Prime Time (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  CHAPTER 21

  The Work In

  I practiced meditation to give my life a spine on which to hang my heart, and a view from which I could see beyond what I thought I knew.

  —ZEN PRIEST JOAN HALIFAX

  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

  —MARCEL PROUST

  THE JANE FONDA WORKOUT BECAME A VIDEO PHENOMENON IN the 1970s, launching the video industry as well as the acceptability of women’s muscles. But these days, while I continue to maintain my strength, flexibility, and aerobic fitness as best I can, I find myself turning more and more to the work in. This chapter is about how I got there. But there are many paths to the realms that lie within.

  On several occasions when I was young and lost, I took off to somewhere entirely foreign in the hope that I would “find myself.” The instinct was well-founded. As we learn from mythology, the passage to a new and important phase in life always required the hero (heroes were the only ones written about back then, although plenty of sheroes had preceded them) to pass into the unknown, cut off from all that was safe and familiar. Joseph Campbell called it the “hero’s journey.”

  The problem was, I didn’t understand that the answers I was looking for could come only if I gave myself up to the foreignness, allowing myself to be a blank slate. Instead, although the environs were new, I remained the same old me, desperately seeking the safety of activity and companionship—usually male companionship.

  Life in my sixties taught me that I didn’t need to go somewhere “else” to get answers. I do need time alone, time for the introspection I talked about in the previous chapter, and over these last years I have spent weeks and sometimes months at a time by myself. When I am “public,” I’m busily public and pack a lot into each day. Because of this, acquaintances think I have no downtime. They are wrong. I have many responsibilities, not the least of which is earning money to help support loved ones and fund my non-profit organizations. Because of this, I am disciplined in scheduling my downtime.

  I have a ranch on a river in New Mexico to which I retreat. There’s a routine that comes with it when I’m alone with my dog Tulea: Get up with the sun; make breakfast; hike or swim for an hour or so, depending on the season; go to my gym for weight work (and aerobics if the weather has precluded the hike or swim); then come back to the house to write or read or sit or, most commonly, a combination of the above. Several times a week I will go fly-fishing for the Zen of it. Two weeks before my seventieth birthday, I added something new: meditation. I had tried—oh, how I’d tried—over the years to meditate, but I could never still my mind, and although I knew it was something I needed (people were always telling me this), I wasn’t motivated to stick with it. But as I was approaching seventy, every fiber in me told me the time had come.

  I knew I was in transition, not sure what I was meant to do, uncomfortable with a relationship that had ceased to be meaningful to me. Rather than voyaging to a foreign clime, I decided that the new territory that awaited me was within my own mind—if I could learn to quiet it, that is.

  Several months earlier, Jodie Evans, an activist friend who also happens to be deeply spiritual, had invited me to a June seminar at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. She’d told me that Joan Halifax, known for her work with death and dying, would be a speaker, along with Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Mary’s book Composing a Life had had a profound effect on me a decade earlier, and because I had begun work on this book, I wanted to hear what Joan Halifax had to say about the end of life.

  It turned out that Joan is a Zen master and the abbot of Upaya. With her close-shaved head, shining eyes, and dimpled smile, she radiates such presence that it makes you want some of what she’s having. During a break in the seminar, she took me on a tour of the center, which includes a large temple, magnificent and simple, with a glistening, black wood floor like ones I’d seen in Japan. Woven tatami mats raised about four inches off the floor, each with a flat black cushion on it, lined the bare, hand-troweled plaster walls. Joan explained that various sesshin retreats are held in the hall throughout the year, including an eight-day silent Rohatsu sesshin, at the beginning of December, focused on the enlightenment of the Buddha. “Hmm,” thought I. “Pretty intimidating language, but—just so happens I will be all by myself at my ranch then, preparing to turn seventy.” I started to get excited.

  “What’s a Rohatsu sesshin?” I asked, trying to say it right, the way she had, with the accent on the shin.

