The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  After the show is over, the woman sitting next to me raises her hand and tells the kids that she played Miranda in her school play when she was in high school, back in the 1930s.

  Stay. Lovingly. Open. Wonder.

  DAY 7

  This weekend, Forest is at his dad’s house, and I finally have a few uninterrupted days for formal meditation practice at Spirit Rock. In the morning I have a couple of blissful sittings—fully absorbed in the subtle movement of breath deep in the pelvic floor. As I sit in a wash of gratitude, my head begins to slowly rotate on its own to the left, as if turned by the hands of an invisible ghost chiropractor—releasing waves of tingling down my spine. The bell rings, and we all file mindfully to lunch.

  Back in the hall after lunch, as if it has been waiting in the wings—misery. My upper back gradually hardens into a column of iron. The trapped bird of my breath flaps its wings, helpless, against the steel cage of my ribs. A carapace of armor encases my whole upper thoracic. The classic hindrances of meditation descend like a flock of vultures—grasping, restlessness, sleepiness, aversion and, above all, doubt. What am I doing here? Is this the right path for me? There’s way too much sitting for my tastes, not nearly enough dancing. It seems like the day will never end. My only refuge: at the end of the evening, unlike the other prisoners here, I get to drive home and sleep in my own bed.

  Later that afternoon, during walking meditation, I pace irritably back and forth on the beautiful path, under spreading oaks and a blue sky, next to a babbling brook. All that beauty feels as if it’s on the other side of a glass wall. As the bell rings for the next sitting, I realize I am walking toward the hall with dread, as if approaching an execution. I pause: What am I afraid of? All I will be doing is sitting still in a beautiful quiet room full of kind people, doing nothing. Is the pain in my back really that bad?

  Then it hits me—I am dreading me. I am dreading the way I will bully myself, try to control myself, punish myself, criticize myself.

  I see it now: In my mind I’ve been comparing myself unfavorably to another mother and meditator, a dharma teacher who sat the monthlong as a commuter last year, just as I’m doing now. In my training, I’ve heard teachers speak glowingly of her meditation practice and her insights on that retreat: how she’d dropped deep through the levels of jhana, meditative absorption; how she’d followed the classical arc of the “progress of insight,” the stages a meditator is said to pass through on the path to full awakening, as outlined in the fifth-century Pali text the Visuddhimagga.

  I’ve been feeling that I have something to prove, not just to my mentors in my teacher training but also to myself: I’m a good meditator, even though I’m a mom.

  But my progress of insight includes Shakespeare and cane envy.

  I enter the hall and drop to my cushion. I don’t try to control my mind. I don’t look for evidence of progress. I just sit there and watch the stories that spin through my mind—as if I’m watching teenage actors on a makeshift stage.

  My mind wanders, just as it does when I am trying desperately to control it. But everything feels more spacious, and my back doesn’t hurt nearly as much. And I have learned something—at least temporarily—about relaxing into awareness, as a meditator and as a mom.

  DAY 12

  It’s almost two weeks into my monthlong retreat, and I’m spending my morning at home doing “laundry practice” while Forest sits at his computer, discussing Dickens with kids in Texas and Hong Kong as part of the English class he’s taking through Stanford Online High School. I am sitting in the middle of my bedroom floor, folding and putting away clothes.

  Flowing back and forth from home to retreat has been shining a bright light on where my habitual patterns do and don’t support mindfulness. Just as I often don’t realize, until I sit down on my cushion, just how fragmented and chaotic my mind has become, I haven’t realized until I train the lens of heightened awareness on my home what a palpable trail of chaos my lapses of mindfulness have been leaving.

  Who is this person who has been galloping through my life, neglecting the mundane tasks of the present moment as she charges toward her goals? Whoever she is, she has left snack bar wrappers stuffed into the cracks in her car seat cushions, half-nibbled bags of almonds at the bottom of her purse. The bottom of her laundry basket is stuffed with items she put there months ago and never got to: a Christmas tablecloth stained with red wine and candle wax, a sleeping bag mildewed from a rainy camping trip. Her life, like her sock drawer, is stuffed to overflowing.

  At Spirit Rock, everything is tranquil and orderly, from the neatly labeled cleaning supplies for my bathroom-cleaning job to the yogis themselves (although I’ve been practicing long enough to know that behind the downcast eyes and expressionless faces might rage dramas to rival any Shakespeare play).

  Outside the hall I’m learning to generate my own force field of calm. Setting my intention to do a half hour of dishwashing meditation with the same care and attention I’d give to a meditation period in the hall. Driving to Spirit Rock through the brightening dawn with the same precise awareness I’d bring to walking meditation. Buying broccoli at the supermarket with the mindfulness I bring to my breath.

  I tell myself that the daily reminder that “I’m on retreat” lends extra gravitas to these acts of mindfulness and turns them into constant learning opportunities. Vowing to use driving as a meditation practice, for example, I am startled to see how habitually I’d been using it as a time to daydream about plans to write another novel or take Forest on a trip to Argentina. Instead, I focus fully on the road: the jewellike stoplights changing from red to green, the vibration and hum of the moving car, the green pastures I’m driving past, the expressions on the faces of the other drivers.

