The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  And into the midst of this chaos, I’m trying to introduce a monthlong silent meditation retreat. Fortunately, Spirit Rock is just a fifteen-minute drive from my house. I’ve been given permission to sit the retreat as a commuter, returning home for part of each day to keep my family life going. Failing to register on time is just one more symptom of why I need this retreat.

  I fire off an apologetic email to Spirit Rock, download the registration forms, and hit Print.

  My computer informs me it is looking for my wireless printer, which is sitting on the desk a few feet away, its lights blinking enigmatically. The printer has been quixotic lately—fulfilling certain requests enthusiastically, ignoring others altogether, mysteriously waking up in the middle of the night to crank out documents I’d sent it days earlier. This time, my computer lets me know after a few minutes that the printer is offline.

  After restarting both devices and muttering a few off-color mantras, I call in my partner. Teja has computer chops he picked up in his years running a recording studio. After a few minutes, he informs me that my printer driver software is four generations behind.

  Well, of course it is. Software Update had rudely interrupted me again and again while I was writing. I always clicked on the button that said Go Away I’m Busy Writing about Mindfulness.

  Teja begins installing the new drivers. After a few minutes he asks, “Is your modem always this slow?”

  Oh, right. I vaguely recall a voicemail from Comcast a few months back, telling me my modem needed replacing. I actually manage to dig up the voicemail and begin following its instructions to order an online upgrade.

  But what is my Comcast password? Comcast can’t send me a reset message because the email address on file belongs to an account I closed two years ago after it was hacked by someone in Liberia who greatly alarmed my ninety-one-year-old father with their email about my mugging in Madrid.

  Comcast offers me a password hint: What’s the name of your favorite pet? Easy! I triumphantly enter the name of my cat, the only pet I’ve had in the last forty years.

  Comcast disagrees.

  I try again, with a capital letter.

  No go.

  Could it be Teja’s cat? The horse I owned when I was eleven? Or the one before her, that my father bought when I was nine because she had the same name as my mother, then sold after the mare bit me and scraped me off under a tree?

  No, no, and no.

  A text chat box opens up from a Comcast representative: What can I help you with?

  I want to go on a silent retreat!!! I type.

  No response.

  Who is my favorite pet? I demand.

  Nothing on my screen but what my son calls “the spinning beach ball of doom.”

  “Well,” Teja points out tactfully. “Your modem is really, really, slow.”

  I call the phone number at the bottom of the screen. Due to high call volume, a recorded voice informs me, my wait time for a callback will be fifty-three minutes.

  Well, at least that’s better than when I called my insurance company recently and was told that my wait would be 917 hours. I think of my psychotherapist friend who came off a silent retreat a few years ago feeling practically enlightened, and while driving home got into a screaming match on her cell phone with the cell service provider.

  With forty-three minutes left in my wait time, my dear friend Janice shows up at my door. When our kids were toddlers, our weekly Friday night dinners helped keep me sane. We’d cook huge pots of pasta together while keeping an eye on Forest and Sacha as they paddled in the backyard wading pool. When the kids were a little older, she’d accompanied me to India. Now the kids are both teens, and Janice and I often lead meditation and yoga retreats together. Today we’re planning the online course we’re going to offer through our website, AwakeningasWomen.com, on the theme of creating space. Our marketing copy offers a tantalizing promise: “How do you create space and ease in the midst of your busy life? We offer helpful tips…”

  “Those who can’t do, teach!” I tell her ruefully.

  Janice and I crank through our list: website; delivery platform; social media—especially challenging for those of us who suffer from what Janice has dubbed MDD, marketing deficit disorder.

  The phone rings.

  “We can definitely get you a new modem,” the Comcast representative assures me with an accent familiar from my spiritual journeys. “But we notice that you don’t get cable service—just phone and Internet. Would you like to upgrade?”

  “I don’t watch television,” I tell her.

  “Yes, ma’am. But we have a special offer that will save you ten dollars a month over what you are paying now—and will deliver 179 channels of programming.”

