Compassion

The vipassana technique is supposed to cultivate your compassion for all living beings. Now, almost everyone I know would agree that this is a good thing to do, intellectually that is. I don’t have one friend who thinks Gandhi, MLK or Mother Teresa are full of themselves or obnoxious. Yet it is so hard to actually feel compassion for some people who are nothing like Mother Teresa.

Like the Burp Man. Now I know burping is sort of a national sport for Americans. It is considered cute or funny. 22 year old hot blonds who just spent 3 hours to get ready to look as sexy as possible would burp loudly in public to prove their coolness to guys around them. Even on TV, they would disclose this as something that makes them so likable! Every dinner table in America has a few kids or youth loudly burping and then giggling or even competing to see who would produce the loudest burp. Parents affectionately roll their eyes and remind them to say “excuse me” but honestly they don’t mind. It is OK to let your body do its thing as long as you say sorry. How is this different than me farting at the dinner table because I had beans?

So Americans don’t mind. I DO! I DO NOT EXCUSE YOU! I don’t care if you are 2 years old, I don’t. This disgusting habit makes me want to vomit. I can’t enjoy my food, I feel like going to the bathroom and throwing up. I do not want to hear your stomach function, neither do I EVER want to smell semi-digested odor that comes with it. But I know I am a guest in this country and I know how fond people are of burping so I put my head down when this happens, averting my gaze away from the person and just stay quiet and try not to gag. If kids are doing it, I usually correct and say how unacceptable the behavior is, that she should cover her mouth and try not to be so loud. This is called “kizim sana soyluyorum, gelinim sen anla” in Turkish- “I am telling this to my daughter so my daughter-in-law can hear,” indirectly trying to tell people how I don’t like this behavior. Honestly, I don’t think anybody cares so I just try to ignore it.

Now, the burp man at the retreat… He made an art of this particular body function. You have to understand, this is no occasional burping. This is material worth the Guinness Book of Records. Imagine an idyllic, quiet meditation hall, imagine you are trying so hard to focus on the sensations on the body and imagine you are trying your hardest not to react to anything: positive or negative, to avoid attachment/desire/passion or aversion/hate/dislike. Imagine a guy burping every minute for the next 2 hours. Imagine you can hear the rumbles in his stomach before this happens, follow it all the way up to his esophagus, feel it getting stronger, louder, and release like a thunder. Imagine almost smelling it from the other side of the hall. And imagine the poor guy actually trying to control it, this is not the full force version you could be hearing.

And imagine me trying to ignore this for hours at a time for days. I ponder how it is possible for someone to burp so much. I wonder how it is possible at 4:30 in the morning when we haven’t eaten anything the last 17 hours. I spend hours trying to find compassion for this man. He can’t help it. How hard it must be to meditate when your body constantly disrupts your flow. How ashamed he must feel that everyone can hear it. I try to divert my dislike to others who fart and sneeze and cough all day long. Did they not get the same message I got 3 times before the retreat asking to please cancel if they are feeling under the weather even if a little bit, and not to expose others to flu etc? Those selfish bastards! We are in an enclosed hall, breathing the same air you are contaminating with all your sneezing. We are asked to cover our sneeze with our sleeves yet no one wants to break their meditation pose so they are literally sneezing onto the person in front of them. I mean the Burp Man is a saint next to these people. Yet, these poor sick people are getting up every morning at 4 am to meditate regardless of being sick. How hard it must be to meditate when you are deadly ill. I command their persistence. I am searching for compassion. I really am.

Maybe I’ll divert my attention to Amy instead (I changed names hoping to trick Karma :) since she is bugging me so much lately. She sits right in front of me and we are also bunking in the same dorm. She looks about 18 or 19. She is a tall, chubby kid with rosy red cheeks. She has long flowing fine blond hair that she can’t stop playing with. The check-in day I hear her saying that someone in her mom’s yoga class recommended she attends this workshop. I imagine a skinny mom who gently tries to help her. I can see she is searching for something. I imagine she doesn’t have a lot of friends. She is awkward yet she tries very hard to act like it’s all cool, she doesn’t mind. I can tell, she minds most of it but thinks her cover is pretty good. Well, I see through you kid. I feel for you. You are neither a woman nor a child. You don’t fit in the beauty ideal of our day. You can’t help but eat. I feel your pain. But I also see that whatever it is you are trying you are not ready to commit 100%. You want to be cool. You just don’t know how. So this retreat is another attempt at that intangible you are looking for. I can tell you are not gonna find it here, not yet…

Amy is afraid that someone might take away her shower time so before the day is over she will sign her name up and put a note with the next day’s number next to it. Childish! She can’t see it. At the end of every day, someone erases everything including her name and puts the next day’s number as a new clean sign up sheet. Her preemptive sign up did not work, yet no one signs up for her slot. As if to say, ‘see? no need to be fearful of this, you can have the slot without preventing others from signing up.’ She continues this practice and the eraser lady continues hers. I continue my role: to observe but not to react (which is exactly what vipassana technique says to do. I am such a good student!)