  But part of me still feels as if I’m cheating, pulling a hoax on myself and my meditation teachers. This isn’t a retreat. This is just—life!

  Or maybe that’s the point?

  I put in another load of laundry. I’m making my way all the way down to the bottom of the laundry hamper. I keep thinking of something Gil Fronsdal, one of the teachers on the retreat, had said in his dharma talk the night before. As a Zen student, he had been taught that “everything is to be respected.” You bow to your cushion. You bow to your teacup. You bow to your teacher. Nothing is left out. Not your rage and disappointment. Not your dirty underwear. Not your wandering mind. Not the cat sleeping on the bed.

  This morning I am bowing to everything: the wax stain on the carpet from where I knocked over a candle after meditation five years ago; the laughter from the next room; the sock I can’t find a match to; the squirrel who runs along the wooden railing outside my bedroom, holding a bay nut in his mouth.

  What is a meditation retreat? I decide that it is any moment I set on my altar.

  DAY 17

  While Forest sleeps in, I drive over to Spirit Rock to do my early morning yogi job—cleaning the women’s bathroom outside the meditation hall. I scrub the mouth of the already gleaming toilet with the brush, swoosh the bristles in and out, and spray vinegar on its seat. I try to imagine that I am tending an altar. I try not to imagine the naked buddha bottoms that will sit on it. I wonder if the people who use this bathroom will ever think: My, this is a clean toilet! Whoever cleaned it must be enlightened. Look at how they wiped down the top of the tank before arraying the three rolls of toilet paper on it so neatly! I already resent them, a little, for messing up my work. How carelessly they will come in here and sit, without thinking of me at all, their own stories spinning in their own heads.

  Also, I kind of wish I were at home, cleaning my own bathroom—which, I noticed as I dashed out the door that morning, really needs it. Am I so busy with my meditation retreat that I am going to need to hire someone to scrub my toilet?

  After my yogi job I head home in the now full light of morning. While Forest does his Spanish homework, I go outside to meditate on the d
eck in the shade of an oak tree, removing myself a little farther from the sound of the Rosetta Stone language app. I try not to reject the movements of my mind, endlessly reciting its plans for the rest of the day: meditate, drive Forest to Spanish class, buy dental floss. Instead, I soften and widen to include the whole moment, just as it is: the squirrel in the tree scolding the cat; the voice in my head scolding me.

  At the retreat center I cleaned a toilet. At home I meditate.

  Wherever I go, everything I think of as solid—my house, the meditation hall, a tree, my opinions, my son—is actually ever-shifting. It’s all as temporary as a Tempest set—assembled to create an illusionary world where a drama can play out for a little while, before the actors take off their costumes and go home. I feel the futility of clinging to cobwebs, hoping they will support my weight.

  Strangely, that’s an image that makes me happy.

  Forest steps onto the deck. “Mom? Is there anything for lunch?”

  DAY 21

  It’s three weeks into the retreat, and my senses are heightened. In my journal, I find myself writing a prose poem to the retreat cooks, which I know I will never send them: Your food is so sensuously delicious it is almost indecent—it is amazing that we are allowed to eat it in public. You must have laughed out loud as you made that raisin orange chutney—knowing how its flavors would unfurl in layers in the mouth like a time-release capsule of ecstasy, first the languid sweet of the raisin, then the bright notes of the orange, then the fireworks of ginger. I want to devour in two bites that chewy tofu with sesame sauce. At the same time, I want to go on eating it for all eternity. Is that too much to ask?

  Both at Spirit Rock and at home, I’m tuned in to the beauty of life—the clover blooming bright pink on the hills, the deer nursing her fawn, the joy of sitting at home laughing over a bowl of parsley-flecked pasta with Teja and Forest.

  Later, I sit on a bench at Spirit Rock, watching the flamboyant male turkeys spreading and fluttering their great fans of tails, trying so hard to get the attention of the drab females who play at ignoring them. It’s a rampant display of sensuality and passion amid the renunciation of the yogis. I remember the gatha, the meditation verse, that I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh: Present moment, wonderful moment. And I realize that what is satisfying is presence itself, more than what I am present for. Present Moment Wonderful Moment doesn’t mean that this moment is always wonderful—often it isn’t. But in a moment for which I am present, presence itself is wonderful, even if the content isn’t.

  As my mind gets quieter, I’m also intensely aware of the way it skitters away from staying present with joy, just as surely as it skitters away from pain—perhaps to avoid the sorrow and frustration of discovering that joy, too, is impermanent, ungraspable. My mind would rather fantasize about some future satisfaction that it imagines would actually have the power to satisfy in a way that the actual thing happening does not, even when the thing happening is what I have always dreamed of: a family dinner with a partner and a child, for instance.

  When I look closely at some of my most intense pleasures, I’m aware of the anxiety that pulses just below the surface of my enjoyment. This examination is like looking into one of those makeup mirrors that dispels the soft ambient light of delusion and reveals every pore, magnified. Even while pleasure is happening, I want more of it. I’m aware that I’ll miss it in the future. As the poet Bashō writes, “Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto.”

