All Over the Map

by Laura Fraser

  Sharon seems both amused and sympathetic and observes that my impulsiveness isn’t all bad—it’s a quality that’s related to being spontaneous, vivid, and generous. It’s true: I’m happy to throw a spur-of-the-moment dinner party, I’m quick with a retort, and I never have to return to a boutique to discover that the dress I wanted is gone. I even have a few friends left. Sharon tells me I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for my impulsiveness but learn to make my temperament work for my benefit. “You can prize that adventurous spirit and become more mindful of times when you’re hurting yourself or others,” she says. What I need is to slow down my speed and momentum, take time to investigate my feelings, and create a private sense of pause. Then my reactions would be a choice, not a compulsion.

  Fine, but can she fix me? Now?

  Sharon suggests that I begin, as I did with my eating problems, by tuning in to pure sensation. The pace of our lives is so fast, she says, that we scarcely notice what’s going on around us. We get so caught up in achieving our desires and avoiding our discomforts; we’re preoccupied with plans, distracted with wondering what other people think about us. But something as simple as concentrating on the cool, soothing sensations of washing my hands, the taste and smell of hot tea, or the rhythm of my breath could bring me back to an awareness of the present.

  That all sounds lovely, but I am impatient. “What I need,” I say, “is an emergency pause button.”

  Sharon smiles and contemplates that. First, she suggests, I could get into the habit of saving my e-mails as drafts before hitting “Send.” Just that, I agree, could have prevented some serious professional and romantic embarrassment. And when a strong emotion bubbles up, I could stop to check in with my physical sensations: is my stomach clenched, heart pumping, brow sweating? That inventory might delay me long enough not to swear at a traffic cop or hang up on my sister. Given a few moments and deep breaths, I might see that those physical sensations subside and realize that anger, fear, and disappointment aren’t as solid and immovable as they seem. Fierce emotions don’t always have to be shoved away; they can be like a storm that passes.

  I like the idea of being still in a tempest, not always buffeted about, feeling compelled to react. Now that I have a couple of tools for emergencies, maybe I could leave. But Sharon makes it clear that developing a habit of tuning in to myself, of being mindful, is going to take some practice. That practice, she says, is called meditation.

  That’s when I’m ready to bolt. The one time I tried meditating, my mind didn’t go blank; it wandered off wildly. Plus I’d done everything wrong. I was at a Zen center and accidentally put my feet where people eat and bowed the wrong way, and bald, black-cloaked monks yelled at me in fervent whispers. Sharon assured me that the “insight” or “Vipassana” meditation she practices isn’t as formal as Zen—pretty schlumpy, really, by comparison—which appeals to me. Nor am I doing everything wrong if I don’t achieve a blank mental canvas or state of bliss right away. The point of meditating, she says, isn’t to empty your thoughts but to develop an awareness of them, watch them with an almost clinical eye. You concentrate on one object, such as your breath, but you’re not messing up if you get distracted. That’s just an opportunity to notice where your mind has strayed and gently start over. The practice of letting go—of obsessions, plans, feelings, attachments—and starting over again with compassion for yourself eventually affects the way you live.

  “When you’ve blurted out a comment, you don’t lose heart and get discouraged,” Sharon says. “You just start over.” Hopefully, you reach a point where you don’t make unwise comments to begin with.

  Now it’s time to try it out. I am anxious, but Sharon tells me to just close my eyes and get comfortable in my chair. She leads me in three exercises that turn out to be surprisingly simple, with no secret mantras or chanting. One is a sitting meditation, watching my breathing, feeling it rise in my chest or stomach, and practicing letting go of whatever thoughts intrude without judging them, bringing my attention back to my breath. The exercise is like herding stray cats out of my brain; every time I chase one away, another is right there, yowling for attention. Then there is a walking meditation, where we slowly pace around her hotel room as if through peanut butter, focusing on subtle physical sensations, hopefully to the exclusion of nagging, neurotic thoughts.

