In the laboratory of my mind, I’ve been researching communication. Internal, external…anthropologist Clifford Geertz says culture itself is comprised of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Being sick and traveling to Cartagena gave me insights on both these loops.
My microbiology professor said that if she had to choose one phrase or process to describe the secret of life and the universe, it would be “signal transduction”. In the sciences, that means cells receive signals and translate them into another kind of signal – which usually results in a cascade of events that sets off another signal, and the beat goes on. It’s a means for any organism, no matter how small, to interact with its environment. But even one single cell is an environment in its own right, and by extrapolation, each human body is a universe of environments that requires the stalwart transduction of signals to maintain homeostatic balance.
Illness is an upset of that balance, and it’s therefore a really good place from which to observe how the internal dialogue changes, both in nature and in tone. My sore throat and unquenchable thirst and phlegm-y head and dry cough nagged me only a little at first; they turned up the volume until it dawned on me that in fact I was sick; I started taking herbal medicine, resting more, getting more acupuncture, drinking twice as much water. I saw that those were important signals to send my body: I would give it all of the tools at my disposal to support its amelioration. From the grander interventions to the subtler choices, I was saying This is the direction I want to go in… and hoping it was a quick ride.
My mind’s part in the “Are we there yet?” script started booming in bold: Have we reached our goal? I almost never get sick. Aren’t I supposed to heal quickly? I’m scared I won’t get better for a long time. The stories we tell ourselves… what reality was I creating, or not creating, through that conversation? Or better yet, how did those messages jive with the ones I was sending myself through my actions? Did the crossing of signals create static, or harmony? Was one louder and therefore more powerful than the other?
Physicist Fritjof Capra trumpets the Santiago theory : that communication isn’t a transmission of information, but instead a coordination of behavior through mutual structural coupling. The theory proposes that that coordination isn’t determined by meaning but by the dynamics of the dialogue, be it between birds, pets and their owners, or humans. And that’s what makes me wonder what happens between “Rest a while” and “Hurry up and get better”. Is that an effective way of coordinating behavior between my 75 trillion cells? What is the true goal?
No more pertinent question to ask when I’m attempting to communicate in Spanish - a language I started in college, assumed I spoke because I got A’s, and promptly handed my ass to me on a platter when I arrived in Cuba and faced the reality of uncontrolled interaction. Chaos. I spent seven months on that island, not giving equal weight to the complicated conversations I could have by the time I went home, but clinging morosely to the story line that I had failed: I had not realized my potential to be fluent, and most things that came out of my mouth weren’t good enough.
So the first night I arrive Cartagena, my husband arranges dinner with one of his students. The restaurant is strange and cold, but the people are bright and funny and laid back. At first, I cruise along and my short, well-worn sentences sound good… and then when I have to really explain something or tell a story, I devolve. My mind searches the database of what I can’t say. This does not strike me as an encouraging developmental utensil. It’s like being tasked to feed a bumping crowd of starving villagers, looking in the storeroom and reporting: Okay, we don’t have any steak. We also don’t have milk… hell, we don’t even have rice. Lemme see if I can find a bag of saltines…
The faucet turns decisively to the right, the flow freezes, and I stutter until I just stop. Later, when I’m more relaxed, I’ll replay the conversation and I’ll think of three different ways I could have said _______ with my nascent stock of goodies. It’s not Voltaire, but it would work. And that begs more questions: What signals am I sending when I shut down? To whom? How are they received? Does it matter?
