All Our Waves Are Water

by Jaimal Yogis

  Inspirational though she was, I didn’t think I’d be one of the Queen’s many rescues. I’d gotten my drug experimenting done in high school. I wasn’t an alcoholic. I even had a job.

  One day in spring, however, Siri and I were having lunch on Ocean Beach, not far from where we’d burned our apartment sketches. Afterward, I went surfing, and Siri went walking.

  It was a crisp day, offshore winds keeping the sea alert. I was feeling renewed after my paddle. But when I saw Siri from afar, it looked as if she had stumbled on the grail. She was dancing on the beach in little spins. When she came closer, her green eyes were bubbling.

  “Wait till you hear this!” Siri said, galloping toward me.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Remember the Queen of Ocean Beach?”

  “I think about her every time I put on my wetsuit,” I said.

  “Well, I ran into her on the beach and introduced myself.”

  “Go on.”

  “She has a place. With ocean views! And guess how much it is! Guess!”

  “How much is it?”

  “Twelve hundred! And she wants to give it to us.”

  “But in her house? Have you seen her house?”

  “I know, I know,” Siri laughed. “But she showed it to me. Come on!”

  “Now?”

  “It’s now or never!”

  Siri and I moved in right away to the top floor of the Queen’s palace—our bedroom flanked by those wooden dolphins, Saint Francis greeting us at the front door.

  Siri was right too. Downstairs, the Queen’s house remained creatively organized. A silent character named Paul slept on the living room couch and seemed practically part of the furniture. Rotten Robbie, an ex-con and recovering alcoholic who prided himself on never drinking water and storing guns under his bed, lived in a tiny closet room next to Paul. You had to stumble over the occasional chicken to get to our stairwell. Pete then often greeted you before you went up, insisting you look one more time at his photos from a trip to China.

  But Paul couldn’t hurt a flea. Pete was guaranteed to make you laugh. Robbie promised to guard the house if any addicts who had failed the Queen’s recovery program came back trying to rob the place. Once upstairs, you were in a new world. The room was three times the square footage of most city studios with high ceilings and skylights.

  Skylights.

  The central room opened into a long kitchen, which opened onto an east-facing wooden deck that hovered over the garden. The west side of the room opened into a dormer that was long enough to be a separate bedroom, a bedroom that looked out at the Pacific.

  It wasn’t exactly like the place we’d burned in the fire. It was far better.

  Siri found beat-up antique dressers people were giving away, then sanded them and painted them teal or sage. She found a Victorian door with delicate cracks in the chipping white paint, an art piece in itself. We propped the door against the western wall—our port to let the sea inside. As we decorated, for the first time in our relationship, there was zero temptation to flee. I even felt a little settled in my job.

  Not that arrows weren’t still zinging everywhere, sticking out of the closet and my computer and my van’s old tires. I still got anxious.

  But we were in a new space for a time. Prayers answered.

  19

  He who tries to shine

  dims his own light.

  He who defines himself

  can’t know who he really is.

  —Lao Tzu

  Siri and I had quite a few dinner parties in the Queen’s palace. Sometimes Carol would even show up, smelling of bonfire smoke and ozone, cackling away. Friends, most of whom could afford homes without people sleeping in the living room closets, often praised our place, and we had to pinch ourselves. Here we were, two people who couldn’t write code if our lives depended on it—and did you open the shutters? Did you smell the salt?

  Siri continued teaching. I continued writing. Work was still work. Good sometimes. Difficult often. But at the Queen’s I felt that I was learning, filtering, integrating all this life info. Unlike in New York where I tried to see everything as meditation in place of actual meditation, this time I kept that up too. Unlike in Mexico, where I chased tubes to the exclusion of other riches, I stopped obsessing rabidly about those too—perhaps that was why the tube I’d long been searching for finally sought me out.

