May all beings be well. May all beings be happy. May all beings find peace.
(for Tika, much delayed written version of a tale i told high in the himalayas, arriving to a hut in the midst of a hail storm!)
I once attempted a Vipassana meditation, in the Goenka tradition, 10 days of silence, stillness and near perpetual meditation. It was immensely powerful, but way too much for my fragile sanity, I left after 7 or 8 days.
Part of my learning was in fact: “it’s ok to leave, sometimes it’s good to give up”.
I really struggled with the Silence, with the Social Isolation, that, and the Intense Visions. Ultimately i decided that, yes, I could have made it to the end… pushed on through, the likelihood tho would have been that I’d blow a spiritual gasket, either attain enlightenment, emerge as a saint, else as a madman… and is it mostly a matter of context as to which is which?
As a Father… i need to be rooted in the world. I have responsibilities. Yes. It’s Ok to leave.
The retreat was in January, a beautiful location in the Welsh countryside, as we arrived they separated us, men to one side and women to the other. All phones placed safely away in lockers.
The gong rang at 4:00 am every morning, the days filled with endless meditation, breakfast, and the occasional ‘relaxation’ hour when you could walk around the grounds.
The meditation technique began by focusing on the place where breath first comes into the body, just beneath the nose. On later days we were moving attention around the body in a rhythmical fashion… first slowly, eventually quickly.
Its a curious experiment, everybody emerges having had a completely different experience… some of my friends have merely found it boring and suffered from aches and pains, whilst for others it triggered deep childhood anxieties.
A very obvious criticism is that it is not ‘trauma informed’ and my own strong feeling was that it was irresponsible of the organisers, it failed the participants, in that there was no support of any kind afterwards… its like being thrown off a cliff, who knows where or how you’ll land?
I was expecting that, if I was lucky, somewhere towards the end of the retreat I might experience some waves of eternal cosmic bliss. What happened was that after meditation on the second day I went out to look up at the bright mineral stars, went back to lie down on the bed and my whole body felt like it was made from exploding stars. spangled eruptions. Eight days still to go. buckle in!
For me, the closest experience was to that of tripping. Intense visions and insights, ecstatic reverence closely interwoven with fear and paranoia.
A powerful religious tone, seeing halos around other peoples heads! This mingled with classic buddhist thanka type images, the sensation that my body is on fire, a cold fire, that does not burn, else that my body is eternally blossoming, the flowering of form.
Rather than being Buddhist in aspect, most of what I ‘saw’ was in a western, nature based tradition, the feeling that i am a Narnian, else dwell in a Tolkien-esque place. I think that we all have a particular spiritual palette and it is this that the unconscious and imagination draw from. It’s developed in childhood, from a time before our conscious personality is fully developed. Mine was a green realm of woods, streams and low hills, British, the human sized spirit of the land.
The Vipassana course incorporated cult like disciplines… which are identical to monastic religious traditions… not harmful in themselves, but important to be aware of. These included:
Endless meditation.
Social deprivation and isolation… You are forbidden from looking at anyone, let alone speaking.
Sleep deprivation… You barely sleep. When meditating all day, the body doesn’t seem to require it, the mind is perpetually in the hypnagogic zone twixt sleep and wakefulness.
Fasting… food is breakfast and lunch, you are not permitted to eat beyond midday… blood sugar levels fluctuate, prompting a mental clarity and spiritual openness.
A single point of view… Each evening, the treat, and the only point of levity in the day, would be to listen to a tape of Goenkas voice intoning some nugget of spiritual wisdom… like a great bullfrog… this fixed viewpoint, a framework to understand your experience, yet no alternative proffered.
The woods, time outdoors, was my main salvation, this felt so much more harmonious than the meditation hall. The beauty of nature in cold, empty January, the minute twitches of life, a mere wriggle of root, the first buds of snowdrops, small scale, but a distinct stirring.
Goenka intoned a key teaching ‘Everything arises then falls away. The world comes into, then out of being’. It was sunset, mist midst a foggy twilight, I walked amongst the trees and could both feel and see this truth. Scintilla. Granularity. The fundamental oscillation of the universe, a palpable and joyful sense of this.
Much of the time was also extraordinarily pleasant, for many of the meditation sessions I found myself slipping into a tranquil groove.
Calm. Serene Bliss. Warmth and Abundance bubbling upwards, coaxed forth from the silence.
World coated in a golden glow.
An hour would pass and I’d barely need to adjust my posture, physical sensations would recede, and I would relax into a realm of rapture.
Sonorous Profound Love.
Food… the knowledge that grub was grounding… the meals were vegan, delicious tasty and nourishing,… savor and chew every mouthful. but, but… times when i’m sitting there flunked out, not wanting to be near anyone, hyper aware, hyper vigilant. Knowing i needed to eat, that it would be 12 hours till the next rations… It wasn’t hunger, but I wanted grub to pull me back down from my spiritual pedestal, yet each mouthful, each chew and chomp felt like a torment. Wish i’d smuggled some oat cakes in!
I wanted desperately to make it to the end. The day of metta, of loving kindness. I needed to be hugged. On this day I would have been able to speak to some of the others. The restless mind makes up stories about people. Perpetual Narrative. The guy sitting near to me, agog, who seemed to be shining. The woman on the far side with whom there was a karmic bond? I wanted to hear who they were. Yet if I left, I would never see them again, there could be no hope of closure.
The man I shared my hut with snored like a pig, he seemed to sleep all the time, his rasps would shake the foundations of the hut. I, in my near crazed funk couldn’t sleep at all, constantly interrupted by his snores. I found myself trying to sleep by matching my breathing pattern to his, obviously this is not possible, for a while it would work, but then i’d find myself breathing quickly, shallowly. I’d wake from my half slumber gasping for air, floundering, drowning.