  “Sesshin is an intense silent meditation retreat that unifies the heart and mind,” she replied. “You become clear and open so that you can experience your true nature. Rohatsu means the eighth of December, when, in the Japanese Buddhist world, we celebrate the enlightenment of the Buddha but we also mourn our own stupidity.” I got goose bumps. Finding my true nature was just what I needed before I hit seventy. Throwing in a little mourning of my stupidity would make it perfect.

  “But I’m a Christian,” I said, hoping this wouldn’t render me ineligible.

  “Many Christians come here,” she assured me. “For us, Buddhism isn’t a religion, it’s a practice, a philosophy. One of my Christian friends told me her time here had made her a better Christian.” Always a believer in trial by fire, I signed up then and there.

  Five and a half months later, I was in that hall, sitting in silence with sixty women and men ranging in age from nineteen to eighty. My friends couldn’t believe I was really doing it. “Aren’t you scared?” they asked me. Several were positive they could never go eight days without speaking. Scared was the last thing I could imagine being. Excited was more like it. This was a wonderful chance to jump-start a regular meditation practice—and maybe even a deepening of consciousness. As for not speaking, I knew I would relish it. I’m not my father’s daughter for nothing.

  During the eight days, we weren’t silent just during meditation. Even in our adobe guesthouses or as we walked to and from the hall in the early mornings and late evenings, the center was bathed in utter silence. We were asked to avoid eye contact and to fold our hands at our waists as we walked. I cheated, of course, sneaking furtive glimpses as I passed other guests and hating myself for being occasionally judgmental. “That one’s a sure loser,” I’d think.

  Except for the first meditation period, at 5:45 A.M., and the last one, at 8:40 P.M., when we faced out into the hall, the rest of the time we sat on black cushions facing the wall, backs straight, hands folded in our laps in a ritual position—left hand resting in the cupped right hand, thumbs touching. That is when, in my case, all hell would break loose between my ears. Who knew there was so much chatter in there? If this was my true nature, I needed to be locked up. I tried to “follow my breath,” as we’d been instructed. I tried shutting my eyes but would fall asleep. (I discovered that I can sleep in a perfect meditation pose without anyone knowing.) I tried opening my eyes a crack, so that just a faint bit of light would come through my lashes. I’d count—four breaths in, four breaths out—and less than five seconds would go by before some thought would come galumphing in and get stuck. Later Joan described it as having a “sticky” mind, like flypaper—all your poor little thoughts buzz around and get stuck and drive you crazy. I would remember to “let it go” and return to the breath, but in another few seconds a new thought would move in and get stuck. “Am I the only person here who is waging a war with my mind?” I’d think. Everyone else appeared to have it all together. Then again, I must have appeared that way, too.

  Every forty minutes a lovely gong would sound and we would rise, bow to the center of the hall, turn to our left, and begin a walking meditation, single file, ever so slowly, our hands held in ritual position at waist height, back straight. We reminded me of the black-robed magicians marching up the dungeon stairs in Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. The first time we did this, I continually risked bumping into the woman in front of me. “What a l
oser,” I remember thinking. “Why’s she creeping along like that? She doesn’t even know how to walk.” After a while, trying to get from judgment to meditation, I began to focus all my attention on how each foot slowly touched the ground, heel first, then bit by bit rolling through the arch, the ball, the toes, until the full foot was flat on the ebony-dark hardwood floor. Only then would I lift the other foot. Before I knew it, I was walking just like the “loser.” It was a humbling experience. Mourning my stupidity was becoming a full-time job.

  Except for the chants that preceded and followed the meals, the food was served in silence, in a simple, highly ritualized ceremony in which servers would enter carrying large steaming pots, turn, bow to each of us as it was our turn, and kneel. We would return the bow with our heads and offer our bowl to be filled. As there were three bowls, this process would be repeated three times, each server bringing a different food. We’d been taught at the start exactly how to place our wooden spoon and chopsticks, fold our three cloths (place mat, napkin, and cleaning towel), clean our three bowls, and fold everything back up again. The simplicity and exactitude of the ritualized meals forced me to acknowledge the extent to which I was not, as I had thought, really “in the moment,” paying careful attention to each gesture, each detail. I was spending too much time noticing what others were doing, judging if their napkin was folded into a better lotus-blossom knot than mine. It took several days for me to realize that when I really was in the moment, really showing up, for example, for the small head bows to the servers, I would experience gratitude. “So there is a deeper purpose for each step of the ritual,” I thought.

