As I write this, it’s 9:30pm on Day 10 of Vipassana and after closing out “The Bar,” as Mel, Anna and I called the cafeteria during our tea chat session, we and 15 other women, who just finished Vipassana with us, had our dance/singing party shut down. Mel is an Afgan woman whose family escaped from the country when she was 8 and parked their butts in the US for 20 years and 8 years ago, she decided to take her western education and start a corporate law practice in her home country. Anna is a woman from Finland who decided to spend her 1 year sabbatical, from her management consulting profession, in the country she spent so many years working and is finally getting to see the country for what it really is. During our dance/sing party shut down, Mel and I were in the midst of a very climatic part of Rain Drops on Roses while the lot of us were being told “no dancing or singing is allowed on the Vipassana grounds!” from the course manager. We of course didn’t hear the announcement and kept singing louder and louder as the rain fell on our faces and thunder clapped overhead. Oops! I guess that the solo dance parties Franzi and I had in our Lamphun rooms were super illegal so I’m glad no one heard me blaring the new Santigold album as I was shakin my tush in the shower on 10 day of my 2nd Vipassana. J The fact about 20 women are outside right now and some were singing Bollywood songs while an adorable girl, Puja, was doing traditional village dance just goes to show how incredible this Vipassana and this group of people were. These bloody things seem to keep getting better and better! No expectations for any subsequent ones though, of course. ;)
As I sit in my little prison cell sized room, literally, with no windows except for a small skylight overhead, I can’t help but reflect on the incredible life affirming changes that have taken place over the last 10 days of silent SUPER intense meditation. I was hit with a profound revelation on day 2, in the middle of just doing Anapana, which is observing the breath, which transformed my life from that moment forward. For some reason, unbeknownst to me, while “observing” my breath, it dawned on me, this magical thought - “Wait, why would the manufactures of the Indian squaters, Hindustan in most cases, put their name on the side of the squatter where your butt faces? Wait a second… OMG!! I’VE BEEN USING THE SQUATTER BACKWARDS THE ENTIRE TIME I’VE LIVED IN ASIA! No wonder there has always been the threat of a tickle sprinkle on my foot!!!! Holy shit!! HOW EMBARRASSING!” It’s like I’ve been straddling the toilet bowl for a whole year, elbows propped up on the back, just chilling, waiting for a dook to plop, which completely explains why one of my dad’s out of town work visitors from some Asian country was doing just that in our guest bathroom in my parents’ house when I was younger. So note to all – in the west, face the door, in the east, face the wall! The amazing things that come out of Vipassana… I tell ya!
I also got very intimate with part of my body on this course as well, so intimate in fact that it was a little too intimate and I had to stop myself after only making it an 8th of the way through. NO, you dirty sluts, I didn’t blue clit myself… bitch please, never, but I now know why I’ve always had problems with ingrown hairs when shaving or waxing my legs. That shit has NO orderly growth pattern! Yes, I will blame Franzi for this, I took tweezers to my legs and as much as my friend Aimee hates the term “plucked,” I feel it most appropriate to use because pulling each leg hair, one at a time, maybe two if I was lucky, I really feel I became one with the plucked chickens of the world. I made it almost ½ way through my lower right leg and decided I liked my morning and afternoon naps WAY better than this! Not only that but once you get to the outside part, you have to crane your legs in all sorts of ways and I am not only out of yoga shape, but I was already in immense amounts of pain from my 10 ½ hours of sitting still, meditating, and it was just making matters much worse. AND, if matters couldn’t get any worse, I started to PMS and men, I know you can’t relate but ladies know what I’m talking about. HELLOOOOO sensitivity and exaggerated states of pain! I couldn’t take it anymore, I had to stop! I looked down though and between my shin high, scull socks and my fisherman’s trousers, there was this little bit of exposed skin… think of the really awkward leg tan soccer players get… it was ½ hair and ½ bare! Aye, so I sucked it up and finished off the part just under my knee and so NOW, I have a totally “wax ready” left leg and a freakishly patch worked right leg. I think this makes my year of celibacy easier to attain. ;) Guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow though, as soon as I drop my bag off at my guest house?? Praise the one “beauty salon” in Bhagsu!
