Meditating with monks: day seven

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By Gabrielle Jackson

6.59am: At breakfast just now, there was an ant on my table. I picked it up and put it on the floor. I ate too much again and now I will have to sleep and miss the first hour of the next session, like I have done for the past two days.

12.30pm: I’ve taken a step backwards on the pain management front. Today my left leg hurts. Yesterday it was the right. The front of my leg throbs. When I lay down on my bed, also known as a wooden slat, my muscles around the sacrum spasm like crazy.

The good news is that I think I’m getting better at being mindful. The bad news is I’m getting worse at concentrating during standing meditation. I really want it to be over now.

4.26pm: I’ve had a breakthrough. Thank God for my interview with Sayadaw, even though I didn’t want to go. I told him that I was in so much pain most of the time that I was having great trouble focusing. He said that if I was in that much pain I could move ‘with mindfulness’.

So I went back and when the pain got too much, I just moved, kept breathing and observing the rise and fall of my abdomen. It was great. Just brilliant. Because I wasn’t waiting for the 15-minute chime – because I could move when I wanted – the time passed ever so quickly and I was able to concentrate. Yipee!

9.29pm: OMG, I’ve gone all zen. In this evening’s session, usually the worst of the day, I hardly moved in the Dhamma talk. I started out thinking that it might be some kind of joke and that Sayadaw was just up there repeating the same thing night after night as a trick to see if anybody is listening, since the only thing I ever understand is something about yogis ‘coming and go’. I felt like I should be the one to stand up and say, ‘Haha, busted!’ and that I might get some prize for it. But just at that moment I heard him say, ‘The yogi might see lots of blood. The yogi might see his head off his body’ and so it went. I’m pretty sure I’d never heard that before, and decided not to be the one to call him out after all.

After the talk, I helped two ladies tie their mosquito nets to the cord hanging from the ceiling because they were too short to reach it. Then, although I had to move twice in my sitting hour, I did so with mindfulness and felt a kind of euphoria. My head was spinning and at the end, when the bell chimed, I’d completely forgotten about meta chanting, which we do at the end of every day. How is that even possible? I felt so happy and calm and realised that this Buddhist calm and peaceful thing is not at all put on. It felt liked I’d just smoked some really good weed.

My euphoria lasted throughout the chanting, which I generally don’t like. It’s a bit like praying and with everyone sitting around chanting together it just feels like too much of a religion. I realise I’m on a Buddhist retreat, which is a religion, yes, but let’s face it, the Buddhists don’t cause much trouble, do they? You don’t hear of Buddhists blowing things up in the name of being peaceful. They can’t even kill an ant for crying out loud. So I didn’t really see it as a religion when I signed up. But now I’m here, I see it is clearly a religion and I am innately distrustful of religion, so the meta chanting usually gets on my nerves.

While what we chant is well meaning – we chant for pretty much every living thing to be free from physical and mental suffering and to be happy and able to look after themselves. Oh, and that we be free of aging and death. I mean, really, isn’t all that aiming a bit too high? And isn’t it proof that the prayers don’t work? Because I’m pretty sure there are a few people suffering and I haven’t heard of anyone living forever yet, although apparently there’s some guy who’s about 200 living in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. Anyway, these Buddhists are pretty hard to dislike and they’ve been graceful enough to allow us to come and learn meditation with them and nobody’s even mentioned us becoming Buddhist, so I might give the chanting another chance. 

See also: DAY SIX and  DAY EIGHT