14 October 2014
Written in the style of The New Yorker
When our eyes are closed and everyone has stopped shifting noisily and the room grows quiet enough to hear the high-pitched whine of the audio equipment, Tara Brach asks us to consider our ultimate intention in coming here today. There’s an inherent disconnect in why I’m here. I know from my research that Vipassana meditation is about “staying in the now to the most extreme degree possible,”1 but my ultimate intention in being there is here, as I’m recalling the experience and writing it. I’m never there; I’m always here.
I tried to be a good Buddhist and focus on the there and then, because without being present how can I say my experience was authentic? But my mind is already here, cataloguing each moment so that I can re-create it for my audience. It is the naming of things that distinguished my mindspace from that of the regular practitioners around me. Instead of letting the thoughts pass away so that I might return to the present moment, I clung to them and labeled them in order to return to them in this space. The straight-backed rattan chairs squeak with the least bit of movement. The black razorback tank top clings to the perfectly tanned skin of the woman sitting in front of me. Tara’s voice is deep and earthy as she asks us to visualize a wide-open sky with the curve of a smile. A valley in the heart of West Virginia was where I last saw an endless expanse of blue dotted with puffy cotton clouds. As I tried to superimpose a smile on that image, I realized it was already there.
It started out enough like religious services I’m familiar with: announcements and a guest speaker. The man at the microphone stammered as he asked us to get involved, and he seemed to wish he’d spent a bit more of his past thinking about the future so that he was more prepared for what he was saying at present. As he talked, a woman to my left who was too old to be New Age fiddled noisily with something wrapped in cellophane, reminding me of my grandmother’s butterscotch candies and Sunday mornings of my childhood. I recall the Raja-Yoga, which says that “All worship, consciously or unconsciously, leads to this end” of awakening the power and fulfillment that resides within each of us. I imagine my grandmother with her eyes closed, her head bowed and her hands clasped, and there may not be much difference between her experience and mine.
The chanting of “Ohm” may bear some resemblance to the monotone muttering of “Our Father,” but it has much more resonance. I joined in, but I was careful not to be the first to start or the last to finish. I wasn’t the only one there who wished to blend in, and the staggered choruses at the beginning and end of each syllable made me feel more at one with the hundreds of other people in the sanctuary than if we’d sung a perfectly timed chorus. The first was tentative, the second had much more confidence, and the third sounded as though most of us wished for a fourth. We chanted with our palms together and level with our heart, and everyone else knew to relax them at the end without making a sound. It took me a while to realize we wouldn’t be prompted to do so.
My inner copy-editor cringed during the metta practice, knowing I would need to write “lovingkindness” without a space. I thought of my pets when she asked us to visualize a love that was simple and uncomplicated, not quite sure they qualified. However, her discussion of unconditional love afterwards contained multiple references to dogs. I looked for allusions to religion, to anything that resembled a sermon, and I failed to find them. The man who spoke at the beginning mentioned the “dharma,” but the Buddha sitting behind Tara on the altar was the only indication of the worshipful nature of the service. She didn’t quote the Buddha; she quoted Woody Allen, among others. She talked about space suits, not sacraments. She asked us to reflect, not pray.
Everyone filed out silently; the only voice I heard was the dharma man’s, and he sounded much more comfortable without a microphone. I felt the ground under my feet and the wind on my face, and halfway through the parking lot I finally heard people beginning to converse as normal.
Lauren B. Lentini 