  That night I come home and crawl into bed with Teja. When the retreat began and the usual precepts were recited, I’d been careful not to vow myself to celibacy. I’m not a nun. I kiss him and say, “This is even better than the parsnip soup at lunch.”

  He says, “That’s the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

  I wrap my arms around him and say, “We are both alive, and we are together.” We kiss again, and then I add: “It won’t always be that way.”

  DAY 26

  I’m in the last week of my retreat, and attending yet another performance of The Tempest, this one at an elementary school in a primarily Latino neighborhood. Most of the students have never seen a play before, and they are wild with excitement. When the demon dogs roar in in act 2 and drive the other actors off the stage, the kids leap to their feet, cheer and squeal for almost five minutes, shout for an encore.

  Watching, I’m aware of a sense of well-being and ease—a steadiness in my nervous system, a quiet warmth in my heart. This is different from the way I felt when I began this monthlong journey into “integrative practice.”

  There was no breakthrough moment on this retreat. The notes in my journal don’t build in a crescendo to a grand realization. Instead, the retreat has been a collage of moments, arising and passing away. There were mini awakenings, moments of profound gratitude, moments when the gates of my heart swung wide open. There were also moments of distraction, annoyance, judgment, just like any retreat. It was joyful and messy and chaotic. It was ever-changing. It was my mind, my life. And at this moment, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

  On stage, the play churns on to its happy ending. After the curtain call, the kids in the audience swarm onstage, surrounding the actors, clamoring to touch Forest’s sword. “Is it real?” they ask him.

  What is real and what is illusion? I wonder.

  As I hang back and watch the kids, Prospero’s closing words echo in my heart. I’ve watched them recited over and over by a teenaged boy—to fifth-graders, to high schoolers, to a gray-haired audience with a bevy of walkers and wheelchairs parked to the side of the improvised stage. They are the words of an aging magician, written by a playwright for his final play—words that sum up the truth of impermanence, the ever-changing nature of life:

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air.

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  SUTRA 16

  Singing My Mother to Sleep

  • • • • •

  WHEN MY MOTHER was ninety-one years old, she stumbled in her pew at weekly Mass and gashed her leg on the edge of a kneeler.

  By that time, she and my father had been living in a military retirement home in Washington, DC, for the past decade, and they had been, as my mother put it, “in appropriate health.” But the next day the cut was infected. Her doctor prescribed oral antibiotics. But she had been having trouble swallowing—a symptom, I’d been told, of the dementia that had begun to erode her short-term memory. My conversations with her about daily life and recent events had increasingly cycled through repetitive loops, which embarrassed her—“I don’t like feeling so confused,” she told me. Yet she was able to vividly recount details of her Army childhood in the 1920s—the mule-drawn wagon she’d ridden to school in Hawaii, a trip to Yellowstone with her parents and brother in a Model T.

  When she tried to take the antibiotics, one of the pills lodged in her throat and partially dissolved, burning the lining of her esophagus. She refused to take more. Her fever soared along with her white blood count, and over her protests—she had already said that she didn’t want her body to be forced to outlive her mind—she was taken to Walter Reed Hospital and put on intravenous antibiotics.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t know any of this while it was happening. Teja and I were leading a meditation retreat for corporate executives in a rustic Northern California conference center with spotty Internet acc
ess, so I hadn’t checked my email for three days. When I logged in over lunch for a quick peek at my messages, I found a stream of emails from my six siblings.

  I scanned down the thread, trying to grasp the situation, assuming that this was just one more of a series of minor health incidents. In recent years my mother had fallen a couple of times, leaving the bones in her arms with hairline fractures. She had been admitted to the ER with a fever from a urinary tract infection. But she was always still there the next time I visited—marveling at how much I had grown as I walked in the door and slipping dollar bills and napkin-wrapped dinner rolls into my coat pockets as I left.

  And as usual, the emails conveyed, my six ultracompetent older siblings were already taking charge. Connie—a lawyer and former nurse, sixteen years older than me—had already taken the train down from New York to be with my parents. My other brothers and sisters—scattered over the East Coast from Long Island to Maine—were outlining their availability.

  I looked at my calendar—when the retreat ended the next day, I was supposed to drive home for the opening night of Forest’s high school fall play, Urinetown, which he’d been rehearsing for weeks. I checked out my frequent-flyer miles, balancing the logistics of love in my head: being present for my teenaged son, being present for my aged parents, being present for the partner I was co-leading the retreat with. I booked a flight for a week later, assuming that was soon enough to be helpful.

  Then I went back into the meditation hall to lead the afternoon session.

  Between meditation periods, I checked my email. My mother’s white blood cell count had dropped and the pneumonia seemed to have been beaten back. But her breathing was labored, and she could only speak in a whisper. Removed from her familiar apartment, she was disoriented and frightened. The doctors wanted to give her a barium test to determine why she couldn’t swallow. She didn’t want the test. She wanted, adamantly, to go home to my father. They would keep me informed, the emails assured me.