  Finally, she leads me through a “lovingkindness” meditation, where I am to silently offer good wishes to myself and others: “May you be safe, May you be happy, May you be healthy, May you live in ease.” In this meditation, she instructs me to begin by offering kindness to myself, then to my dearest family and friends, and then work my way through neutral people I’ve encountered but don’t feel one way or another about, then on to annoying people, and then eventually, with practice, to really difficult people, such as my ex-husband and Dick Cheney (I don’t make it that far). This meditation is supposed to develop a wellspring of compassion for myself and other people I deal with. “It’s like giving yourself a gift,” Sharon tells me.

  After I try these meditations with Sharon, I have to admit I feel calm and refreshed, a state that lasts even through the lines and delays at the airport. Once home, I take her advice to meditate every day for fifteen minutes. It is a lot harder without her leading me through, like trying to do yoga by yourself at home. During the first few sessions, I am angry that my timer is broken (it isn’t; it just seems as though time has stopped). My back hurts, my legs fall asleep, my nose itches, and my brain goes racing all over the place. I feel bursts of sadness, hilarity, recrimination, and despair. But I do sit it out. Occasionally I reach a space where I feel as if I am wearing internal noise-canceling headphones. During one session, I have a clear image of my mind as a cluttered attic, furnished with all sorts of old petty grievances, grudges, and fears. I am starting to clear away some of the debris, giving myself room to move and breathe. And at night I begin having dreams where instead of flipping out for getting a parking ticket or having my credit card rejected, I let my anger go. Clearly, something is going on in my unconscious that my waking mind doesn’t yet grasp.

  Eventually, I notice a few times when my mind presses the pause button on its own. When I lose my purse, I check the car before panicking. I pass an adorable pair of emerald green sandals and hear a little voice say, “I have enough shoes.” Waiting in line with an inept clerk, I don’t have cartoon flames shooting from my head, I just suppose the poor guy is having a trying day. Distressed about a situation with an article I’m working on, instead of snapping at the fact checker, I ask if I can call her back later. When I e-mail Evan and he doesn’t respond, I don’t immediately think, “That close-minded asshole probably thinks I’m too fat or too old, so fuck him;” instead I think, well, maybe he’s got something else going on, I just don’t know and we’ll see.

  After a month, I am so excited by my newfound patience that when I get an e-mail announcing a ten-day silent meditation retreat, I don’t pause, I sign right up.

  AS SOON AS I arrive at the Spirit Rock meditation center in Marin County, epicenter of the New Age, I realize that once again, I’ve made a mess. I’ve failed to think things through, I’ve made a ridiculous decision, and now I am being punished for my impulsiveness. The retreat center is pretty enough, with hiking trails in the hills and a lovely meditation hall, but the place is full of aliens, people who affect Asian robes, beam goodness, and shuffle around looking at their feet. Meditation may help me become a more patient person and increase my chances of finding a partner by forty-five, but I’m definitely not going to find a guy to fall in love with at a Vipassana retreat, especially since I won’t have a chance to even speak to anyone. I’m supposed to stay here—completely silent!—for ten days.

  The first day isn’t so bad. They assign each of us a chore—mine is cleaning the kitchen floors, which involves slopping a satisfyingly loud amount of water around in the quiet atmosphere—and we meditate for several sessions, followed by a dharma talk by one of the retreat le
aders, who surprises me with his dry and delightful sense of humor. At the end of that day I feel virtuous and refreshed—and quite ready to go home.

  That night, sharing a cell-like dorm room with a frizzy-haired woman in Guatemalan pants, I resent the slurpy tooth-brushing and grooming noises she makes and the rude and selfish way she keeps her light on until late. Then comes the second day. The first forty-five-minute “sit” is grueling, starting well before daylight and caffeine (which isn’t recommended, but I have some anyway). After breakfast, where everyone moves too slowly through the buffet line and makes annoying chewing sounds, I go to a succession of forty-five-minute sits, with breaks in between, as if I am attending classes at a school where absolutely nothing happens. Each session is an eternity long, people breathe and sniff too loudly all around me, noisily shifting their cushions and props, and all I can think about, aside from lunch, all the work I have to do when I got back, the pain in my right hip, and how many frequent-flier miles I need to amass before I regain my executive status, is when the hell is the bell going to ring? Between sits, I pick up a novel and read, parched for words and entertainment.

