by David Roland
But I put these thoughts aside. Since the stroke, I’ve learnt to trust my intuition. My recovery has shown me that I need to go to uncomfortable places sometimes.
I’ve gone through a lot of discomfort in the last twelve months, but I’ve made progress. In early 2010, Anna and I made the heartbreaking decision to put our home on the market, but it took until late December 2010 to sell. The buyer couldn’t move in for a few years, so now we’re renting it back from them. Once the sale is settled, we can pay back the loans from our family and friends. We’ve sold the investment properties that were saleable and paid out their respective mortgages, leaving only those that won’t achieve a sale price sufficient to pay out their loans. I’m gratified with what we’ve achieved; financially, we’ve got through a lot this year, although it’s been about mitigating our losses rather than making any gains.
We’re not out of hot water yet. The developer that commenced litigation against us went into administration a few weeks ago. But just before this, they drew on the deposit bond, which guarantees payment of 10 per cent of the purchase price. We don’t have this kind of money. The finance company that issued the deposit bond sent us a letter of demand: pay them the full value of the deposit bond or else. I phoned the company, hoping that we could reach an agreement that took into account our actual financial position. I was passed from person to person before ending up with the man who made decisions about these things. I outlined the purpose of my call, but he refused to speak with me further, saying that we needed to go through a lawyer. So we’ll have a new legal fight on our hands this coming year.
But I’m more hopeful this time around. We found a service that negotiates with creditors on behalf of their clients. Dominique, our lawyer there, understands: she had to claw her own way out of debt after failed property investments. She’s made applications for financial hardship on our behalf with each of our creditors. Dominique has also put us in touch with the Financial Ombudsman Service, an independent body that mediates in financial disputes with lenders. After we lodged the disputes, the pummelling of creditors’ demands stopped — at last giving us breathing space and time to think, and giving my fight-or-flight response a rest.
The scenery is changing; houses are showing through the trees beside the road. My GPS has woken up and is fussing over the route ahead. I’ve reached the outskirts of Hervey Bay.
Following the GPS instructions, I navigate the streets, finally pulling into a cul-de-sac. I see the place I’m looking for: an unusual red wooden fence painted with horizontal stripes; two large palm trees in the front garden; and, behind these, a two-storey maroon home. I nose the car into the driveway and pass a stone Buddha sitting alone in the middle of the lawn. Navigating the long driveway, I stop in front of a garage-cum-shed. I get out and walk back part of the way along the drive, poking my head in through a sliding glass door. I see a large room. To my left is a heavy bookcase filled with spiritual books; to my right is an elongated area with white mats and rectangular-shaped cushions on the floor, oriented to face a white armchair. Before the armchair sits a low table. This must be the meditation hall.
‘Hello?’ I call out.
A curtain is brushed aside, revealing a small office space off to the side, and a woman emerges. It is not Choeying. This woman is middle-aged with short hair, glasses, and sallow skin. She smiles. ‘You must be David. We were expecting you. My name’s Queenie.’ Queenie explains that she’s helping with the organisation of the calm-abiding course. ‘You’ll be attending, won’t you?’ she says.
‘I guess so,’ I say.
Queenie takes me upstairs to the kitchen and makes me a cup of tea. She will be staying for the whole month with Choeying and Rex, she says, while she detoxifies from alcohol. Quite unselfconsciously, she tells me that her usual routine was to start on the grog on Friday evenings and drink through the weekend. She abstained from alcohol for the rest of the week, but she still felt its after-effects, each time wondering why she had these weekly blowouts.
Choeying arrives. She’s wearing her usual loose, white cotton garments, her hair very short and white. Enveloping me with her pale arms, she says, ‘Hello, darling! So pleased you could come.’
She introduces me to Rex, her partner, who has just materialised. He’s tall and broad-chested, bald with wire-rimmed glasses, giving the impression of a rather oversized, good-natured professor. He looks to be in his mid-sixties, and speaks with a gravelly, resonant voice.