  No! I want to go on silent retreat! I will happily pay you ten dollars a month NOT to deliver me 179 channels of programming! Instead I ask, “Where are you calling from?”

  “I am in Kolkata, madame.”

  Calcutta! That’s one of the places Janice and I had traveled together, six years earlier.

  Get off the phone! I want to tell the Comcast rep. Get on a train to Bodh Gaya! I’ll meet you there!

  Instead, I tell her I don’t want the upgrade, but please send the new modem right away.

  A week later, the modem still hasn’t arrived. But the cable box for an upgrade has. It’s sitting on the floor in the corner of my office, still in its package, the gateway to an almost infinite world of distraction. Why go on retreat when I could watch Game of Thrones?

  I decide to just make the fifteen-minute drive to Spirit Rock to fill out the overdue registration forms. I tell myself that maybe, when I get back from retreat, I’ll have time to send back my cable upgrade.

  * * *

  —

  The truth is, I’m ambivalent about embarking on this retreat.

  It feels as if I’d be reenacting on a small scale the renunciation of the Buddha when he slipped out of his palace in the middle of the night to become a wandering seeker, not bothering to make arrangements for family meals and car pools while he was gone. Sure, it sounds idyllic. I imagine myself sitting under the soaring dome of the Spirit Rock meditation hall as the last of the winter rains drum on the roof. Doing walking meditation through hills dotted with spring wildflowers. Taking a shamanic journey into the wilderness of my heart and mind. Leaving behind the clutter on my desk: credit card statements, applications for health insurance, an unread copy of Social Media Marketing for Dummies.

  Besides, I want to do this retreat to become a better teacher. I’m two years into an intensive four-year dharma teacher-training program—and while I’ve sat many silent retreats in the week-to-ten-day range, and taught yoga on many more, I’ve never done the meditation marathons that are a rite of passage in this particular lineage. Most of my childless fellow trainees have sat for months at a stretch in mountain hermitages and Burmese temples, riding the samadhi elevator into deeper and deeper levels of absorption and insight. Meanwhile I’ve been juggling my formal practice with my life as a divorced working mom, struggling to remember to stay present as I take out the recycling. Sure, I know that spiritual awakening can happen anywhere, anytime—but meditation practice has not erased my drive to excel. In the race to the here and now, I’m worried that I’m falling behind.

  But as Forest gets older, I’m finding that my daily presence still feels vital for both of us —just in a different way. Yes, he’s more and more independent, spending most of his time engaged in his own activities or with his own friends. He spends hours each day writing sci-fi novels, which he self-publishes through CreateSpace. He roams the slopes of Mount Tam with the “Dire Wolves,” his pack of buddies in “Dirt Time,” the homeschooler’s nature education program.

  My own life has expanded too. Three years earlier, Teja had moved in with us, and his college-age daughter, River, had spent the previous summer
with us as well—so it’s rarely just me and Forest at the dinner table anymore. When Forest’s at his dad’s house, which is half the time now, I get to revel in “date night.” I’m spending my early mornings snuggling with my sweetheart instead of processing angst in my journal, where I’ve also almost stopped taking notes on my adventures with my son. Especially since the most recent time he got sick, when immediately after throwing up he looked up from the toilet and begged me, “Don’t write about this, okay?” (Oops—I guess I just did. But I ran it by him first.)

  But our increasing individuation makes it feel all the more vital that I’m around in the background for Forest—available to run his Shakespeare lines with him when he walks into the kitchen for a snack; to read the latest hot-off-the-press chapter of his Underwater Waves trilogy; to hear the stories of his day bushwhacking as I drive him home from Lake Lagunitas.

  And now that I have the happy family I always wanted, I want to be home with them as much as I can, laughing around the dinner table. Is this really the time to sneak out like the Buddha in the early hours of the morning, aspiring to enlightenment?

