developed a crush on a United Nations worker who was volunteering at a nearby refugee camp, and I spent the entire day fantasizing about how I might approach her when we were allowed to talk again. Soon I’d even played out a passionate romance and happy life together—two children, a cottage in Bali, a successful crusade against world hunger.
But on day four, I abandoned this fantasy and began stewing about the teacher, an elderly Indian man, for telling me not to do yoga during the retreat.
“Simply do the meditation,” he said. “The practice is all you need.”
I smiled, but was thinking, And all you need to do is remember we’re in the middle of the fucking Himalayas! I think a little yoga is OK. (I was carrying around a lot of anger.)
By day five, I began to settle into the practice and felt just on the cusp of some good old-fashioned retreat peace. But when the pitch and chop of the mind begin to settle, when you sink into the still depths, you occasionally find the tentacled creatures that live down there.
On day six, I got hit with a memory of Sati and me in Hawaii. It was a simple image. Just us with our feet in a tide pool near Hilo, giggling and about to go for a snorkel. She was wearing a gold one-piece bathing suit and was joking about jellyfish and how locals had told her to pee on herself if one stung her.
It wasn’t much. But
for whatever reason, surrounded by a thick crowd of mindful breathers, each sorting through their infinite psychological knots, I began to convulse. I began to sob.
I restrained myself enough not to sob for the rest of the hour—wasn’t I supposed to be a zen warrior here?—but when the bell rang, I ran out to my tent, plunged my head in my pillow, and bawled like I had never bawled before. I cried for an hour straight, a sort of wheezing tantrum that I didn’t even think was possible anymore.
At the end, I felt better and assumed that it was over.
“Minor technical difficulty,” I tried to say with subtle glances to my neighbors, especially the United Nations woman.
But during the next sit, it happened again.
Then again.
Then again.
Meditate. Cry. Meditate. Scream and punch pillow. Meditate. Weep until donkey grunts and hiccups set in.
Silent retreat had become weeping retreat.
In those early Ch’an retreats, I’d had this vague notion that meditation was all about cutting off emotion with razor-sharp focus—about getting tough on pain, which was ultimately a mental illusion. And before meeting Sonam, I would have forced myself to stop crying. I would have sucked it up and soldiered on. But in the midst of my sobbing, hokey as it may sound, I felt as if Sonam was coaching me from the sidelines: “Ja-ma, look! Dis bery sad, noooo problem. Big sad berrrry OK!”
So I tried to follow my coach. I tried to just let the sadness be. And it was interesting. Once I stopped being angry at myself for not being enlightened, for being a human with feelings, the crying and sobbing and pounding ceased to be so bad. I wouldn’t have minded if they left and never came back, but still, while bleating and hiccuping, if I surrendered, the wave of emotion became a surge more akin to unrestrained laughter than to depression. It was actually strangely pleasant.
And the more the tears were allowed to flow, the more the sobbing shifted away from Sati. There I’d be, head in pillow, but I was also an eleven-year-old boy watching Mom collapse by the sink as Pa said he was leaving the marriage. I was a six-year-old at a new kindergarten, terrified to speak to the other kids who looked so easy and carefree. I was a fifteen-year-old getting high and caught in another stupid lie that was hurting someone I loved.
I’d never cried about any of it. I’d taken up the torch of our military family and spent my whole life soldiering through grief, flipping the bird at sadness as if it was weakness. But Sonam had revealed a truth so obvious it was the easiest to miss: you couldn’t run away from sadness any more than a river can run uphill.
Life was sad. Really sad. Loss. Sickness. Cruelty. Death. There was no way around it. But sadness, when it was allowed to be itself, was strangely not sad. Sadness was just sadness. Tears just salt water.
5
When you begin to question your dream, awakening will not be far away.
—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming still.
—Herman Melville, Mardi
Pema Chodron, an American nun in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, tells a story about Milarepa, one of the most revered Tibetan sages, who lived during the twelfth century. One night, Milarepa came back to his meditation cave and found a horde of demons.
“He had the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind,” Chodron writes, “all the unwanted parts of himself.” But he still didn’t know how to get rid of them.
At this point, Milarepa had been at this spiritual practice stuff for a while. He had a few tools. So he tried lecturing the demons on the dharma, the Buddhist teachings. No luck. Milarepa raged at them. They laughed. Finally, he gave up and said, “Looks like you’re not going anywhere and I’m not either, so let’s just live here together.”
Then, as if Milarepa had spoiled the demons’ fun, all of them left—all but one really nasty one with horrible fangs. And “we all know that one,” Chodron writes. “Sometimes we have lots of them like that. Sometimes we feel that’s all we’ve got.”
With this demon, Milarepa knew he’d have to be smart. So he walked up and stood face-to-face with it, feeling its hot breath. Then he promptly stuck his head into the demon’s mouth. That demon then left too.
