Eat, Pray, Love

It’s physically grueling too. You are forbidden to shift your body at all once you have been
seated, no matter how severe your discomfort. You just sit there and tell yourself, “There’s no
reason I need to move at all during the next two hours.” If you are feeling discomfort then you
are supposed to meditate upon that discomfort, watching the effect that physical pain has on
you. In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to adjust ourselves around discom-
fort—physical, emotional and psychological—in order to evade the reality of grief and nuis-
ance. Vipassana meditation teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life, but if
you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that
everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.
“The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the
terms of the world,” says an old Buddhist teaching. In other words: Get used to it.
I don’t think Vipassana is necessarily the path for me. It’s far too austere for my notions of
devotional practice, which generally revolve around compassion and love and butterflies and
bliss and a friendly God (what my friend Darcey calls “Slumber Party Theology”). There isn’t
even any talk about “God” in Vipassana, since the notion of God is considered by some
Buddhists to be the final object of dependency, the ultimate fuzzy security blanket, the last
thing to be abandoned on the path to pure detachment. Now, I have my own personal issues
with the very word detachment, having met spiritual seekers who already seem to live in a
state of complete emotional disconnect from other human beings and who, when they talk
about the sacred pursuit of detachment, make me want to shake them and holler, “Buddy,
that is the last thing you need to practice!”
Still, I can see where cultivating a measure of intelligent detachment in your life can be a
valuable instrument of peace. And after reading about Vipassana meditation in the library one
afternoon, I got to thinking about how much time I spend in my life crashing around like a
great gasping fish, either squirming away from some uncomfortable distress or flopping hun-
grily toward ever more pleasure. And I wondered whether it might serve me (and those who
are burdened with the task of loving me) if I could learn to stay still and endure a bit more
without always getting dragged along on the potholed road of circumstance.
All these questions came back to me this evening, when I found a quiet bench in one of
the Ashram gardens and decided to sit in meditation for an hour—Vipassana-style. No move-
ment, no agitation, not even mantra—just pure regarding. Let’s see what comes up. Unfortu-
nately, I had forgotten about what “comes up” at dusk in India: mosquitoes. As I soon as I sat
down on that bench in the lovely gloaming, I could hear the mosquitoes coming at me, brush-
ing against my face and landing—in a group assault—on my head, ankles, arms. And then
their fierce little burns. I didn’t like this. I thought, “This is a bad time of day to practice Vipas-
sana meditation.”