At least I can answer the latter inquiry with a resounding yes: it matters if the goal is connection. The true meaning of that word goes beyond a simple registering of signals from sender to receiver. I believe it means that the energy between the two parties flows together in harmony. Harmony, not in a naïve or idyllic sense; think of it in a musical sense. You don’t have to be able to sing it to hear it: discord is palpable. Harmony is sweet. And it’s the perfect example because it doesn’t imply the notes coming together are the same, or even that the most experienced musicians can always predict what it’ll sound like. It might require Capra’s beloved coupling. But that seems right. Fun, even. A millisecond of that is worth a lifetime of noise.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
sayoshi
turn around and
i will dance with you
again
i was small when we first spun -
my heart was noisy with
fear,
the outline of you
was a pheromone that
buzzed into the gap
then time tampered
with our compromiso
and distance ruled
memory trumped -
real transformed to
story,
phantoms paced
until the curve was rounded
and the
atoms of you alighted
the imprint revealed
nothing ever
disappears
i will dance with you
again
i was small when we first spun -
my heart was noisy with
fear,
the outline of you
was a pheromone that
buzzed into the gap
then time tampered
with our compromiso
and distance ruled
memory trumped -
real transformed to
story,
phantoms paced
until the curve was rounded
and the
atoms of you alighted
the imprint revealed
nothing ever
disappears
Sunday, January 4, 2009
CONFESSIONS OF A RETREAT VIRGIN
It took a whole year to get up the courage to do a meditation retreat. I’d dabbled in Zen sitting – I’d taken classes with Tibetan nuns – and I couldn’t sit still for more than ten minutes. I knew if I were going to be serious about meditating, I’d have to learn how to sit for longer. I thought a retreat would mean intensive study of a solid technique and a guarantee that I’d do it regularly. I was worried I’d be blowing my vacation time on something that resembled a bad acid trip. But I’d been through too much to deny the reality that I could go anywhere in the world and I’d never escape the trappings of my mind.
The summer of 2001 began with my last grandparent dying. Three of my best friends were going to get married. I was put on month-to-month contracts at NPR, and didn’t know what my next permanent position would be. I also found out federal taxes were never taken out of my NPR paychecks, and I owed the IRS thousands of dollars. It was no longer good enough to hope that my boyfriend would love me someday; we broke up the night of the first wedding, and I’d moved out by the end of the summer. Fall had barely arrived by the 11th of September. I was a walking, barely waking, open wound.
I devoted myself mostly to work and Buddhism. And by January some of the numbness had given way to determination. So I set out for northern Massachusetts in the shelter of winter to do a ten-day retreat at the Vipassana Meditation Center.
According to the Center’s website, “Vipassana is one of India’s most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. The word vipassana means seeing things as they really are.” Ambitious; time tested. I liked that.
I clicked on the section called “Code of Discipline”. No killing, no stealing, no drugs, no dinner (no dinner?), no exercise, no writing, no reading, no eye contact, no mixing of men and women, no music, no television, no outside contact, NO TALKING. It was becoming clear that they probably called it a retreat because most mortals would run away from this, screaming.
I felt pretty brave just showing up at the Center. I chuckled with cockiness as the staff locked up my cell phone, my pens, my journal. I can stand anything for ten days, I concluded. That first night, sixty of us piled our shoes at the doors of the main hall, grabbed as many pillows and blankets as we could, and sat down. Cross-legged, in neat, silent rows – we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen in this place where we would spend 17 hours of each day wrestling our minds to the ground.
~ * ~
At 4:00 the next morning, we heard the hollow gong of the bell – the same bell that would signal breakfast time, rest time, another meditation session or lights out at 9:30. I was surprised that it didn’t take more than a couple days to get used to the silence I thought would be so ominous. At first, you’d feel uncomfortable sitting directly across from someone in the dining hall, hearing only the steady clink of spoon against bowl, the hiss of hot water melting a tea bag. Where do you look? And if someone looks at you, can they tell you’re actually certifiably insane when you’re not hiding behind social graces?
Eventually you realize you have nothing to say to the person across from you anyway, and you feel more relieved than stifled. And who needs conversation anyway when you can finally hear all that nonstop noise going on in your head… the Elton John song you tried to forget two weeks ago, the mini-series you’d pitch about a shady character from the Witness Protection Program hiding out at the Vipassana Meditation Center, the ex-boyfriend you were sure you’d forgiven, the way your mom got angry at you for taking your braids out at school when you were eight, the fact that you’d better clean your plate well because this morning you got one with a carrot sliver stuck to the side. There is no thin line between crazy and normal, I’d think to myself. It’s the distractions that fool us into buying that distinction. And we cling to those with the strength of life itself.
With so much inaudible thinking, it was nice to hear someone else’s voice every once in a while. The teacher, S. N. Goenka, lives in India - so the Center plays his teachings on tape. Meanwhile, two supremely mellow assistant teachers sat in front of the group on soft white cubes. You were allowed to ask them questions, but only about the techniques we were learning. For the first three days, we learned how to focus our attention on the feeling of inhaling and exhaling air through our nostrils. This helped us to distinguish between subtle and gross sensations (the tickle of a strand of hair vs. the ache of a stubbed toe). The real vipassana training began on the fourth day. That was the day they asked us not to squirm or fidget or wiggle during the sessions – we were supposed to try not to move at all. That way we could turn our awareness on the entire body – scanning each part from head to toe for the subtlest of sensations.