  By day two my back and knees were screaming in pain, and I moved from sitting in a partial lotus on the mat to a folding chair. I told myself that, after all, I was older than most of the others, and that the few who were older than I were also sitting in chairs. Although it never occurred to me to leave—I’m too proud—by day three I was asking myself why I’d come, why I was purposefully putting myself through this torture. What made it all possible—no, not possible; endlessly worth it—were the daily one-hour dharma talks given by Joan or one of the three other priests. “Dharma” refers to the teachings of the Buddha, and because this was a sesshin focusing on the enlightenment of the Buddha, the talks centered on enlightenment. We would carry our mats into a semicircle around the priests. They would sit on mats facing us as they talked, and it wasn’t just the breaking of the endless silence that made their words so precious. Sometimes Joan would choose a koan, a brief Zen story that can be understood only when you let go of the mind and allow the feeling of it to penetrate you. I was reminded of the twenty-one sayings or puzzles attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. He said that grasping their meaning would allow you entrance to the “Kingdom of Heaven”—which I take to mean achieving higher consciousness or wholeness.

  Joan would help us understand the koan’s meaning by weaving a personal, often hysterically funny story around it. She told us about the time when she was to give a talk at a big temple in Japan and walked out of the Japanese bathroom, forgetting to take off the bright red toilet shoes (with the word “toilet” written in kanji on the tops of them), and strolled “mindfully” down the public hallway to the lecture hall; her soon-to-be Japanese audience subtly brought her attention to her egregious cultural faux pas. She related this story to illustrate a verse by an ancient Japanese Zen master: “A splendid branch issues from the old plum tree; in time, obstructing thorns flourish everywhere.”

  This was a good talk for me, as my lessons in humility were advancing. It seemed like every insight I was having was accompanied by more stupidity and more “thorns.” I was being taught that these obstructing thorns were all part of the package of life.

  Every talk Joan and the other priests gave, every story, felt as though it had been chosen especially to help me see why I was there, and what I should reach for within myself. It was comforting when she told us that even the Buddha had had a hard time quieting his “devilish thoughts.” “Whenever an unpleasant state of mind would arrive to the Buddha,” she said, “instead of rejecting it, or judging himself, he would say, ‘Hello, old friend. I know you,’ and that would dispel the state of mind itself. It’s an important strategy, the strategy of nondenial.”

  On the sixth day, I noticed that I didn’t have to count my breaths anymore; I was being breathed, just as Joan had predicted. The nondenial strategy made my mind less “sticky” and helped me get to a new mind stillness and stay there for minutes at a time. I felt, then, suspended in what seemed like an intersection behind my forehead. Just floating. I was aware that my awareness of not thinking was different than thinking.

  Joan describes this as the “nonadhesive mind”; like a mirror, it reflects what is, without judgment or attachment. It’s not something you can make happen. It arises spontaneously. Joan used the metaphor of the mirror and the red balloon: As the red balloon passes the mirror, the mirror reflects the red. It doesn’t judge the red or comment on the red. It just reflects it. But the mirror is not red. It is a clear, still medium (like our minds can be), and thus it can reflect things just as they are, without distorting them with projections or agitation. In other words, I got that it was possible to have an “unfiltered” experience of reality.

  During the talks, Joan spoke of what she referred to as nonduality, but I didn’t understand what that meant. Then, on the seventh day, as I was floating in that still void behind my forehead, the sixty people sitting as I was seemed to merge into a single energetic force that filled the hall. It wasn’t that I thought of this; it just was. For a fleeting moment I knew that everything—every thing—is part of an unbroken wholeness, constantly flowing and coherent. Tears poured down my cheeks. They tickled me. Joan had talked about this—not scratching when we itched, instead becoming the itch. I became my tears. I was beyond happy.