  DAY 1

  It’s the first morning of my retreat, and I’m sitting with a hundred other meditators in a high-domed meditation hall with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto rain-greened hills. After the frenetic pace of the last few months, I’m grateful to be somewhere where all that’s on the printed daily schedule is “Sit. Walk. Sit. Walk. Sit. Lunch. Sit. Walk. Sit…”

  Some of the yogis on the retreat have already been in silence for a month, and the stillness in the meditation hall is palpable and contagious. I track each breath—the beginning of the inhale, the ripple of its movement through the interconnected web of the body, the beginning of the exhale, and its ripple on the way out. My mind folds in on itself in the momentary space after each exhalation—diving deep inside like a humming bird dipping its beak into a flower and tasting the nectar.

  This retreat at Spirit Rock is normally reserved for meditators who can step away from their busy lives and do a deep dive into practice in the protected bubble of silence.

  This seclusion—once available only to monks and nuns who gave up sex and family life in exchange for silence and a shot at liberation—supports the mind to enter into samadhi, or deep concentration, and to see the true nature of self and of life—interconnected, everchanging, and impermanent. When you see how things really are, you’re less likely to get caught in delusions and clinging, and you’re more likely to make choices that lead to true happiness.

  But late that afternoon, I walk out the retreat center gates toward my parked car. Because for my monthlong retreat, I’ll be experimenting with what my mentor and I call “integrative practice.” I won’t be in that protected bubble, burrowing deeper and deeper into samadhi. To keep our family life on track, I’ll be maintaining my usual schedule of shared custody with Forest’s dad. Teja, who would normally be happy to help out, won’t be available to do so, because he’s teaching qigong on the very retreat that I’m sitting. Roughly half of my time this month will consist of the usual retreat routine—sitting meditation, walking meditation, qigong, dharma talks, silent meals chewing every bite in exquisite slow motion. The other half will consist of shopping for groceries at the Good Earth, cooking and eating meals while talking over his day with Forest, and occasionally checking my urgent-parenting-messages-only temporary email address, anneonretreat@gmail.com. I’m hoping I can slip into the field of deepening calm in the meditation hall, like a snake gliding into a pond, then slide back into the world without leaving a ripple.

  As I head to the parking lot, I walk extra slowly, trying to display my uninterrupted continuity of practice. I feel like I’m playing a mindful mother in a film about spiritual practice. I get into my car to drive serenely home. I switch on my phone. And I am greeted by the ding of a text—“Can you drive the carpool to the Tempest performance in Sausalito tomorrow morning?”

  Because, this month, my daily domestic routine happens to include fourteen productions of The Tempest—in which Forest is playing the villain, Antonio—at an array of local schools, theaters, senior centers, and retirement homes.

  My calm immediately shatters. Tomorrow’s show was supposed to be at a high school in San Rafael, just a fifteen-minute drive from Spirit Rock, which would have meant that I could do my early morning “yogi job” at the retreat (cleaning the bathrooms by the meditation hall), drive home to pick up Forest, drop him off for the performance, and make it back to Spirit Rock for the morning instructional sitting. Then I could spend the morning sitting and walking in silence, picking up Forest at lunchtime after the show was over.

  But the director apparently changed the schedule, so the first performance is now at a middle school in Sausalito, a half-hour drive farther south. I stick the phone out the window, trying to catch the flickering signal, and send off a snippy text: “You really should be more clear in your communication with the parents!”

  Suddenly my meditation retreat feels not like a respite, but just another obligation to add to my busy schedule.

  As irritation swells inside me, I belatedly remember to pause and name it, just as I would in the meditation hall: Irritation feels like this. Judgment feels like this. This is a contracted mind. I remind myself that my retreat practice is supposed to be about cultivating my ability to maintain a continuity of mindful embodied presence, whether I’m sitting in the meditation hall focusing on the in and out of my breath or driving a carpool of teenagers at sixty miles an hour down a freeway to a play performance.

  Will it work? A half day in, I’m having my doubts.