  It was a fairly awful surf day when it happened. Gloomy skies. Cold black water. Onshore winds. Rain. I was the only one paddling out near the windmill at Lawton Street and was only doing this to get some exercise.

  But once out, the waves feathering far outside turned out to be protecting the inner breakers from the wind. There was a clean, organized pocket—a kind of sanctuary that you couldn’t see well from anywhere until you were in the middle of it.

  Inside this sanctuary, the rollers re-formed into “double-ups,” waves in which two or three swells gather into one, creating more momentum and thickness.

  These two- and three-headed denizens looked like beings from an Icelandic reef. But with the sky near black with rain and the winds howling, the peaks weren’t inviting. They were frightening, especially because I was out alone on a tiny new board.

  I thought for a minute about going in, unsure that I needed to get beaten up alone. But I figured I’d be frustrated with myself if I didn’t even try. So I just bobbed around for a while, almost going on a few, then second-guessing.

  Twenty minutes in, I was considering paddling in for a warm cup of tea, waveless, when a swell seemed to focus in on me. It was a strange being, a triangular peak with a squared-off, foamy head. A liquid bulldog.

  Honestly, the wave didn’t look like it would be much of a ride. But hoping this would be my train to the sand, I turned to paddle, made it to my feet, and the bulldog lunged. In a blink, the water beneath gutted out, and I was standing inside the most gaping, hollow cavern of salt water I’d ever witnessed from the inside. I barely needed to crouch as I whooshed through the dark belly, foam twirling around like a maypole.

  As opposed to that wave at Padang, today I was going right, chest to the wall, centered—or so I felt—like Jimmy. The light at the end of the tunnel seemed far away, and I thought for certain I’d be swallowed, mashed into the blackness. But the new board—a board Jimmy had inspired me to seek out—skimmed through, never surrendering speed.

  One second I was disappearing into darkness. The next, there I was under open sky, laughing. Hooting. Delirious with shock and joy in the sideways rain.

  In Bali, crafty locals had gotten wise to surf vanity. They sat on the beach snapping photos. Images of nearly any wave could be purchased and posted to the globe on social media. I admit to have succumbed to this attraction. But nobody saw this wave, and that seemed right. This, like the Queen’s house, was a gift, a lesson. We hunt and hunt and hunt some more. But the ocean tells its own story. We are merely rippling characters. The sea may respond to our pleas, prayers, strivings. They are part of the story—pushing and refracting back. But water will not be rushed. So relax. Be humble. Stay open. Look where others don’t. There are secret sanctuaries everywhere, places nobody can tell you how to find—places you won’t discover until you’re there.

  But the tube, as I’ve been trying not-so-subtly to point out, is just the metaphor. I’ve really been using this whole book as a way of discussing nonduality, the divinity that unites us, and how that might be integrated into this world of strip malls and melting ice caps. So it seems I should end this book on some great integrative note—like that time I actually ended suffering for good by seeing oneness forever in everyone, and never got angry again.

  I’m not going to do that. I’m a father of three boys under five. The last time I got angry was this morning when our four-year-old was trying to put the baby in the toilet.

  There is, however, a moment I can point to which, like that tube, gets to the heart of what I’m trying to say. So here it is, unfiltered. The beginning of t
he end.

  Bali had reminded me that if I was going to survive modern American work life, I needed to treat myself like a car. I had to change the oil quarterly. I had to do those retreats even more often than I thought I needed them because once you feel your car is short on oil, the engine is already getting shredded.

  A few months into living at the Queen’s, that Ch’an teacher I’d been training with since my monastery days, Steven Tainer, announced that he would be teaching a weeklong dream-yoga retreat in Canada. Usually our little meditation cult did retreats near the Bay Area. But Steven had found a rare opportunity to practice at a small house on a secluded island.

