The first day was just awful really. Sitting there, facing myself. It was like torture. No distraction, no ‘phone a friend’, no reading, no internet, no work, no walking the dog, no watching tv. Just sitting there, having to face what emerges in my mind. I found it unbearable. I really did think I could not bear to stay and started thinking about how I could just leave. I was cold; it didn’t matter what I did, how many socks I wore, how many blankets I wrapped myself in, I was cold. The people opposite, by the radiator, were hot. I was kneeling in the draft from the door and I was cold. I thought about being cold, and why I was cold and why it was so unfair not to be able to move and swop with one of the ‘too hot’ people. I thought about a work situation I was worried about. I thought the same thoughts for hours and hours and hours. I could not bear it. I asked for an interview with Fiona, because I had to do something other than sit there and I was worried I would just get up and go home. I can’t remember much about the interview, other than it was a relief to be seen and heard and that it was such a help to reflect a bit on where all this comes from, this busy mind. I spend my life, when I am not worrying (and indeed even when I am worrying), putting into words in my mind how I would say this (whatever ‘this’ is) to someone else. I have a constant conversation going on in my head. It is boring, frustrating. I felt real anger towards myself – started to imagine myself shouting at myself to shut up.
The redeeming features of day one were the birds on the feeders behind the Buddha – I secretly bird-watched when we did walking meditations, and in between the sessions. I secretly looked up the birds in a bird book, indeed saw three birds I had never seen before (siskin, goldcrest and brambling). It was such a relief to be secretly naughty. The other redeeming feature was the chanting. We chanted ‘om’, starting at different times, on different notes. It went on for at least twenty minutes and was a great pleasure. I played around with singing in harmony and with introducing a discordant note – no change there then. It was very satisfying and uplifting and made present the community that we were becoming.
The second day started in the same vein, but a bit less going on in my mind. I liked though, this idea of Silent Illumination – Fiona explained it in her morning talk. I had heard it before but it landed a little more deeply. Being silent is not about, err, having a silent mind, but having a mind in which you can watch the thoughts that arise. Just watch, don’t try and stop them, just observe. Then, the theory goes, the quality of Xin – translated as heart-mind – means that insights emerge. Fat chance, I thought, as I watched the usual stuff go on and bored myself with my boring, mindless, endless ‘not being able to be there’ – as so busy thinking about the past, the future and, of course, the cold, my cold feet. I had a great, escaping thought. I needed to go to a pharmacy to get something. I spent half the morning rehearsing how I would introduce this and to whom. Would I ask permission? Would I sneak away? Would I inform? What would happen if I told (a) rather than (b)? Would (a) tell me to talk to (b) and might I be told I could not go? This took up hours. In the end, in a rather unnecessarily assertive way, I informed (b) I was going, that I knew where I was going (before (b) had a chance to ask) and I would not be long. What freedom to drive away (I didn’t actually know where I was going). Then the insight came as I drove along. Did I realise that almost all the things I think about are negative? I had run a workshop recently. The feedback forms were more than averagely positive, with 17 out of 20 giving me pretty wonderful reviews. But three were less effusive. Guess what I focused on! What would happen, I thought, as I drove merrily through Snake Pass, if I consciously thought about positive things? I tried it, and, guess what, I felt different, more embodied and relaxed, less on trial. It later occurred to me (another insight) that in my upbringing, my parents were very hot on ‘dire punishment’. Stepping out of line would see me smacked and put to bed, where I would have ample time to reflect on my crimes and misdemeanours. Maybe this negative conditioning had trained my brain to reflect on the negative and I had not had balancing reflective moments when I reflected on how good I was, or nice I was or how well I was doing – or how lovable and loved I was!
And, the best bit was the chanting of ‘om’, and the birds and the growing sense of knowing all these people and sussing them out and being in community, despite us not talking. I noticed too how much I want to be acknowledged by others, how I want to be smiled at and connected to. I felt that harped back to a sort of existential question over my existence (never mind my identity). Still doing it (this smiling for recognition) after all these years, and/but noticing the sense of shame it evokes to notice myself noticing.