  By afternoon I am going nuts with boredom and can fixate only on the fact that I am just a few minutes away from Point Reyes Station, where I know a restaurant that serves Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on tap. I don’t think anyone has ever meditated so long on a cold pint of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale—its slightly bitter taste and golden color, its perfection among beers, how supremely thirst-relieving it would be in the midst of a hot Marin County summer afternoon, how well it would go with a medium-rare Nieman Ranch hamburger with bleu cheese instead of all this vegetarian hippie food, how my body would feel bathed in it to my chin. Breathe in pale ale, breathe out pale ale. May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I drink pale ale. May all beings everywhere drink pale ale.

  The second day, we have a small-group meeting with one of the retreat leaders, and I am assigned to Sharon. I was hoping the fact that it is a silent retreat would mean that we wouldn’t have to go around the circle and share how the retreat is going for us, but this seems to be the one exception to the no-talking rule. As usual, I instantly have the feeling I have in small groups where you have to go around and introduce yourself and talk about your feelings, of a mood ring that has turned black, a misanthropist who wants nothing more than to be anywhere but in a small group going around the circle. One by one, the participants describe how calm the retreat is making them feel, what a wonderful opportunity it is for them to deal with their pain, grief, anxiety, and impatience and search for meaning; how already they can feel themselves opening up and accepting, achieving a sense of balance, purpose, and equanimity. Only a couple people admit to any problems; they are basically confused about whether they should focus on breathing into their nostrils or their stomachs when they meditate and relax visibly when Sharon tells them there is no one right way.

  Then it is my turn. I give a calm smile, as if to show that I, too, am reveling in a higher state, off swimming with the dolphins in my own personal pool of serotonin. Then I open my mouth. “All I want,” I blurt, “is to get into my car, drive to Point Reyes, and have a nice cold pint of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.” Then I glance around the room, looking surprised and slightly offended, as if that outburst had come from someone else.

  There is silence. Unlike at the rest of the retreat, this is silence you can hear, loud silence. I don’t believe everyone is stunned into realizing how much they, too, desire a pale ale; they are doing their karmic best not to be judgmental about what an unenlightened, impulsive, alcohol-addled bitch they have in their presence. And then Sharon gives a gentle laugh, a kind laugh, a real laugh, not laughing at me, exactly, but at how funny people are in general, working themselves up so about being in a small group and bursting out with the truth about wanting a beer.

  “If you’d like to go get a beer, Laura, then why don’t you?” Sharon says. This is an honest offer, not a leave-and-don’t-ever-come-back threat. People in the group sigh, perhaps relieved, perhaps disappointed I’m not getting thrown off the island, as in Survivor. “No one says you can’t take a little break if you need it,” she continues in her sensible voice. “This is your first time, you’re here for you, do what you need to do. Sometimes it helps to take time out during the first few days.”

  Well, that deflates my angst. That’s like someone telling me, when I’m on a diet, that dark molten chocolate cake has no calories; it suddenly makes no difference whether I eat it all right away or not. Once I give myself permission to go have a beer, it loses its urgent appeal. I am no longer defying an authority I presumed was there, going against the rules just because I hate rules in general. I have a free choice. So I decide it is getting kind of late for a beer if I want to get back in time for the dharma talk this evening, and I can go tomorrow instead.

  I don’t leave the next day or the rest of the ten days, which go by surprisingly fast. Instead of hating being silent for all that time, which all of my friends thought would be impossible for such a chatty raconteuse, I feel profoundly relieved that for the first time since I was a toddler I don’t have to speak. If I said anything to anyone I’d feel I had to entertain them, tell them a story, give them a favorable impression of myself, put them at ease, flirt, tell them where I live and what I do for a living, and then have to explain that yes, sometimes you come up with story ideas yourself and sometimes the magazine calls you, and no, generally you do not submit the same story to a lot of different magazines at once. I am free to be anonymous and observe, like being in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. You’re just there, your most simple, reliable self.

