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Calm

TIM PARKS

Author’s Note

How did I come to be where the reader will find me at the beginning of these pages? Not by careful planning, nor any deep wish of mine, and certainly not in order to report back this experience to the world. Quite the contrary. If there was one thing in my life I never imagined myself doing, it was a Buddhist meditation retreat. Brought up in an evangelical household with parents who spoke in tongues and occasionally performed exorcisms, I had vowed to spend my life as far as possible from anything that smacked of spirituality. Then, in midlife, chronic pain struck. I won’t describe the details, but they were embarrassing. Let’s say my lower abdomen felt like a lump of molten lava. There were urinary issues. The doctors let me down. They filled me with drugs and offered surgery while admitting they didn’t understand what was up. Nothing worked. Finally, I had the good luck to discover a book called A Headache in the Pelvis by a certain Dr Wise. It advised a series of breathing exercises, oddly described as paradoxical relaxation, which proved an immense help but had the unexpected side effect of leading me to understand that I must change my life. Then an old friend who gave shiatsu massages told me, if you want to learn to relax through breathing, you should go to a Vipassana retreat. So after a year’s prevaricating, I did.

The Gong

VIPASSANA MEDITATION IS done sitting cross-legged like a Buddha. Before confirming my booking, I phoned the meditation centre to warn them that I had never been able to sit cross-legged; I wasn’t a flexible guy. They reassured me I could always use a chair. Lying down, however, was not permitted. The back must be upright.

‘The position is not the problem,’ a man with a haggard, monkish face announced.

On arrival, I was surprised to find people talking. I had assumed the whole retreat took place in silence. Sitting on the front doorstep of the farmhouse, looking out over an Alpine panorama of peaks and stone and misty cloud, a girl in her mid-twenties had been expressing her concern (and mine) about spending ten to twelve hours a day with her butt on a low cushion.

‘The position is not the problem,’ this gloomy, handsome man repeated. From the way he spoke it appeared that there was a problem, perhaps a very considerable one, just that it wasn’t ‘the position’.

Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. It is the process of self-purification by self-observation. It is a universal remedy for universal problems.

‘Universal’ and ‘remedy’, I thought, are two words that when put together can only epitomise wishful thinking, unless we are talking about a bullet in the brain. Purification, on the other hand, was a concept I couldn’t begin to understand and hence a goal I could hardly desire. As for seeing things as they are, I knew that meditation was done with the eyes closed.

‘Vipassana helps you to start feeling your body,’ Ruggero, my shiatsu friend, said. Lots of his fellow shiatsu practitioners did it; it enabled them to explore the meridians. He suggested I look on the retreat as a merely physical therapy.

What could that mean from a man who didn’t believe in the separation of mind and body?

In the early evening we gathered in the meditation room and were invited to take a vow of silence. Seventeen of us. From now on we wouldn’t be able to compare notes. Since the centre advertised itself as a lay Buddhist, non-religious organisation, I was surprised by the liturgical solemnity of the language and the moral seriousness of some of the avowals. For the space of our stay: we mustn’t speak or communicate in any way; we mustn’t kill, or harm any living creature; we mustn’t steal or use what was not ours; we mustn’t ingest intoxicants or any mind-altering medicines; we mustn’t indulge in any sexual activity; we mustn’t disturb those around us; we mustn’t read or write; we mustn’t engage in any other religious or meditative practice; we mustn’t leave the grounds; we mustn’t wear shoes in the meeting room; we mustn’t lie down in the meeting room; we mustn’t sit with our feet pointing towards the teacher.

There was one positive instruction: we must ask the teacher, a certain Edoardo Parisi, to teach us Vipassana. He was not proselytising. We must seek him out.

The meeting room was a modern wood-and-glass extension built onto the side of the renovated farmhouse, itself perched on the steep slope of the mountain. Outside, rain fell steadily through the darkness. Inside, the only light came from burning logs behind the glass door of a stove and a dim lamp on the floor. The participants, men to one side, women to the other, sat cross-legged on cushions facing the teacher who was slightly raised on a low dais. Just one elderly lady had chosen a chair. Was it vanity, then, made me choose to sit cross-legged? Looking around as we removed our shoes and entered the room, I had simply copied the others. Against the wall there was a stack of cushions, hard and soft. I put two under my butt and pillows each side of my feet to support the knees. My ankles had to be yanked into position.

There was a long silence. The outside of the feet pressing against the mat would be the first to complain, I thought.

I was taken aback by the religious feel of this – the mumbo-jumbo ‘sadhu’ in particular – but accepted that it was a rigmarole that must be gone through if I was to enjoy the benefits of the days ahead. There was no assent in my mind. The idea that all beings might ever be free from sorrow was impossible and hence it was impossible for me to wish it. I remembered Emil Cioran dismissing utopian ideas that ‘do honour to the heart and disqualify the intellect’ and simultaneously warned myself that if I had come to pit my ‘superior’ intelligence against ancient formulas I might as well have stayed at home.

