Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  “That’s funny. To me, it feels like life.”

  Matt shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket. “If you wanted to make a life with me, there were other ways you could have gone about it. Like not tricking me into being a father, for starters.”

  “You know what, Matt? This isn’t about you.”

  “Apparently not,” he said. “So in that case, I might as well be going.”

  I wanted to throw myself weeping to the ground and grind my face in the dirt. I wanted to scrape up handfuls of earth and eat them. Don’t leave. Don’t leave. Please, please, don’t leave. “Don’t let me stop you,” I said.

  SO MANY TIMES, at moments like this, I’d said that I wanted to crawl into a cave. This time, I could really do it.

  The yogis’ cave was tiny, only about ten feet across, just high enough to sit up in. Butter lamps flickered on a low altar, painted red and gold. The walls were black with centuries of smoke. I squatted on a meditation cushion and hugged my legs into a ball at my chest, wrapping my arms around my shins. I felt as if a nuclear bomb had detonated inside my chest.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe I should run down the hill after Matt, fling my arms around him while the pigs and the chickens rooted and pecked at our feet. Please don’t leave; please come back and torture me some more. I fumbled through my daypack looking for a chocolate bar. I pulled it out and ripped the wrapper off. As I stuffed it into my mouth, I began to cry in jagged, hiccupping sobs. I didn’t have any tissues. I wiped my sleeve across my face, smearing snot and tears and chocolate all together.

  How many times had I cried like this over Matt? Why had I thought it would be any different this time? If I could escape this pain by starving myself, I would. If I could bully my heart into numbness, I would. I looked at the gaunt Buddha on the altar, the bony rack of his ribs. Is this the kind of heartache Siddhartha and his friends were trying to escape? Funny—the Buddhist sutras didn’t say anything about Siddhartha’s own suffering. Sure, the Buddha-to-be sneaked out of the palace and saw old age, sickness, death, and loss. But they were all happening to other people. Did he ever go mad with grief and longing himself? Did he ever feel so alone in his own skin he couldn’t bear it? Was he ever shipwrecked on the rocks of love, sick with desire for a palace dancing girl, insane with rage because his wife didn’t love him the way he wanted to be loved?

  I blew my nose on the sleeve of my shirt. Well, if he did, he dealt with it the way most guys do: He bolted. What about his wife? Was she devastated when he sneaked away in the middle of the night without even leaving a note? She probably just sat back at the palace, sobbing and thumbing through the Pali equivalent of Women Who Love Too Much.

  I put my hand on my belly. I’m sorry, I whispered, and started to cry again. I’m sorry I’ve screwed up your life before it’s even started. Funny how it was mainly men who felt compelled to go off and torture themselves in caves. If men could feel this life moving inside them—if they could feel a new human being incarnating in their bellies—would they still need to do all these tortuous practices just to wake themselves up?

  The air was thick with incense, sweet and spicy. The walls curved in all around. Being here was like crawling back into the womb. No wonder the yogis wanted to hide out here. Siddhartha was in his late twenties when he first sat down here, in his early thirties when he finally left—just the age Matt was now, come to think of it. A young man whipping himself toward some kind of luminous perfection, a mind state impervious to sorrow, to loss, to longing, to despair. To chase it, he’d walked away from everything he’d held most dear.

  The Buddha: Awakened master? Or just another guy who was afraid to commit?

  Tortoise Pose

  (Kurmasana)

  Sit on the floor and spread your legs wide. Bend both knees and slide your arms under them. Then gradually straighten your legs, pressing out through the heels, and using your legs to tug your shoulders down to the floor.

  Withdraw the head and legs of your senses into your bony carapace. Don’t smell. Don’t taste. Don’t hear. Don’t see. Don’t feel.

  Turtles live long and move slowly. They have all the time in the world to get where they’re going. Once a turtle is in its shell, nothing can disturb it.

  Vipassana is observing the truth. With the breath I am observing the truth at the surface level, at the crust level. This takes me to the subtler, subtler, subtler levels. Within three days the mind becomes so sharp, because you are observing the truth.

  —S. N. Goenka (1924–)

  CHAPTER 16

  THROUGH YEARS OF breakups—and observing the breakups of those around me—I had learned a few things not to do afterward.

