The Washing Machine of my Mind

Photo by Skye Indira Couzyn

A yogini maybe, but could I be still? Truly still. As in seated and meditating for over 10 hours a day. For 10 days. I ruminated like a mad cow chewing the cud, as the date of the retreat approached. I could dive into my yoga practice and journey through poses into strange corners of my psyche, but meditation...that was the realm of shaven-headed monks and other serious people.

Did I want to spend 10 days churning around in the washing machine of my mind? Reading through the code of discipline on the Vipassana centre’s website, I wondered what kind of self-torture I had signed up for. Complete silence, no singing, dancing, writing, reading, no communication with fellow meditators or the outside world. And most terrifying: no yoga. What confused me slightly was that the code agreed yoga was compatible with the meditation technique, but should not be practiced as there are no “proper secluded facilities” at the centre.

But I knew how my old friend Resistance rears its head before many truly liberating experiences. So with that in mind I faced the panic and drove south into the mountains of Worcester to the Vipassana Meditation Centre. The timing was incredibly auspicious: beginning the retreat at a new moon framed by Jupiter and Venus in some rare planetary alignment. In perfect cosmic synchrony my own moon time began.

I embraced the challenge of acceptance and discipline. I dressed in kaftans and shawls. I stared at the ground and avoided all human contact in noble silence, like a pathologically shy teenager. And so began the dive into the murkier depths of my consciousness. All instructions were given by tape recordings of the teacher, Goenka. Slow, drawn out words dressed in a heavy Indian accent, echoing with careful repetitions that imprinted their message even deeper. “Scan the body from head to feet. Be alert. Work diligently. Work equanimously...equanimously...” Besides speaking, Goenka likes to chant. This is not done as a rite or ritual, we were told, but to calm his students. His vocals had the completely opposite effect on me. The sound was horrendous. Like the dying groans of a Galapagos turtle, syllables stretched out to their bitter ends, then collapsing like the creaking drones of an unstartable car engine. I painstakingly smoothed my wincing face day after day, reminding myself that this too was important. This suffering too, would ultimately end.

The first 3 days were hell. The washing machine was on spin, throwing back the same thoughts at me in an endless cycle. I tried to focus only on the sensations between my nostrils and upper lip, as Goenka instructed. It was like trying to teach algebra to a child with ADHD. My unruly mind wanted to muse over Christmas shopping and family gossip, to untangle the threads of my past romances and weave future dreams. What was sacred about this?

And there was the pain. I moved into every sitting position in my yogic repertoire, with various arrangements of blankets and cushions and a block, but the muscles of my neck roared in fury. The tension crept all the way up to the back of my head. When the tape-recorded voice encouraged us to adopt adhitthana or “strong determination” by holding one sitting posture without moving for the entire hour of group meditation, my body reared up and screamed. It was so contrary to everything I’d ever learned in yoga. For years I’d been unlearning the tendency to push myself that had been instilled by sports and dance teachers throughout my schooling. Through yoga I’d found a way to be kind and gentle to my body. This felt so wrong.

So when it came to Question Time at 9pm and meditators could test whether our voices still worked, I asked the Assistant Teacher about this problem. Although I phrased it carefully, so deep was I in silence that I could only squeeze out a whisper: “I feel that I should treat my body with kindness. So how can I sit through this pain?” His reply got a smile out of me. “Nobody ever broke any bones from meditating”. But later I reacted to the comment. What about postural injuries or muscle strain? My neck muscles were in spasm. Should I sit through that like an ascetic on a bed of nails? My inner yoga teacher panicked about permanent structural damage and physical safety. But then, somewhere in the mists of Day 4, a new understanding came.

In early stages of the course, when the gong marked breaks between sittings in our 10-hour meditation days ,the grounds in the women’s area were littered with forward-bending females. Ladies walked with arms twisted in yogic contortions, desperately attempting to release our aching shoulders and necks. But by Day 4 I noticed the tension had lessened. My shoulders felt softer, I could sit more easily and in the midst of a meditation it dawned on me: physical tension is mental tension. I’d spoken about it in my yoga classes, I knew it theoretically, but now, cell by cell, I was experiencing it myself. I didn’t have to do anything with my body. As my mind quietened, my body let go.

Realisations about yoga crystallised. How can we just stretch the body by twisting and contorting it into shapes if we don’t first undo the tension in the mind? Otherwise we are just gymnasts or circus performers. We as yogis need to work from the inside out.

But we yoginis can be strong-willed. I bent the rules against practising yoga in public. Yoga became my secret lover. I did it behind the curtain on my bed, in the shower, under the shade of that big black wattle tree during lunch hour while other meditators strolled or slept. Just a few choice poses: leg out to the side to release my thighs, sage twist and, inspired by the wildlife at the beautiful dam, heron pose. I realised I didn’t need to follow rules blindly if they made me feel trapped and prevented me getting the most out of the course. I began to follow my body’s instinct.
No setting could have been more fitting. Each day the weather played a different song. Winds from the west scattered delicate clouds, morning mist shrouded the peaks, and evening light drew red out of the rocks like blood to the surface. Eastern breezes whipped up mischief of flying hats and popcorn. Gentle rain blessed us one night as we slept and Orion’s glittering greeting at the 4.30am bell drew sleepy smiles from me daily. Through it all the mountains held the space, encircling us like a row of wise elders.