After another long silence we were invited to concentrate on the sensation of the breath crossing the upper lip as it enters and leaves the nostrils. Already the pressure of my left ankle bearing down on my right was painful. Already the straight back I had forced myself to assume was collapsing into a hunch. How could I concentrate on something so nebulous as breath on the lip in this state of discomfort? Lying down, I might have done it. Lying down I had learned to dispel the tension in my body. Thanks to Dr Wise’s relaxation exercises. Cross-legged, tension was intensifying rapidly. Everything went rigid.

I wriggled. Perhaps I had got the position of the cushions wrong. They should have been tipped forward a bit.

‘If thoughts should arise,’ the teacher at last intoned, ‘don’t worry, it doesn’t matter, just say to yourself: thoughts, fantasies, not my thoughts, not my fantasies, and bring your attention gently back to the breath crossing the lip beneath the nose. The in-breath crossing the lip’ – pause – ‘the out-breath crossing the lip.’

The voice was soft and reassuring and I tried to follow its instructions. At the same time it was now evident that I had made a mistake coming here. I would never sit through an hour in this position. It had definitely been a big mistake not putting a third cushion under my butt, plus something to ease the pressure where my crossed legs touched. ‘Not my thoughts,’ I repeated, disbelieving. When, for a moment, I felt a light breath on my lip, I clutched at it as a man falling into a fiery pit might clutch at a thread. It snapped. The fiery pit was my legs where pins and needles were advancing rapidly. Amid a turmoil of angry reflections, I remembered something I had translated once from a book on pre-Vedic philosophy: ‘So as not to be hurt, before coming near the fire, the wise man wraps himself in the meters.’ The arcane instruction had impressed, I remembered it, and I had a vague idea it might now be appropriate in some way, but it also sounded like something from Indiana Jones.

‘Thoughts, fantasies,’ I repeated determinedly and went looking for my breath again. It eluded me.

‘If pains should arise,’ came the teacher’s quiet voice, ‘don’t worry, it doesn’t matter, just say to yourself: aches, pains, not my aches, not my pains, and bring your attention gently back to the air crossing the lip beneath the nose. The in-breath crossing the lip’ – pause – ‘the out-breath crossing the lip.’

Saying ‘pain, not my pain’ worked even less than saying ‘thoughts, not my thoughts’. Whose pain, if not mine? After twenty minutes the pins and needles had crept up from my crushed ankles to my cramped calves. My thighs were simultaneously burning and numb. My curved shoulders were a rigid block. There would be no warm wave of relaxation tonight. Angrily, I hung on. When the hour mercifully ended, I couldn’t stand up.

SO WHY DID you come? I demanded of myself in bed. Surely you didn’t really believe this experiment would help you stand up straight. Who cared about standing up straight, anyway? Why had I chosen to give the business of posture such symbolic force?

Oddly, it now appeared that there was a gap between my actually being here, in this remote valley, sharing a room with two younger men (one snoring steadily), and some moment in the past when, presumably, I had had my good reasons for signing up to five days of Vipassana meditation.

I stayed awake for some time, got up to go to the bathroom, returned, listened to the man snoring, put in my earplugs, turned to the wall.

‘You were looking for a showdown with yourself,’ I muttered. That was it. A showdown with this tangled self, these tussling selves. You decided that without that showdown the pains would soon be back. Or other pains.

What form would the showdown take? I had no idea. But I had been told that, sitting in silence for days, people do come to a new knowledge of themselves. That was the goal. Knowledge, confrontation. To plumb the source of my tensions and defuse them once and for all. Settle once and for all that ‘tussle in the mind’.

Of course, I had no more believed I would be successful in this project than a knight setting out to find the Holy Grail supposes he will be the one chosen to recover it. At some deep level, I wasn’t even surprised to have spent a miserable hour merely verifying the fact that my hips, legs and thighs were too stiff for me to sit cross-legged. What else had I expected? Yet the following morning, after a tedious night taking care not to wake my room-mates as I padded back and forth to the bathroom, I went once more to the cushions, not to a chair. And I went without hesitation. I went cheerfully, expectantly.

In the end, I no longer believe that it is given to us to understand why we behave as we do. I should stop trying.

I say ‘the following morning’. In fact the gong sounded at four a.m. Dead of night. It was a rather beautiful gong, a sort of auditory moonlight rippling through the deep silence of the house, promising calm and clarity. I was already awake and went downstairs at once. In the kitchen were flasks of herb tea. I poured something minty and went outside to drink it under the eaves of the house looking out into cloud and fog. A woman about my own age came and lit a cigarette beside me. It wasn’t unpleasant, standing silently there together, listening to trees and gutter as they dripped, smelling her cigarette smoke in the damp air. I remember she shifted from one foot to the other. The not-talking actually made us more aware of each other’s presence.