  After just spending all my money escaping to an island, I couldn’t afford to stop working to escape to another. I told Steven I’d be missing this one. But, as you’ve probably gathered by now, dreams are important to me. Steven had never before given teachings on this rare form of meditation. Shortly after resigning myself to missing this retreat, I was getting coffee at my usual spot and saw a bumper sticker that said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

  A lightbulb appeared above my head. From that café, I pitched an article on a dream-yoga retreat in Canada to Yoga Journal. I didn’t think this would work. My travel pitches almost always got rejected. But this time, my three-pointer banked in. I was flying to Canada—a dream-yogi reporter.

  Dream yoga is a practice I’d been introduced to with Sonam but had never delved into. Basically, it means dreaming lucidly, or knowing you’re dreaming while you’re still asleep.

  Lucid dreaming has gained popularity in the West as a psychological tool. Before flying to the retreat, I got to interview many of the country’s sleep and dream scientists and psychologists. These folks told me lucid dreaming can help boost our creativity, break addictions, transcend phobias, and improve performance in sports and at work. The method, researchers said, probably works like creative visualization does—only more powerfully, because dreams feel more real.

  If you interpret a nightmare about a monster to be fear about a relationship, making that mental association can be therapeutic. But in a lucid dream, you can confront or change the monster itself. “When you escape from a nightmare by waking up, you haven’t dealt with the problem,” Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist and one of the leading dream experts, told me. “But staying with the nightmare and accepting its challenge, as lucidity makes possible, allows you to resolve the dream problem in a way that leaves you healthier than before.”

  In the late 1970s, LaBerge’s research at Stanford University showed lucid dreaming to be both a common phenomenon and a teachable skill. “Yogis never needed any knowledge about neurology to do this,” he told me. “But it’s important that we do the scientific research so we can talk to Westerners about it in their own language.”

  After LaBerge, I interviewed a rock singer who practiced singing in his lucid dreams to expand his vocal range, a scientist who told me he’d healed his swollen tonsils in a lucid dream, and a psychologist who said she’d had sex with everyone she’d ever wanted to in lucid dreams—including herself. “It’s just as much fun,” she said. “And great birth control.”

  Dream yoga, however, is not just lucid dreaming for fun and self-improvement. Having been refined over the centuries by Tibetans and Taoists, dream yoga is used to extend mindfulness into the realm of the unconscious. Chinese and Tibetan yogis, believing that the dream body is better able to feel subtle channels and chakras, have used lucid dreaming to do physical yoga and meditation during sleep, to communicate with spiritual teachers, and for full awakening—to see that all reality is something like a dream.

  Reality did seem dreamy when I made it to the Canadian island. Though only thirteen square miles, Pender Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands, was the most beautiful thirteen miles of earth I’d ever set foot on. Forested farmlands and rocky coves reflected in the glassy Puget Sound. Pods of orcas wove through water, their massive black fins like hooks knitting silk.

  This sounds like a bourgie spa week. And it was fairly plush. But Steven, following the old tradition, taught by donation. He always held his retreats in common houses where we cooked our own meals, and this was no exception. The reason we were all the way up here on a tiny dot of rock in Canada was that Steven was also a master of what you might call psychological feng shui, finding environments that were conducive to different practices. Surrounded by serene waters, swooping bald eagles, and silence, Pender was uniquely conducive to dreaming awake. After strolling around the island to marvel at the goat and llama farms above the sea, I saw his point. Pender seemed to me like the perfect spot for lots of tea and an extremely long nap.

  A little too conducive. For the first couple nights I slept so deeply I couldn’t remember any dreams, let alone lucid ones. But I wasn’t alone. Our small group, which had become even smaller for this Canadian trip, included a physicist, a comic book writer, a retired teacher, and a hip-hop artist. All of us lived busy urban lives and felt that we needed a month of sleep retreat just to catch up. So, Steven dialed back expectations. He told us to sleep a lot and just relax without much of a schedule. He also suggested carrying a dream journal around even for naps because the more dreams you write down, the more you’ll remember. Though individual dreams will often seem crazy or nonsensical, over time you notice patterns. “Your nature,” Steven said, “is trying to reveal something to you.”