The house is full of guests already, so Rex tells me I can sleep in the caravan under the carport, in front of the shed. We go out to inspect it, and it’s delightfully retro: an orange-and-brown 1970s Millard with a single bed. It’s only a short walk to the back staircase, which leads into the kitchen and dining area. It’s private, and should be quiet; I’m going to like it here.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Saturday, after a good night’s rest, I get up early and head into the meditation hall. Sitting on one of the cushions, I try to meditate, but I still have rubber brain from yesterday’s drive. After half an hour I give up, and head upstairs for breakfast.
Rex is there. He’s in a plain T-shirt and shorts, with bare feet. He starts work early, he tells me, and he’s having his first break. Would I like a cup of tea?
‘Yes, please.’
He stuffs the pot generously with leaves. ‘I like a proper cup,’ he says, grinning.
Once the tea is brewed, we sit across from each other at the long dining table. Rex slips into telling me about himself. He trained as an engineer and served in the army, achieving the rank of major just before he left. Since then, he’s run several businesses and is now an inventor. The shed downstairs is where he works.
He is not a Buddhist, he says, but supports Choeying in her work. They have been together for more than twenty years. They’ve both had previous marriages, from which they have adult children.
Early in their relationship, Choeying told him there were things in her past that he should know about before he decided to commit to her. ‘My initial thought was, “It’s abuse,” but I found out that it was serial childhood abuse — sexual, emotional, and physical. Around the time we met, she started to have nightmares and intense anxiety.
‘I thought sexual abuse — the physical act — was an awful thing, but I found out that the worst thing was the grooming, the fear and guilt it created in its victims.’
They went on a driving holiday, at the recommendation of their GP. ‘One night I woke up to find she was at the window of the hotel room, about to jump out onto the concrete below. I pretty much just managed to catch her by gripping her waistband with my fingers. Suicide attempts became a recurring nightmare. We ended up in the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne. They sent her to a psychiatrist, who conducted tests and recommended psychotherapy. We sold the marketing business Choeying had spent eight years setting up and focused on getting her well.
‘Psychotherapy affirmed that something bad had happened, shouldn’t have happened, and that she was not guilty for it happening. But Buddhism did more for her than psychotherapy.’
I’m intrigued, and ask what he means.
‘Just as she was becoming stable and our life was getting back to normal, she got cancer. This must’ve been around 2002 or 2003. It was a rare form of cancer in the roof of her mouth, and aggressive. She was experiencing massive head pains due to it, but because she had a history of mental disorder, the doctors thought these pains were psychogenic in origin and diagnosed trigeminal neuralgia.’ This is a condition, I know from my pain-management work, that causes extreme facial pain. ‘It wasn’t until they did MRIs that they made the correct diagnosis.
‘Following the operation to remove the growth from her mouth, a biopsy revealed that it was a more serious condition. She was rushed into an emergency operation, and radiation therapy followed. For the next six weeks, she was given radiotherapy every day. She had claustroph
obia, but was able to go into MRI machines. It involved her being in a confined space, unable to move, with her head secured. Bloody awful. She would stick a picture of the Medicine Buddha up above her in the machine during treatment, so that she could imagine the radiation rays were the healing light from the Buddha. Meditation carried her through.
‘She learnt that all these things are surmountable. She doesn’t want everything she’s been through to be a waste. She wants to help others dig themselves out of a hole, even when the holes may not be as big as hers was. I understand the motivation to be useful, as I felt the same in providing support to our soldiers as an army engineer during the Vietnam War.
‘Choeying’s teacher, Robina, an Australian Tibetan Buddhist, was running the Australian arm of the Liberation Prison Project, and she asked us to take over when she moved to America. There was a little group going into Rockhampton Prison, and they kept asking for someone to go up there. Although it involved a seven-hour drive, Choeying was prepared to go. Also, at the house here, a few local people started to come round, and this developed into a sizeable weekly meditation group.’