  I get into a rhythm with meditating. I don’t go to all the sessions, respecting my limits and restlessness; I ditch one session a day to do yoga, which I figure is almost as good as meditating, and another to hike on the trails, which is perhaps better. On one of those walks, I encounter a rattlesnake, notice his lovely pattern, say, “Hello there, feller,” to his flicking face, and keep on walking while he slithers into the grass. That’s when I know all this meditation is having a seriously calming effect. Ordinarily, I’d have to be loaded on benzodiazepines to see a rattlesnake without screaming, having heart palpitations, and bursting into a sour sweat.

  The last rattlesnake I ran into, for instance, was quite a different story. It was dusk on the day my ex-husband proposed to me, and we were taking a walk in the La Sal Mountains above Moab. My new fiancé asked me if I had any fears; every time in our relationship when we’d come clean with our fears, we’d ended up feeling closer. He said he was afraid that since he’d been abandoned as a kid, he might do the same thing to me or even abandon his own child if we had one, which we were planning to do. I reassured him that his fears were normal and unfounded. Abandon me? I could never imagine him doing that. Then he asked me about my fears, and I told him I didn’t have any. Just at that moment I heard a distinctive, dry rattle. There, two feet from my left foot, thick as a fire hose, a rattlesnake was coiled up, warning to strike. I screamed and ran. When he caught up with me, my fiancé, who knew I was terrified of snakes, instead of comforting me, admonished me that I shouldn’t have jumped, it was stupid, because snakes will jump right after you. I later thought of that snake as a sort of warning sign, an omen from the universe, and even if that sign was hard to read, my fiancé’s lack of care and comfort—not to mention his warning that he’d abandon me—was not.

  So now I’ve managed to stay calm, which has to be a good omen.

  Toward the end of the silent retreat, I begin to feel as if I have an altered sense of awareness of everything around me. After I finish reading one novel I don’t start any of the five others I’ve brought, not wanting to take myself out of the experience anymore but instead trying to stay in a state of constant mindfulness that feels a little like being on acid—noticing everything around me with a sense of benevolent amazement, moving amid nature and other people with a quiet ease and grace.

/>   With nothing else to do, I spend a lot of time in the sessions doing the lovingkindness meditation. At first, after giving myself some cursory kindness, I quickly move on to others. But as I have so many long hours to meditate, I might as well pause and give myself a little more time to say May I be safe, May I be happy, May I be healthy, May I live in ease, May I love and be loved. The longer I say these things to myself, the more I feel my heart cracking open. This is such an unusual voice for me. Usually I say You’re so stupid, You make foolish mistakes, You can’t be trusted, You blew it, You’re such a bitch sometimes, You’re middle-aged and chubby, even with all that fucking exercise you do, You swear too much, and You’re never going to be loved. No wonder I so often feel frantic to escape from myself.

  So I sit there offering myself lovingkindness, over and over, luxuriating in it, basking in a sense of well-being. Then when I turn to offer lovingkindness to other people in my life, it’s bathed in more golden happy intention. I start with people who are easy, who love me, whom I’m grateful for, people like my parents and sisters, Maya and Cecilia, Sandra, Giovanna, and Kathy; my guy friends; all the people at the writers’ collective where I work. I realize, going through my friends with my wishes, how I am grateful to have so many (especially since the meditation session is so long). I offer lovingkindness to people in difficult straits, the sex-trafficked women in Italy, women coffee workers I met in Nicaragua. I work my way to neutral people, like the people on the retreat, and then move on to difficult people. I start with my roommate in the Guatemalan pants, and when I’m feeling compassionate for her, I tackle a few mismatched relationships and bad dates—they probably didn’t mean to be so difficult or harsh. Finally I offer it up to my ex-husband and, in the end, to the Samoan surfer, who did, after all, apologize. May he be safe from sharks. Or at least recover from being tossed around and severely bitten.