  Do not go to bed with the guy instead of going home, hoping that if you pretend you didn’t just break up, he’ll forget that it happened.

  Do not call his voice mail at three in the morning to persuade him of what a terrible mistake he has made by leaving you.

  Do not become best friends with the woman for whom he left you, so you can commiserate with her about his chronic inability to commit while secretly waiting for them to break up so you can get back together with him.

  Two days after my fight with Matt, I had a new rule: Do not—repeat, do not—sign up for a ten-day vipassana meditation retreat.

  I was ten hours into the first day of my New Year retreat, which was held at the Bodh Gaya Vipassana Meditation Headquarters, a brick building that squatted off a crowded alley a few blocks from the Mahabodhi Temple. I was sitting cross-legged on an understuffed black cushion, trying to concentrate on the sensations of my breath moving at the tip of my nose. My underwear had crawled up my crotch, and I couldn’t figure out an inconspicuous way to pull it out. Someone seemed to be prying my kneecaps off with a crowbar. My neck itched. Through the open windows, I could hear the din of bus engines, truck horns, pony hooves, rickshaw motors, crows cawing, cows lowing, a rooster crowing, and a distant, intermittent hammering.

  I’d signed up for the retreat a couple of days ago, the evening after Matt bolted. Devi Das and I had gone to the German Bakery so I could smother my grief with chai and cinnamon rolls. We’d sat down at the only empty seats, which were at a table already occupied by a ponytailed guy from UC–Santa Cruz whose girlfriend had just left for the market to shop for a brass Tara statue.

  “If you really want to learn to meditate, vipassana is the only way to go,” he’d lectured us, digging his fork into a slab of apple pie heaped high with whipped cream. “It’s the exact same method the Buddha used. It’s been passed down for thousands of years without changing a thing.”

  I dipped the end of my cinnamon roll into my chai, watching the sugar dissolve and float on the surface. “Does your girlfriend do vipassana, too?”

  “No. She’s into the Tibetan thing. She says the guys are hotter.” He crammed another bite of pie into his mouth. “She’s not really my girlfriend, actually. It’s more of a friends-with-benefits kind of thing. But the amazing thing is, I’ve developed so much equanimity through my vipassana practice, I don’t give a shit any more.”

  That had sounded good to me.

  But now it was only Day 1, and already things weren’t looking so good.

  I stared down at a scuffed linoleum floor and waited for the meditation teacher to strike the bowl-shaped bell that sat on a massive cushion at the other end of the room. I felt like one of the dogs I used to walk at Doggie Day Care, whining, staring at the leash, its whole body one quivering knot of longing: Now…now…oh, please, now…now? Oh for God’s sake, what are you waiting for? Not that anything particularly exciting would happen when the bell rang: I’d just get to stretch out my aching legs, get up, and stalk back and forth in the garden at a pace of about two steps per minute, trying to concentrate on each sandaled foot touching the ground. Within ten minutes of doing that, I’d be looking forward to the bell ringing again, so I could sit back down on the cushion and resume concentration on the tip of my nose.

  I’d been p
lodding along like this since five o’clock this morning, in a forced march through a sensory desert: Sit for forty-five minutes. Walk for thirty minutes. Sit. Walk. Sit. Walk. The afternoon stretched forbiddingly in front of me. Lunch—the big excitement for the day—was far behind, though the aftertaste of curried eggplant and yogurt still burped into my mouth. In the distance shimmered the oasis of afternoon tea.

  When the teacher’s voice cracked through the silence, I nearly jumped out of my skin. “If your mind has wandered,” he suggested in a thick Australian drawl, “simply draw it back to the physical sensations of your breath.”

  Drore it back. Sen-sie-shuns. I’d been expecting the retreat to be led by an Indian monk in saffron robes, like the one who glared from the cover of the pamphlet I’d flipped through in the registration office. Instead it was team-taught by Karen, a beak-nosed New Yorker in her sixties with iron-gray hair and a dancer’s posture; and Harold, a boyish Australian with brown curls, a disarming grin, and a Buddha tattooed on his right bicep. The room was packed with about fifty meditators—all of them also Westerners, as far as I could tell—sitting knee to knee, castaways in little islands of cushions, benches, shawls, used tissues, and water bottles.