Photo by Skye Indira Couzyn

Noble silence was a bizarre and magical experience. My eyes sharpened. Bird song became more musical, more rhythmic. Each day after lunch, under the wattle tree, animal theatre entertained me. It was as if nature sensed the vibrations of my inner work. I had slowed down and become one of them. So they came closer. The dragonfly landed in the speckle of sunlight just beside me, the fiscal shrike perched on a branch shouting rowdy rantings. As I lay on my jacket in the heat I became so silent I could detect the scratching sound of a tiny woodlouse underneath me. I watched a rotund black beetle chomp through all the green plants in its path like a hungry mower. It even took a bite into my fingernail, making me break my silence loudly. The peacock was the star of the show, strutting his lurid feathery stuff in the women’s dining area or on random rooftops. His unanswered pleas for a mate punctuated many hazy meditation moments like a raucous wake-up call, snapping the wandering mind back into the present as instantly as elastic.

Photo by Garth Ensley

Living with housemates I couldn’t speak to for a week was its own quirky mime. Washing lines and bathrooms were negotiated by gesture or look, with a diplomacy only meditators know. Getting to know strangers only through their actions, without hearing them express their thoughts or stories often revealed a persona very different to the one they presented to the world.

And then it all came together. In yoga. Union. I was sitting with that searing spasm on the right side of my neck, resisting the urge to move, observing the pain, detached from it, like I was watching a stone drying in the sun. In a while I shifted my attention to the next body part and the pain had gone. It had melted before my inner eyes. From then on I was fired up. I discovered sitting. My neck rose up from between my shoulder blades like branches inching skyward. It was like another body within mine, my true body had been unpeeled. I felt such strength in my core, from all sides. Like soft pulsating armour surrounding my belly and back.

Then I could face anything. Crown chakra streaming I galloped on a stallion across skies, roaring into battle. Each time my mind tried to slip away I grabbed it and faced the task with the determination of a meditation warrior priestess. Undefeatable I was in those moments. But of course they were just moments. Beads in that long string of time that ultimately give way to the next.
I sat through intense boiling anger and frustration that made me want to burst out of my skin. I had to rouse willpower in all its legions and armies to support me, but I sat it out. And it passed, as storms do. That was followed almost immediately by my peak experience. A sensation of total bliss- a sudden shift into “free flow” when I felt a multicolour serpent of energy gyrating through me from head to feet, feet to head. A slow vibration, that effortless dance of Tai Chi. I just sat, amazed, watching and feeling with all my senses. Spotlighted on a stage like all else in the world had become darkness. People left the room one by one and there I was motionless. My body opened. Wide. Lotus-like. I became a carving, morphed into wood or stone. In the heat I sat with legs spread, extending into far horizons, my heart limitless, my sitting bones rooted into the earth’s core. I no longer held my body up, it was held. It settled into a statuesque stillness while my awareness levitated above, charmed by the constancy of my breath. And when the gong rang that day I felt an up-welling of gratitude, so close to tears. I wanted to fall down but I pulled myself up to my feet and slow-motion stumbled to eat my 5pm fruit. Beaming like a loony, tottering like a drunk. Feeling like my hips had been loosened by the gods, like I’d rolled out of some ecstatic love nest. The whole world had been shaken and rearranged. I called out to Rumi the Sufi poet in solidarity, suddenly knowing how a man could write passionate love poems for the Divine. This bliss too was mine. But it was not. For as Goenka reminded us, all is ever-changing, in constant flux. All is anicca, anicca, anicca.

I could hear the echoes of Goenka’s warnings: Do not crave pleasant sensations. Do not crave bliss. Even the joy will pass as the pain will pass. Again I returned to many hours of feeling dull or feeling nothing or feeling so bored with the same constant pattern of sensing each part of the body from head to feet that I could have shed my skin. But from that point forth there was no need to run to my yoga practice. It all became integrated. Sitting was yoga. My body understood and it gratefully accepted. It confronted, it inhabited each sitting pose from the ground up. The more rooted my hips and pelvis became, the more my spine could fly as powerful as a cobra arched in combat. The magic carpet was ready for take-off.

Body and mind merged seamlessly. In my thoughts I went back to all those people I had cursed during the course’s early days for telling me about Vipassana, and thanked each one of them.
So yes, I did enter the washing machine of my mind and it spun me into all dimensions, through all emotions. But when the many wash cycles were done, I emerged spotless.

Fellow meditators

Photo by Skye Indira Couzyn

For more info on Vipassana meditation worldwide see:

http://www.dhamma.org/