The third day was totally wonderful! Fiona introduced the idea of koans, having given one of the funniest descriptions of how we hold beliefs and worldviews by telling a long story about her Mother’s washing up bowl. I was crying with laughter, partly because I have washing up bowl issues too. Maybe it’s a Northern thing. When thinking Fiona, think of Victoria Wood and Alan Bennett meeting the Buddha. The humour makes accessible the subtlety and clarity of the points she makes. As someone else said (when we weren’t speaking over the clearing up in the kitchen – well just speaking a bit), ‘here is someone who is absolutely on her game.’
I’d never done this koan thing before and was really interested in the direction Fiona gave – see it as something personal to you, start by asking yourself where you fit into the koan. I chose to work with a story about a fan with a handle made of rhino horn. The Master asked his follower to fetch the fan. The follower said, Master, it is broken. The Master said, ‘Then bring me the whole rhinoceros’. I started to ‘xin’ this – who was I in this story? It came to me as a shock that I was the broken fan. Tears rolled down my face. I was broken, of no use. Then I thought/felt that in fact I could not be used any more, and that I was still of beauty. I basked in my beauty for a while. I saw the fan with a horn handle, polished, brown and beige and white, with the fan made of long white feathers, beautiful to behold. Then I got a sense that the fan was trampled into the ground and broken. ‘Then what?’ someone said in my inner vision. I was shocked by the violence of the act (in my heartmind) but then thought of dust to dust and ashes to ashes. That is what happens.
Later I started to think about the rhino. I became the rhino, small eyed, a bit stupid, blundering along. I thought that he/I/it was useless, emasculated, without its horn, and that a cut off horn, when broken, is useless too. But that a rhino with a broken horn is still a rhino, can still live and be in the world. That we all have scratches, or broken nails or limps; that no one is perfect, and if we take the perfection of us (the horn) then it is no use without the rest of us, particularly when it stops being perfect. I am only complete if I embrace the bits I don’t like, am ashamed of, as well as the bits that I (or others) do like. You can’t have my horn without my bulk and rough hide and bad breath!
This insight seemed miraculous and it was as if I was not ‘thinking’ it but it was emerging viscerally. I felt I was whole but imperfect, but perfect in my imperfection. I was only whole if I recognised that the whole means you accept and include the ‘bad bits’. And I ‘knew’ this rather than thought it! It was exhilarating! I wanted to jump up and down.
I felt on fire with all this, flowing, exhilarated…
Then I started to think about the web of relationships, Indra’s net. What was the point of me in this web? And I found myself thinking, what was the point of my Mother? I went to the experience of us chanting om each day. We were not all the same in that chanting. Some people quietly held onto one note, some people, like me, soared around and changed things. I thought about the fact that for a while, I was quite prominent in the chanting, singing quite loud, singing high, singing low, singing deliberately discordantly and noticing how that changed what others did. Did they follow the shift in key or did they ignore it or what? Then I stopped chanting. And things carried on. There was a sense in that the ripple of what I had introduced into the chanting carried on, was not entirely forgotten – and, equally, a sense that things carried on perfectly well without me. I had a unique part in the web of life, I left a memory, a glimmer of what I had brought - and then life went on. My uniqueness was shaped to some extent by my Mother, by my reaction to life, by my woundedness and my strength (which is which though?). I was still tousling to see what my Mother was for. I realised I resented her ease and happiness which seemed to some extent to be at my expense. But, I felt, she was still playing a role in this web of ‘om’ and ‘it’ is; all these things just are as they are. I have the cards in my hand that I have – it is not planned or pre-ordained, has no purpose or intention. I can play them well or I can play them badly, but feeling it is unfair to have the cards I have does not get me anywhere. There is no point to me being my Mother’s daughter, there is every point. There is no point to striving, there is every point. Gosh, I thought, I feel I am coming to terms with something that has dogged me all my life. No purpose, purpose, no point, every point. How did all this understanding emerge? Where did it come from? What was my role in creating this emergence? They seemed like the wrong questions. Maybe the question was, ‘Was I changed by this experience and was my ‘knowing’ expanded’? Did I know myself better? Was I settled in/by that knowing? I felt I was.
So, in a way, that was it. The following morning, I felt tired, glad to be going home, looking forward to coffee and bad things to eat. But it felt easier to be there, exhilarating. We did the last morning exercises in the yard, in the dark as the trees emerged from the gloom, as the stars appeared from behind the clouds, as the owl hooted. I resolved to do morning exercises every morning, to meditate every day, to come back to the felt sense of this koan and embrace this expanded knowing. But first, to find a bacon sandwich!