The rhythm of breath, air flowing freely into our lungs. The rhythm of blood, the pounding of the heart. This DNA double spiral.
Another night, half awake, half asleep i became aware of a drumming, a pounding… ‘she is coming, she is coming… the serpent is coming from the deep’, a powerful, palpable sense of dread.
The Snake was often with me in this time, usually beautiful and benign, ‘she’ was a majestic, immense, green sea serpent, a huge swoon swirl of sinuous energy passing through. Yet with me, terror is seldom far behind.
Traditionally the way a snake shucks off its skin, is a symbol of spiritual rebirth, else the Urobus, the universe serpent, eating its own tail. I have always been fascinated by snakes. As a child, at the zoo, to enter the reptile house was a shiny silver sixpence extra, a small dark building, I’d go in alone. Deep underground. These glimpses of the Delphic Oracle.
Equanimity, ‘not to grasp, not to reject’, is a core message. Fundamental agreement with this, but, hey, its difficult.
Within a visionary landscape, equanimity was the golden thread. From where I was standing I could view the distant hallowed spiritual uplands, golden and glowing, but to get there the path ran downwards, across stony rugged ground, then into a dark wooded valley, eventually it climbed up and out the other side. I knew that within this forest lurked monsters, creatures fed from darkness, all of my fears and ones that I don’t even yet know of. Follow the thread, remember and practice equanimity, all shall be ok. But yeah, I was scared, and didn’t wish to go that way.
I made an appointment and went for a 10 minute lunchtime meeting with the course leader, I was hoping for some assurance that the daunting array of visual and kineaesthetic hallucinations I was experiencing were somehow ‘normal’ for the process and that I wasn’t on the cusp of a psychotic episode? The advice I received was merely not to focus on these sensations, just to stick with the process. The guy was an odd, somewhat remote figure, it was pleasant peculiar merely to use my voice again.
I returned to my room, fell briefly asleep, woke to find that i was following the rotation of consciousness meditation even in my sleep. Faster and faster… keep going, keep flowing.
I couldn’t stop?! It was this exact meditation that was pushing me further and further out, a frenzy of madness.
I returned the next day to speak with the course leader again at lunchtime, his advice this time was not to meditate whilst sitting in the meditation hall. just to sit there. I tried this, yet became convinced that we are all resonant with each other, in a room where everybody is powerfully meditating, you cannot help but thrum with the same vibration, you cannot stop gyre circling higher.
That night the snoring was even worse, frustrated I finally got up from my bed around midnight, went to the hut of the course helpers to tell them, bliss to actually have a brief normal conversation. They came over, stood outside and laughed, the snore sound was unbearably loud, they said they’d move me to another hut, but by then i realised that what I actually had to do was leave, the snoring was the catalyst, the turmoil was within myself.
‘We are all star consciousness’, words written in a visitors book as I prepared to depart, I feel this strongly to be true, I can see the star tarot card, the beautiful maiden pouring water endlessly onto the land… a bird in the tree beyond… a golden 8 pointed star of mental clarity.
Mineral, pure, clear, cold.
But we are more! The abundance, the green tendrils of vegetable consciousness, this wriggle writhe.
else animal consciousness which is blood and movement, deep red, vermilion, scarlet… blood and bone… quick, vital
Beyond all that human consciousness. Connection… about the heart, relationship… we are poor shiversome creatures nothing without our fire, our intelligence, our tools, a love of language and story. We exist as family, as tribe, it takes so long to nurture a human child… carried in arms for the first year, we are nothing without each other.
The morning I left the retreat, they offered me a lift down to the main road, from where I could catch the bus.
In truth I did not feel the need for the immediate clamour of towns and human life… far preferable: gradual, gradual.
It was a beautiful dawn in the middle of January, deep in the welsh countryside, the morning sun had just crept above the hill opposite… radiance, the distinct white rays of starshine, mingled with the golden warmth of sunshine.
I hoisted the bag up onto my back, to begin to walk the couple of miles to the road… there is always something profoundly satisfying about walking away under our own steam.
A farmer was pootling along in his tractor up in the field, he waved!?! With pantomime enthusiasm I semaphore waved back… longer than a week since any human had acknowledged my presence! weird and deeply pleasant.
I came around a bend, and there, sitting outside an old farmhouse door, was a dog.
She jumped up and started barking, a beautiful, young collie, with black and white markings.
There was no ferocity, just a playful enthusiasm, she pranced from side to side, I hunkered down and threw open my arms. Tongue lolling, tail wagging, she came forward for a cuddle.
This was too much for my wrangled heart, all the pent up emotion from isolation, over a week of teetering on the boundaries of madness.
I started to sob, tears welled up, then splashed out of my eyes, some of them flopped down into the eyes of the dog, rolled around, then dropped to the dust below, as though she, in turn, were crying.
Swollen, awash with gratitude and love, marvelous hound.
Blessings for our hearts, our blood, our passion, for all of this love that dwells in these our beautiful animal souls.
afterwards
Hanna came over and hugged me for days… this was exactly what I needed… a yearning for human connection and warmth, that i felt was missing from the whole experience, we loitered, cooked hearty meals, went for slow dawdle country walks, slept greatly and just chatted.
A few days later my kids stayed, the simple, benign pleasures of being human.
All that remained of my meditation experience were mad, ragged, fervent dreams, those and a strong ringing, a persistent tone in my head which endured for weeks afterwards, a note of one particular frequency, possibly 528 hz, the eternal hathor frequency? that which comes from out, beyond, somewhere in the universe.
It took several weeks to fade.
Soften back into the stillness, allow a pool of golden warmth gather at the heart, then radiate out to all living souls
May all beings be well. May all beings be happy. May all beings find peace.
Om Mane Padme Hum