It’s an unusual story, but I can believe it. It’s not like an ex–army major and engineer to make up this sort of stuff. Choeying has hinted at a difficult childhood to me before, and mentioned her recent recovery from cancer. I know from my professional work that someone who pulls through this kind of personal history and thrives cannot remain ordinary. I feel lucky to be staying with Choeying and Rex.
ON SUNDAY MORNING the first session of the calm-abiding course begins, and I join in. The course is being run over the coming three weeks, with a mid-week evening session and an all-day session each weekend. There are twelve students attending.
Choeying sits at the end of the meditation hall on the white chair, on a meditation cushion, with her notes propped up in front of her. She begins by welcoming us all, speaking in a commanding, no-nonsense manner. She was a businesswoman, she tells us, before becoming undone. The ‘unimaginable abuse’ she had experienced as a child caught up with her and she became suicidal. She has overcome cancer twice in her life — the first time in her twenties, and the second more recently, with Rex by her side. Her adult daughter is estranged from her. ‘So darlings, there is nothing you can tell me that will shock me, that I haven’t experienced or heard before.’
She asks us to say our names and why we’ve come. A big man, ruddy-faced with a pursed mouth, sits cross-legged on several cushions, his knees pointing skywards. He speaks with a cultured accent. ‘I’ve come to learn to meditate. I do have some stress in my life.’ His body language indicates this is an under-statement.
Queenie tells us, ‘I’m a three-weeker and a runner.’ I under-stand what she means: someone who doesn’t see through the detoxification period. Three weeks is the longest she’s ever abstained from alcohol, she tells us.
‘I’m Shas. I don’t know why I’m fucking here. Well, I do, I came ’cause I’m a friend of Cindy’s. She said I needed to come.’ Cindy is an earnest mother of two whom I met briefly last night, when she drove Shas here. Shas is small, in her twenties, with eyes like a possum’s. She was an apprentice jockey when she fell off her horse at training one morning. ‘I still don’t remember what happened. That was eight years ago. Now I see things differently,’ she says, but does not elaborate. She has a husband and a young daughter, and they are setting up a cattle farm on a bush block outside of town.
The previous night, after dinner, I came across Shas in the downstairs walkway, reclining on a couch. ‘How ya goin’, mate?’ she asked, with a blunt look. She wore a weathered Akubra, a work shirt, shorts, and no shoes. The calf of one leg was heavily bandaged. I asked her what happened. ‘Fell off the motorbike I got for Christmas, didn’t I,’ she says. ‘Landed on the hot muffler. Not s’posed to be ridin’.’ She sounded pleased with herself, and showed me the burn on her leg. It looked deep and nasty.
I doubt I’ll have much to do with her, I thought. But later Choeying told me that she was the other brain-injured person attending the course. ‘She needs a break from the family,’ Choeying said, ‘more than she realises.’
Shas was keen to talk to me when she found out that I also had a brain injury. Just this morning, she took me outside after breakfast and pointed up to the clouds, asking, ‘What do you see?’
‘I see clouds,’ I said.
‘I see bubbles,’ she said, ‘and they’re moving. Sometimes, I don’t know if others see what I see. Walls can dissolve; they don’t seem solid. It’s like I could walk right through ’em.’
Her neuropsychiatrist told her that the things she sees are not hallucinations, exactly, and she will have to learn to live with them. I asked Shas about her brain injury. She had been in a coma, and what she said suggested that the injury was worse than mine, involving more frontal-lobe damage. She’d have difficulty with planning, staying on track, and social appropriateness, I thought. ‘I had medication for the hallucinations before,’ she said, ‘but I don’t like what it does. It makes me dull. I can’t feel. You know, my family says, “Why don’t you snap out of it?” Ted — he’s my husband — he gets frustrated with me all the time. I sleep a lot. That’s why it’s good to meet you. You understand, dontcha?’
‘Yes, I think I do,’ I said.
‘You’re not one of these bloody Buddhists, are you?’ she asked.
‘No, but I like some of their ideas, and I think they’re good people.’