  On the final day, we held council. All sixty of us, together with Joan and the other priests, sat in a circle, and each person spoke for a few minutes about what the eight days had meant for us. I learned that every one of us had been challenged in the mind-stilling department. As I heard the others describe their experiences and what had brought them there, all the “loser” labels melted away and all that was left was our shared, beautiful, fragile humanity. The poet Mary Lou Kownacki has written, “Is there anyone we wouldn’t love, if we only knew their story?” I’d been broken open.

  It is hard to put words to what the experience at Upaya did to me and for me. But upon my return, I remembered a letter that my grandaunt Millicent Rogers had written to her son Paul prior to her death in 1953—it was he who’d given it to me. Millicent was my mother’s cousin, the daughter of Henry Huttleston Rogers, a cofounder of Standard Oil, and a woman of legendary style. Despite the fact that the Millicent Rogers Museum is in Taos, New Mexico, I had always avoided knowing about her because I wanted to disassociate myself from anything related to my mother and because I assumed Millicent was simply a fancy socialite. How wrong that assumption was! The opening paragraph of her letter showed me that she had attained, before her early death at age fifty-one, what it had taken me seventy years to begin to understand.

  Darling Paulie,

  Did I ever tell you about the feeling I had a little while ago? Suddenly passing Taos Mountain I felt that I was part of the earth, so that I felt the Sun on my Surface and the rain.

  I felt the Stars and the growth of the Moon, under me rivers ran. And against me were the tides. The waters of rain sank into me. And I thought if I stretched out my hands they would be Earth and green would grow from me. And I knew that there was no reason to be lonely, that one was everything, and Death was as easy as the rising sun and as calm and natural—that to be enfolded in Earth was not an end but part of oneself, part of every day and night that we lived, so that being part of the Earth one was never alone. And all fear went out of me—with a great, good stillness and strength.

  PHOTO BY JUSTIN MARCEL LUBIN

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sp; I set the letter down and marveled that I hadn’t read it until my return from Upaya, when I was totally open to her words. I wondered if my ancestor Millicent hadn’t been holding my hand as I’d made my inner journey. Maybe she’s why I have ended up spending so much time in New Mexico. Seekers and sages say that we all have councils of elders guiding us from the other side.

  I can’t pretend to carry the non-sticky, non-dual mind with me day to day, but I have begun a regular practice of meditation, and sometimes, when I reach that still intersection, it comes back to me. I can tell from my interactions with people and when I speak publicly that I manifest a different energy, one that encourages an easy give-and-take, often on a soul level—even with strangers. Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, told me that the center is training young students in a Buddhist meditation on death and that the data the staff is collecting seems to indicate that meditation allows the students to experience the “Positivity effect,” similar to what happens to so many people in Act III.

  In the days that followed Upaya I was aware of being kinder and more careful of others. Colors appeared more vivid, sounds more acute, and my thinking felt different. Changing your thinking is so hard. Joan had said, “Don’t believe your thoughts.” How to get out from under our thoughts? I learned from Upaya that slowing down the thinking process lets you feel beyond or deeper than the thinking process, and thus to avoid being a toy to conceptions. I was to see that this changes the experience of thinking itself.

  But the change I noticed most was what happened to time. It seemed to have doubled in volume, and I know why. It is because during the eight days, I had learned to pay deep attention to the Now. This allowed me to see that on a subjective level, time is what we make of it. We’ve all read or been told umpteen times that time expands if we fill it with newness. Remember when you were a child and summer vacation seemed to last a year because things were new? My experience at Upaya showed me that even within the familiar, time expands when we are paying close attention to life, detail by detail, moment by moment. Perhaps this is another purpose of the Third Act. Assuming we are able and want to reduce the to-ing and fro-ing of youth, we have more time to make time for time.