The point of that was to learn how to make all sensations “equanimous”: to train ourselves to refrain from feeling aversion to pain or craving pleasure. We were to just let all the sensations arise and then fade away. I didn’t have such a hard time letting go of the pleasurable feelings – but after an hour and a half of sitting completely motionless on my bony ass (the five pillows underneath it might as well have been sheets of toilet paper) on a concrete floor, it was pretty much impossible to not be averse to the pain. The pain in the lower half of my body was so unbearable that I would spontaneously burst into tears. In my mind, I was absolutely certain that I’d reached my limit, and that if I continued to sit there with this pain, I would die. There was no way something that hurts this much can be good for me, I’d tell myself over and over again.
And then that magical moment came when I decided to try sitting still for just one moment longer, just to see what would happen, to see whether I’d die or pass out or go crazier. And I didn’t. In one negligible fraction of a second, EVERYthing changed.
~ * ~
The images of previous “impossible” moments rolled through my mind in a furious wave. Was I wrong? About ALL of them? The next time I sat and reached that threshold of pain, I had an entirely new anticipation: that my mind would attempt to convince me I couldn’t take it. And I needed to follow the experiment through: if it were just my mind convincing my body, couldn’t my body be convinced of something new? My reactions to the pain started to became less powerful. I went from shaking and crying to thinking it was really uncomfortable to thinking it was just another sensation. And what our teacher was saying started to make real sense: we only give pain and pleasure so much importance because we’ve developed the habit of doing it. We’re used to labeling those sensations “good”, or “bad”, and we either want more or less of them to make us happy, or at least maintain the status quo. The retreat was an extreme example of what it feels like to shift into neutral – where you give yourself the time and space to just notice the feelings without becoming attached to them.
Was it, therefore, the best or the worst kind of example?
Seven years later – I’m still trying to figure that out. I’ve learned enough about Buddhism that I see the fool’s errand I’d normally take on, of trying to recreate that retreat experience, trying to return to some place that was moving and changing even when I was there. It was, more than all my beach vacations combined, the most relaxed I’ve ever felt. And my struggle to sit for 20 minutes every day seems both epic and juvenile in comparison. Most of the time it feels like faith to sit down in the first place. So I guess I haven’t learned so much about Buddhism that I’m free from the desire to want more. More relaxation, more time, more deaths of the impossible. More of the courage I had for a split second to see what happens.
The summer of 2001 began with my last grandparent dying. Three of my best friends were going to get married. I was put on month-to-month contracts at NPR, and didn’t know what my next permanent position would be. I also found out federal taxes were never taken out of my NPR paychecks, and I owed the IRS thousands of dollars. It was no longer good enough to hope that my boyfriend would love me someday; we broke up the night of the first wedding, and I’d moved out by the end of the summer. Fall had barely arrived by the 11th of September. I was a walking, barely waking, open wound.
I devoted myself mostly to work and Buddhism. And by January some of the numbness had given way to determination. So I set out for northern Massachusetts in the shelter of winter to do a ten-day retreat at the Vipassana Meditation Center.
According to the Center’s website, “Vipassana is one of India’s most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. The word vipassana means seeing things as they really are.” Ambitious; time tested. I liked that.
I clicked on the section called “Code of Discipline”. No killing, no stealing, no drugs, no dinner (no dinner?), no exercise, no writing, no reading, no eye contact, no mixing of men and women, no music, no television, no outside contact, NO TALKING. It was becoming clear that they probably called it a retreat because most mortals would run away from this, screaming.
I felt pretty brave just showing up at the Center. I chuckled with cockiness as the staff locked up my cell phone, my pens, my journal. I can stand anything for ten days, I concluded. That first night, sixty of us piled our shoes at the doors of the main hall, grabbed as many pillows and blankets as we could, and sat down. Cross-legged, in neat, silent rows – we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen in this place where we would spend 17 hours of each day wrestling our minds to the ground.