  Steven usually spoke in simple, even cryptic, terms like this. But the simplicity hid a great merging of a complex body of yogic practices—particularly the Tibetan and Chinese yogic systems Steven had spent a lifetime studying. Steven had spent his first decades of practice working with a series of revered Tibetan lamas. They’d wanted to make him a teacher, but instead, he felt he wanted to expand his knowledge and spent an equal amount of time studying Ch’an and Taoism with Chinese masters. For a few years, he even lived as a mountain hermit, practicing a Taoist yoga that is meant to be done both while awake and in dream. “It’s much more efficient while you’re dreaming though,” Steven said casually, as if this was quite common.

  Steven knew countless methods for lucidity (The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep is one of the best books on the subject), but we only had a couple weeks, so he taught us beginners just a few basics. Throughout the day, he recommended we inquire, “Am I dreaming?” This method worked in two ways. If you got in the habit then asked the question when you actually were dreaming, you’d become lucid right away. But asking the question while awake worked like a koan. Are we collectively dreaming all this?

  “A bodhisattva,” says the Vimalakirti Sutra, “should regard all living beings as a wise man regards the reflection of the moon in water or as magicians regard men created by magic. He should regard them as being like a face in a mirror; like the water of a mirage.”

  This reality-is-dream insight is something Steven and all yogic masters have said we need to experience to actually get. You can’t just practice intellectual Zen and say “Nothing is real.” That’s nihilistic. But one of Steven’s oldest students was that particle physicist I mentioned. George Weissman got his PhD at Berkeley, was writing a book on quantum mechanics, and loved to luxuriate in intellectual Zen. I do too sometimes. So between meditation sessions, George and I got into discussing what this “reality-is-dream theory” might mean from a physics perspective.

  With his disheveled-scientist hair and Swiss-German accent, George told me that, until about a hundred years ago, scientists thought they had a decent handle on what matter is. But today we know that there is no such thing as solid matter. All this bricks-and-mortar stuff breaks down into space and tiny nonlocatable waves and particles of subatomic energy that we’re still trying to understand. What’s more, simple observation or measurement seems to change how these wavelike LEGOs of existence function.

  “The theories are highly controversial,” George said. “But there is no question for me that mind and matter are connected at the root.”


  This does not mean, George said, that reality exists in our brains, or that humans need to exist for reality to exist. Instead, material existence—or what we experience as material existence—seems to be the expression and reflection of a sort of universal mind that our individual minds channel and refract into the three-dimensional prism we live in. “You don’t need a radio to create sound waves,” George said. “The sound waves are already there. The radio is simply a structure that channels what was already there. Humans are a bit like radios.”

  George got into the weeds of quantum theory with me, none of which I will describe here because I don’t understand it. But given that I was on a secluded island with a bunch of eccentrics talking about dreaming your way to enlightenment, it was nice to know that, scientifically speaking, we weren’t totally nuts.

  Steven could geek out on science too. But on retreat, he liked to keep things practical. As our primary practice, he had us doing a meditation in which we counted our breaths as we fell asleep. With each breath, we also imagined a small drop of light, like a snowflake, descending from the crown of the head to the heart center. This seemed impossible at first. I kept falling asleep before getting to five. But once I rested up, by day three or four, I could get to twenty, then fifty, then sometimes a hundred. And though it didn’t produce any lucid dreams, as I lay there watching these snowflakes settle in my heart, I started to feel that eternal OKness of retreat.

  But there was also something different about this sleep practice compared to usual meditation. In those rare moments when awareness trickled between sleep and waking, a space the Tibetans say mimics the transition of the mind at death, the boundaries that usually structured awareness seemed to unwind. This space was more huge and wild: a world that, like Dalí’s clocks, could melt everything I thought I knew.