I’ve hesitated writing much about my actual REAL experiences in Vipassana for a number of reasons. For one, in the event ANY of you actually want to try it yourself, I don’t want to rob you of an expectation-less experience, which is what every meditation session should be, well, what EVERY moment in life should be. Second, I don’t want to preach or sound cray cray about the practice and I figured, if anyone was truly interested in it, they’d ask. So, here is an open invitation, if you want to know anything, ANYTHING (except my own personal experiences) I’ll be more than happy to share. Thirdly, it’s SUCH an intense experience there really are no appropriate words to capture what it is or more importantly, what it does TO you. The ONLY way you can know is to experience, which is part of the core of the practice anyway… to know the true nature of your reality, as it is, on the experiential level, within the frame work of the body. As an old student though, I get to sit closer to the front and since Dharamsala brings TONS of newbs to the scene, closer to the front means seat 3, dead square in front of the assistant teacher. During some of the sessions she has little meetings with small groups of people, asking them about their progress and this particular teacher was so wonderfully engaged with the students, she would call certain women up, one at a time, who had been coming to her with questions throughout the course. I usually left and went to my room to meditate because I’m not exactly seasoned and it’s hard to focus when there are quiet whispers a meter in front of me but on day 8, I stayed. I may not have been able to put what the root of Vipassana is to me into words but what I overhead Nina, the Assistant Teacher, say to one of the other old students, who was sitting before her, sent me running back to my room to capture it on paper, it was so perfect and so beautiful and soooo… it.
When you have equanimity and accept all the sensations that arise, or when your mind wanders to thoughts of aversion or craving and you just accept that it has wandered, without frustration, you are developing love, compassion and peace within yourself. Until you can feel true love, compassion and peace for everything that you are, inside, you will never be able to feel it for anyone else. When you observe yourself with equanimity, you are learning to love yourself.
I felt like I got smacked across the face when I heard this. I let it simmer for awhile and went to lunch but as I walked back to my room, for no apparent reason, tears started to well in my eyes but then faded back into my eyeballs. I got to my room, grabbed my tweezers and thought about plucking away again but all of a sudden I burst into body convulsing, air gasping, snot and tear flowin (or I guess snot lurches more than flows), sobs. This continued for a wee bit and after a few dry heaves in my bathroom, a few more gasps while in the fetal position on my bed, I passed out. Nice timing too because really did come to enjoy my afternoon naps on my right side… I hear it’s good for digestion and lord knows anything helps with THAT whilst in Vipassana. Vipassana is like a cork for your rectum, no joke!
Especially in recent years, I’ve always thought I was a person who loved herself. I thought I was an awesome person with a few minor flaws but generally, pretty bad ass and not in a conceited way, just in a “comfortable in who I am” way. I’ve always known something “wasn’t quite right” inside me though and I’ve thought it was issues with anxiety, attachment, depression, etc but as soon as I heard the teacher speak those words and they rang out to me so clearly like they were placed directly in my scull for me to absorb, I asked myself, “do you love yourself, jess?” You know what… no, I don’t… not completely, not unconditionally, not fully and totally and truly. It’s taken removing me from all the distractions, that are SO EASY to fall into because they are so fun, removing me from my comforts, removing me from the outside world, 3 times, mind you, for me to finally get it. THIS is why I am here! This is why I have left a world I love so much, the people I love, the city I love, the life I love. This is what I have spent 1 full month of the last 11 months trying to figure out, intensely anyway. I feel like THIS is the reason I’m in India. It’s not to travel, it’s not to turn into a pretzel, it’s to find the unconditional love within myself I’ve never had. I don’t truly love myself! I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say I can attribute the sobbing to this realization but it wasn’t tears of sadness or depression, it was so SO intense I needed a release and it was exactly what my body needed to do to accomplish that. After those 5 minutes of being a drippy mess of face fluids, I felt like they sky opened up, like I weighed a fraction of what I did just moments prior and something surged through my body like lightning. It’s not anxiety I’m tackling, it’s not attachment, it’s THIS and with THIS comes everything else. Admitting to myself, finally, once and for all, I don’t completely love myself is the most liberating thing I’ve ever felt and I accept exactly where I am with it right now, without judgment or frustration and knowing full well that *I* am the only one who can accomplish this. No one else can put the love I don’t have for myself in my being, only I can but that’s the complete beauty of it… *I* have control over making this happen.. no one else. Just knowing, deep down, to the core of my tiniest bodily sensations, this, I think is a fucking monster step in the right direction. If that’s not the best birthday present I can give myself, I don’t know what is.
Bhavatu Sabba Mangalam, bitches! ;)
Xxxox
Hairy, Love Bubble of Dirty!
p.s. I totally love the monkeys now! LOVE THEM! They are probably the most fun animals to watch live their lives… srsly… ya’ll should try it and in the wild, not in a fucking zoo.
p.p.s. Ringing in my 32nd year of life in Vipassana was one of the most beautiful things ever... *hops on my rainbow shitting unicorn to go sprinkle fairy dust around Dharamsala*
p.p.p.s. Nina, the Assistant Teacher, used the phrase "Oh, pain is a WONDERFUL sensation" like running coaches say "hills are your friends." ZOMG!!! I died.
p.p.p.s. Nina, the Assistant Teacher, used the phrase "Oh, pain is a WONDERFUL sensation" like running coaches say "hills are your friends." ZOMG!!! I died.