~ * ~
At 4:00 the next morning, we heard the hollow gong of the bell – the same bell that would signal breakfast time, rest time, another meditation session or lights out at 9:30. I was surprised that it didn’t take more than a couple days to get used to the silence I thought would be so ominous. At first, you’d feel uncomfortable sitting directly across from someone in the dining hall, hearing only the steady clink of spoon against bowl, the hiss of hot water melting a tea bag. Where do you look? And if someone looks at you, can they tell you’re actually certifiably insane when you’re not hiding behind social graces?
Eventually you realize you have nothing to say to the person across from you anyway, and you feel more relieved than stifled. And who needs conversation anyway when you can finally hear all that nonstop noise going on in your head… the Elton John song you tried to forget two weeks ago, the mini-series you’d pitch about a shady character from the Witness Protection Program hiding out at the Vipassana Meditation Center, the ex-boyfriend you were sure you’d forgiven, the way your mom got angry at you for taking your braids out at school when you were eight, the fact that you’d better clean your plate well because this morning you got one with a carrot sliver stuck to the side. There is no thin line between crazy and normal, I’d think to myself. It’s the distractions that fool us into buying that distinction. And we cling to those with the strength of life itself.
With so much inaudible thinking, it was nice to hear someone else’s voice every once in a while. The teacher, S. N. Goenka, lives in India - so the Center plays his teachings on tape. Meanwhile, two supremely mellow assistant teachers sat in front of the group on soft white cubes. You were allowed to ask them questions, but only about the techniques we were learning. For the first three days, we learned how to focus our attention on the feeling of inhaling and exhaling air through our nostrils. This helped us to distinguish between subtle and gross sensations (the tickle of a strand of hair vs. the ache of a stubbed toe). The real vipassana training began on the fourth day. That was the day they asked us not to squirm or fidget or wiggle during the sessions – we were supposed to try not to move at all. That way we could turn our awareness on the entire body – scanning each part from head to toe for the subtlest of sensations.
The point of that was to learn how to make all sensations “equanimous”: to train ourselves to refrain from feeling aversion to pain or craving pleasure. We were to just let all the sensations arise and then fade away. I didn’t have such a hard time letting go of the pleasurable feelings – but after an hour and a half of sitting completely motionless on my bony ass (the five pillows underneath it might as well have been sheets of toilet paper) on a concrete floor, it was pretty much impossible to not be averse to the pain. The pain in the lower half of my body was so unbearable that I would spontaneously burst into tears. In my mind, I was absolutely certain that I’d reached my limit, and that if I continued to sit there with this pain, I would die. There was no way something that hurts this much can be good for me, I’d tell myself over and over again.
And then that magical moment came when I decided to try sitting still for just one moment longer, just to see what would happen, to see whether I’d die or pass out or go crazier. And I didn’t. In one negligible fraction of a second, EVERYthing changed.
~ * ~
The images of previous “impossible” moments rolled through my mind in a furious wave. Was I wrong? About ALL of them? The next time I sat and reached that threshold of pain, I had an entirely new anticipation: that my mind would attempt to convince me I couldn’t take it. And I needed to follow the experiment through: if it were just my mind convincing my body, couldn’t my body be convinced of something new? My reactions to the pain started to became less powerful. I went from shaking and crying to thinking it was really uncomfortable to thinking it was just another sensation. And what our teacher was saying started to make real sense: we only give pain and pleasure so much importance because we’ve developed the habit of doing it. We’re used to labeling those sensations “good”, or “bad”, and we either want more or less of them to make us happy, or at least maintain the status quo. The retreat was an extreme example of what it feels like to shift into neutral – where you give yourself the time and space to just notice the feelings without becoming attached to them.
Was it, therefore, the best or the worst kind of example?
Seven years later – I’m still trying to figure that out. I’ve learned enough about Buddhism that I see the fool’s errand I’d normally take on, of trying to recreate that retreat experience, trying to return to some place that was moving and changing even when I was there. It was, more than all my beach vacations combined, the most relaxed I’ve ever felt. And my struggle to sit for 20 minutes every day seems both epic and juvenile in comparison. Most of the time it feels like faith to sit down in the first place. So I guess I haven’t learned so much about Buddhism that I’m free from the desire to want more. More relaxation, more time, more deaths of the impossible. More of the courage I had for a split second to see what happens.
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