I recognised her experience: others frustrated with you, shut down by fatigue, out-of-whack with the rest of the world. ‘When I had my stroke,’ I said, ‘it was like I was only in the present; I wasn’t thinking about the past or the future. Everything seemed shinier, more alive, more interesting. And I wasn’t afraid. But afterwards, I thought I’d gone crazy.’
Thinking about what Shas said, my mind has wandered from the introductions. Back in the meditation hall, we move on from Shas to a young woman who is an emergency-theatre nurse. She tells us that she loves her job but would like to cope with the stresses of her work better. Another woman is grieving over the death of her young son, two years before. She still feels her son’s presence at home. The next woman has been diagnosed with cancer and fears the worst. She has an eighteen-month-old daughter.
A husband and wife tell us that there is a 90 per cent chance she has multiple sclerosis. They have desperately wanted a child but couldn’t, so the likely diagnosis brings with it some bittersweet relief: no pressure to keep trying anymore. A woman with a closed expression tells us that she suffers from depression. Her brother was recently confined to a wheelchair. She has a baby and a toddler. A young man who sits at the front gives only his name: Josh. Choeying’s already told me that he is one of her most committed students.
Tears have flowed in the room by the time it’s my turn. ‘I’ve had a stroke. My marriage is difficult. We’re facing financial ruin. I’m really exhausted …’ I say. Soon I’m crying too, but not from despair. It’s relief — relief to be in a place where it is okay to let go and to be held in the supportive silence of others who know what pain is.
‘I had lots of material things. The perfect life, perfect children, a beautiful home,’ Choeying says. ‘I was always helping others. I didn’t need help myself. I thought these things would bring me true happiness. But my happiness was dependent: dependent, for example, upon whether I was meeting a friend for coffee that day, and if they didn’t show up I was devastated. Even the coffee being bad could make me miserable. How can you live your life like that?
‘We have to look at our minds. Our senses create desire in us. We like chocolate, but we can’t just have one piece because desire takes over and then we guzzle and feel sick and wish we hadn’t. But the next time we have chocolate, we have too much again. We like a particular type of music, so we listen to it over and over until it becomes dull. What we look at, feel, taste, touch, and smell
is neither good nor bad. If we perceive it as good, we can’t get enough. If it’s bad, we can’t get away fast enough. On the other hand, if we see everything as “just is”, we see a new reality.
‘I see, I like, I must have. The mind is not clear when it is driven by the senses. Meditation refines the mind, helping us to see clearly.’
She gives us the first set of meditation instructions.
DURING THE AFTERNOON session, I feel a tap on my knee. It’s Shas — she’s sitting behind me. ‘I’m afraid,’ she whispers in a quiet voice, bringing her face close to mine. She looks terrified.
After our talk this morning, I’m feeling protective of her. ‘What’s happening?’ I murmur. Choeying is talking to the group.
‘I’m not sure if I’m here.’
I reassure her that she’s here and raise my arm to get Choeying’s attention.
When I tell Choeying what is happening, she asks Shas to come and sit with her at the front. Shas settles on a meditation cushion beside her chair and, after a time, beams at us like a contented cat.
When the day finishes at three o’clock, I feel raw and exposed. The emotional impact of my revelations and those of the others is more than I had been expecting. I go for a long walk on the beach, where the gentle waves seem tender, and eventually I feel soothed again.
That evening, as I sit around the dining table with Shas, Queenie, Choeying, Rex, and Josh, it feels as if I’m part of a fraternity. We’ve all pitched in — helped to cook, set the table, and wash up — and now we’re just chatting.
We’re talking about what causes feelings. Choeying thinks that there is always a thought before a feeling. I say that neuroscientists cannot yet explain what a thought is, but they do say that emotions can come first, before a thought. I explain my understanding of the limbic system and how the nervous system enervates the whole body, including the organs, and these give rise to emotions. Choeying believes there must be something before an emotion and asks what is the origin of the limbic system. I suggest DNA and our parents.