  DAY 5

  “Why are the ceilings in this place so low?” asks the fourteen-year-old girl I’m trailing into the retirement home where the Teen Touring Company is about to perform. She is wearing shorts and a bright pink crop top. She has miles of silky tan legs, yards of shimmering brown hair. She’s not addressing me—I’m invisible to her, just the mom who drove the car pool here this morning. She’s talking to the teenage boy who’s walking next to her, their arms laden with stage props: a black velvet curtain and ropes to hang it from the ceiling; a billowing piece of blue silk to represent the stormy sea upon which their ship will be wrecked.

  His answer is confident: “Because when you get old, you shrink.”

  Standing a little taller, I follow them into the reception area, pausing for a spritz from a hand sanitizer dispenser the size of a beer keg. As we pass the front desk, I hear the receptionist on the phone, speaking calmly but urgently: “Can you tell if she is still breathing?”

  In the cafeteria, instead of chatting with the handful of theater parents milling around a table of coffee and pastries, I sit down in one of the empty folding chairs set up for the audience who will arrive in an hour. As the kids begin to string up the curtain, put on pantaloons and flounced skirts, and slide stage daggers into scabbards, I close my eyes and remind myself of the mindfulness acronym one of my retreat teachers had offered in the dharma talk the previous night: SLOW. Stay. Lovingly. Open. Wonder.

  I’m five days into my commuter retreat, and here’s the question I keep exploring: When am I “on retreat,” and when am I not?

  Clearly, I’d been on retreat that morning as I’d done walking meditation under the trees. I’d slipped off my shoes and walked barefoot on the grass by the creek, mindfully avoiding blobs of wild turkey poop. I’d stepped over the leg bones of a deer on the hill, scattered and sucked clean by teeth, rain, sun, and time. With each step I’d recited a word of a walking meditation mantra I’d learned years ago from Thich Nhat Hanh: Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

  And I’d definitely been on retreat the previous evening, when one of my teachers—a former midwife with a solid, grounded presence—had given a talk titled “The Freedom Map of Transcendent Spiral Conditionality.” She had expounded on the twelve steps of transcendental dependent origination
—the Buddhist train ride from suffering to liberation, with stops on the way at stations such as faith, rapture, disenchantment, and deliverance.

  But how about now, as I sit in the cafeteria of this senior home, watching the audience roll in in wheelchairs, shuffle past with walkers? A woman with coiffed silver hair, faded blue eyes, and red lipstick lowers herself carefully into the folding chair next to me. She is wearing a gorgeous turquoise silk blouse patterned in Chinese characters, a soft purple knit cardigan over it. I suddenly feel scruffy in my yoga pants and hoodie—maybe by the time I’m eighty I’ll learn to adorn myself too? She smiles at me as she leans her cane against the edge of the chair. Her cane has a silver parrot’s head on the top. With the heightened attention of my “integrative practice,” I catch myself: Am I really experiencing cane envy?

  The music starts to play, the recorded storm noises begin, the cloth sea billows, and in front of us the fateful shipwreck unfolds. As the castaways come ashore, the beautiful young Miranda, who has been stranded on this island with her father since babyhood, marvels upon seeing other humans for the first time:

  How beauteous mankind is!

  O brave new world,

  That has such people in’t!

  Around me, the residents of the senior center watch, riveted. (Well, okay—a few of them fall asleep.) During pauses in the dialogue, I can sometimes hear the actors whispering and giggling behind the curtain. I’ve already seen this production a couple of times. But I still perk up with pride when Forest as Antonio plots murder:

  Here lies your brother,

  No better than the earth he lies upon,

  If he were that which now he’s like, that’s dead;

  Whom I, with this obedient steel, three inches of it,

  Can lay to bed for ever; who

  Should not upbraid our course?

  After five days of focusing on being present, the story feels more vivid and poignant to me—an enactment on stage of the human dramas of power, betrayal, forgiveness, and repentance that play in one form or another through every human heart. The scenes come and go, like stories in my meditating mind. As I watch the teens performing for their elders, I wonder: Would I have learned any more about impermanence if I had stayed in the meditation hall, watching my breath?