When I lived at the monastery, I occasionally practiced with a group of monks in the Thai Forest tradition too. Some of these monks were British, and though monks don’t traditionally eat after noon, these British guys not surprisingly had found a loophole for afternoon tea. So, one afternoon over chocolate and Earl Grey, they told a story about a pilgrimage they’d been on through India together. While they were heading to Delhi, bandits hijacked the bus and began stealing the passengers’ wallets at knifepoint. Thai Forest monks never touch money. They beg for all their food. And when the bandits got to these orange-robed bald men, some of the novice monks were afraid. But one of the elder monks walked directly up to a robber, pointed at the knife, and then, as if in an episode of Game of Thrones, he bared his neck, daring the man to slice.
The robbers fled.
I was thinking of both of these stories as the crying tapered off on day seven. My neighbors looked relieved I was no longer gagging. And that night I had a dream.
The dream began without images, just blackness. Just sensation. Someone or something was scratching in my chest, behind the breastplate, rummaging through me with a steel comb, a pine branch, chicken wire.
There were mutterings in a language that I couldn’t understand. So I bolted up in bed. And there, kneeling at my bedside, was an old Tibetan man with frail features and silver hair. He smiled and nodded, then reached his hand into my chest Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom–style. He twisted his hand just so, casually removed a few black stones from my heart, then tossed the stones aside as if he were gutting a fish.
You’d think I would have screamed or spoken up. But there was something ordinary about this visit—something half expected. Did I know this man?
He removed more black stones. Then he closed his eyes, as if to pray. I closed my eyes too. But when my dream eyes shut, I woke up. I was in the same tent. There was no Tibetan man. It was morning.
Meditation practice, like any practice, has a cumulative nature. But something important did shift after that dream. And for the final few days of retreat, I felt at ease—myself with nothing added—a state that seemed like the most normal thing imaginable and also the most precious gift.
How to explain? I felt like a patient who’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness and given the medicine, but then, in a strange bout of amnesia, had forgotten to take it. I was ecstatic to have remembered; when the ten days of silence ended, I turned right around and did another ten days of silence at the Tibetan retreat center next door. (Thank you, Vella!)
I won’t bore you with the details of more silence, but the next retreat was equally fruitful. And walking down to McLeod from Bhagsunath with mischievous rhesus monkeys leaping above me in the pines, I wanted to bow to everything for this practice, a practice that truly did dispel suffering. And not by blind faith. By simple awareness of what’s here now, always, moment by moment, breath by breath.
I wondered if this was the fresh, happy mind Sonam woke with every morning, and when I found him chopping cabbage in his single room off the monastery, I felt I was seeing my real brother. I tiptoed under the prayer flags that hung from his front door, trying to sneak up and surprise him. But spoiling my fun, Sonam turned casually as though he’d known I was there all along. “Wah!” he said. “Ja-ma. Dis good meditation. I many many tinking you on mountain. I pray you every day.”
I thanked Sonam for the good wishes, and after some chitchat about his trip south, I couldn’t help telling him about the dream. Sonam nodded while continuing to chop cabbage.
“Ya, ya!” he said as
if we were discussing dinner ingredients. “I tink maybe you see my old teacher. He die. I pray him help you.”
Now. Had this dream happened at any other time or place, I would have either blown this comment off as folk superstition or rattled Sonam by the shoulders and insisted he explain every detail. (Let’s compare notes! Did he have a little goatee and a mole under his left eye?) But after several months in these mountains, I’d grown a bit more comfortable with the common Tibetan worldview. And for Tibetans, the borders between dream states and what we call reality are not necessarily there. Waking life is seen as produced by the collective mind just as dreaming is produced by our thoughts. Many Tibetans, in fact, practice dream yoga, the cultivation of directed lucid dreaming, in which sleep becomes another chance for subtle yogic practices.
The dream realm, which is said to mirror the space between lives, is thought to prepare a yogi for death. So the idea that you’d be able to pray to a deceased teacher and then have that teacher show up in a dream is as commonplace as being able to ask your friend to buy you broccoli at the market.
I wasn’t at the point of seeing dream and reality as one. But after twenty days of silence, my waking state did seem more pleasantly dreamlike. Circumstances had not changed. Sati was still far away. I still had a very long thesis to write. I hadn’t gotten into grad school or published anything (save an article on chai in that local magazine, which, just as I’d feared, nobody read). But all of this was a few measly brushstrokes on a canvas as large as space itself.
Maybe Sati and I would someday be together. Most likely not. Maybe I’d get into school. Maybe I’d be a bum. But none of it would make or break this joy I’d stumbled on again—a gem I’d had all along but had forgotten when I’d buried it beneath possessiveness, fear, and heedlessness. It was all so plain wonderful—life. Why wasn’t everyone jumping for joy about this fact that now seemed so blatant: Happiness and freedom are already ours without accumulating anything new. They’re ours if we strip back the layers of thought and sense the original spaciousness of our minds.