  I’ll tell them I have a heart condition. I tried to wiggle my nose in a way that relieved the itch on my left cheek. I’ll tell them my mother is dying. The itch crept around to my hairline. I’ll tell them I’m having contractions. The itch burrowed into my ear canal. Oh God. It’s an earwig. My hand flew to my ear, unbidden, and my finger poked around inside. Empty. I opened my eyes and peeked around to make sure no one had seen me. The woman on my left was shooting me a sidelong glare of withering contempt. You loser, said her eyes. You just ruined my entire meditation.

  I closed my eyes again. How hard could it be, really? The instructions couldn’t be simpler: I was to sit in silence, without moving, and anchor my attention in the present moment—“The only moment there is, mates,” Harold had drawled. “The only moment in which enlightenment is possible.”

  He must be talking about some other present moment. My shirt was glued to my back with sweat. My pubic bone ached. My armpits smelled like a skunk. Every few minutes the man on my right released the sulfurous smell of rotten eggs. Rickshaws rumbled by, their horns warbling. My left leg had fallen asleep.

  I remembered the Satyanam Ashram with nostalgia. Just a half hour or so of meditation, and then you got to chant! Light incense! Sing bhajans! From the perspective of a vipassana retreat, these activities seemed wildly decadent, like going clubbing.

  Three more hours until tea.

  Day 2

  MY YOGI JOB was to wash the breakfast dishes—in silence, with concentration and awareness, as a kind of meditation in itself. I stood at the sink scrubbing clumps of burned apple crisp off Pyrex pans, rinsing sticky stewed-prune juice off stainless steel serving bowls.

  Yesterday, I had liked this job. I had liked having a task laid out in front of me, with my progress so steady and clear, unlike my progress in meditation: first the dishes are dirty; then I apply effort; then they are clean. Maybe meditation retreats weren’t so bad after all. Maybe I’d go on another one someday—in Hawaii this time, where I’d wash dishes again, mindfully, happily, looking out the window at banana trees and blue surf.

  But today, another yogi showed up to help me: a surly young man who looked like Johnny Depp. I became nervous immediately. I splashed hot water down the front of my apron. I dropped my steel wool in the sink; fumbling for it under the suds, I nicked the tip of my finger on a chopping knife. I sensed his unspoken scorn. He dried the dishes so efficiently that I couldn’t keep up; he stood twirling his dishcloth, radiating impatience. I handed him a pan, and he handed it back to me with a grimace, pointing at a smear of blood on the handle. My face flamed with self-loathing. I lost my steel wool again.

  Day 3

  MY MEDITATION CUSHION had been compacted into a solid brick. When I closed my eyes, I felt as if I had been locked into a closet with a lunatic with a megaphone. With every breath, my bra dug into my ribcage. Why couldn’t we take off our bras at the door along with our shoes? I pictured neat rows of hooks over the shoe racks, dozens of bras dangling, cups empty.

  By midafternoon, I had developed a stabbing pain between my shoulder blades. On a bathroom break between meditation sessions, I did Downward Dog in a corner of the garden, trying to relieve it. But Karen swooped down on me. “No yoga,” she hissed. “Be with your experience as it is. Do not attempt to manipulate it.” Her expression implied that a yoga mat was a slippery slope: One minute, you’re in Downward Dog. The next minute, you’re sitting in a gutter with a needle in your arm.

  Day 4

  WE WERE NOT allowed to read or write, and I was starved for words. As I made my tea, I read and reread the milk carton: Total fat, 15 grams. Saturated fat, 3 grams. As I washed dishes, I read and reread the labels on the kitchen shelves: “Mixing Bowls.” “Serving Bowls.” “Please do not pile paper towel rolls more than three deep.” I read and reread the sign in the bathroom: “Please do not put any item other than toilet paper in this or any other toilet.”

  But doing walking meditation in the garden, it hit me how blissful it was to be without words, to be in direct contact with experience instead: the sun on my face. The brilliant crimson of the hibiscus. The stench of the sewer in the street. The twitching of my baby inside me. The glimpse of wordless bliss was so powerful that I was seized with the compulsion to sneak back into my room and find my journal. You want to capture the butterflies of experience in the net of words, I told myself sternly. But all you’ll have left is dead bugs. Then I sat on my cushion and recited this insight over and over, so I would remember to write it down.

  Day 5

  TIME HAD SLOWED to a crawl. Colors, sounds, and scents were stunningly vivid. At lunch, I chewed each bite for several minutes, marveling at the web of flavors and textures: onion, garlic, turmeric, salt, the silky crumble of potato, the snap of string bean. It was so delicious that it was almost painful.

  After lunch, I sat on a bench in the small, enclosed back yard staring for twenty minutes at a branch: its veined, intricate leaves; the small buds of dormant flowers. Everything was intense: the touch of the wind on my skin; the smell of jasmine and exhaust, the cooing of the wood doves, the faces of the other yogis, who moved around the courtyard slowly, as if underwater. Even the roar of the traffic sounded like music. I felt my baby floating inside me.

  So this was what they mean by “being present”! Well, no wonder people bothered to meditate. From now on, this was how I’d be all the time. I saw myself back in California, beaming at Ishtar and Ernie, washing their greasy two-day-old pasta-with-pesto dishes without a hint of resentment. At the park, children would flock to me, drawn by the peace I emanated. I would sit at The Bookends Café and write my guide to enlightenment, and guys would come to my table and ask if they could sit across from me while I wrote. Just being around you makes me feel happy, they’d say. Want to go out for a drink sometime and tell me your secret? No secret, I’d say. I’m just savoring every passing moment, no matter how small. And then, when I did hook up with one of them, the sex would be fabulous, because I would be so present.

  The bell rang. I realized I had been gone for the last fifteen minutes.

  Day 6

  ALL MORNING, I felt the baby fluttering inside me: the faintest of butterfly wings deep in my pelvis. Sometimes I was sure I could feel the beating of its tiny heart.

  I worried that my silence would frighten it. During walking meditation, I ducked into a bathroom and closed the door. “I’m still here,” I said out loud, my voice husky from the long silence. “Don’t worry.” There was something else I want to say, but it took me a minute to figure out what it was. Then, “I love you,” I whispered. As I said it, I knew for the first time that it was true. It was a feeling completely unlike the yearning I felt for Matt, or the affection for Lori. It was fierce, and protective, and as impossible to remove
as my own skeleton.

  Day 7

  IN. OUT. IN. I was peace, I was light, I was infinite consciousness, vast as the sky. In. I was ambushed in the space between breaths by a memory of the time Matt took me rock climbing on the cliffs by Stinson Beach. Partway up the cliff, I’d missed a handhold and slipped, and suddenly I was spinning out into space, dangling on the end of his belay rope. It’s okay, he’d called, holding the other end of the line. I’ve got you. For a moment I just hung there, relishing the fact that he had been there to keep me from plummeting to earth. Then I had reached out and grabbed onto the rocks again.

  He’d always been the one opening the doors into the unknown so I could follow him through. It was one of the things I’d loved about him. But sitting alone on my meditation cushion, it hit me that the adventure of pregnancy and motherhood was as wild as any of the ones that Matt had invited me on. And he wasn’t coming along.

  Out. Tears began to trickle down my face. I was not supposed to wipe them away. I was not even supposed to wipe my nose. Maybe enlightenment was just the booby prize, the thing you went after when what you really wanted didn’t work out. We’re so sorry, says the game show host. It looks like you won’t be getting the perfect relationship, after all. But you do have a chance to win total inner peace! Okay, you say, trying not to look disappointed. I’ll give it a shot.

  Day 8

  WE SPENT THE morning sending metta—the Pali word for “loving-kindness”—to ourselves. To people we loved. To people we found difficult. To the whole universe. “May I be happy,” I recited doggedly, hour after hour. “May I be peaceful. May I be free. May you be happy. May you be happy. May you be free.”

  The more I did it, the more annoyed I got. Half the people in the room were weeping. Others were beaming, as if they just couldn’t contain their love, as if they were popcorn poppers exploding little emotional kernels into a fluffy white cascade of good feelings. I seemed to be the only one who wasn’t getting it.