Amy stays in the dining hall the whole time meals are scheduled. She is always hovering around food, hands in her sweat pant’s pockets, looking over to see if the selection has changed since she loaded her plate 15 minutes ago. Sometimes she sits on the window sill that separates the buffet from the dining tables and loads her plate again without having to go around the buffet table. She likes the breakfast most I think. She practically lives by the toaster. She has about 5 slices of bread with varying combinations of butter, peanut butter, tahini, honey, jam. She doesn’t like the oatmeal or the yogurt much though she tries to eat a little bit with fruit. When there is dessert, she will take two, then every time she would be leaving the room to get a drink or more food she will inconspicuously pick another one and throw in her mouth. None of this bothers me. I watch her with understanding. I am getting a hang of this compassion thing.

Things change around day 5. Now the technique is getting harder. We are not supposed to change our posture even if there is pain and we are supposed to be more dedicated in our practice, extending it to meditating even with eyes open while doing other things. Around this time people are sobbing and can’t take it anymore and some people already left, breaking their wows to complete the 10 days. I can see that Amy’s excitement about trying this “awesome” thing is now vanishing rapidly. She does not get up for the 4:30 am meditation session anymore. I see her tumbling into breakfast with the gong at 6:30 am, clearly just having woken up. There are 3 specific meditation sessions which everyone must attend with the teachers as well as the nightly discourses. Other times are more relaxed, you are allowed to meditate in your own room. I was meditating on my bed half of these flex times since I liked having my back to the wall. Of course Amy and half the room were sound asleep during meditation time, snoring and inviting me to do the same (and succeeding half the time). So she would only show up in the meditation hall when it was required. She was always one of the last ones to enter the hall and the first one to leave. She was going through the motions but really wasn’t there anymore. She wasn’t gonna quit –in her mind- but it was clear she already did.

Of course she was bored out of her mind. She would sit or lay down on the lawn in front of my window during meditation hours and start making bird calls. There were 2 birds who would respond to her and she would smile and say stuff to herself in whispers. Granted a lot of people were having issues with the silence by this time. Some people were humming songs. Giggles and laughter and snorts were increasing at an alarming rate at the evening discourses. It is not that the teacher’s stories weren’t funny but honestly they weren’t funny enough to warrant the laughter you usually reserve for Jerry Seinfeld’s stand up routine. People just needed to make noise, I think. Amy loved these lectures. She would laugh at every story, put her hands around her head shaking from side to side because she could not contain herself or better yet would raise her arms up and point with her hands down as if in a hip hop concert, saying ‘word!’

By this time she was so bored that she started working on her hair. She would braid her hair into really skinny braids on either side of her face during the day and then she would unbraid them during the evening lectures. This would happen every single day like clockwork. Then she started collecting rocks. This consumed her days. Her head was constantly down surveying the grounds. We were instructed not to pick anything, no flowers etc while at the compound. Her collection started with 3 rocks of varying sizes, than by the 9th day it was up to 25. She would wear her gray sweatpants but would not tie it so it was constantly falling down and exposing her butt crack while the long tie dangled in front of her, feeling completely ignored. She was also bending her waist line out like the skinny girls but of course this was making it harder for the poor old sweats to stay on her bottom. Now, add 25 rocks to her pockets and her pants were constantly grazing her mid-hip area. She would constantly put her hands in her pockets and swish the rocks around making noise which I could not ignore since she was literally inches away from me. She would bend in front of me to make her sitting arrangement perfect –which started with one cushion and now was up to 12 cushions that fit under her butt, behind her back, under knees as well as every other crevice you can imagine- and plop down with a loud thump and swoosh which would push her set up back towards my feet blocking the walkway. At this time her butt was completely exposed as she would try to pull up her pants and pull down her shirt while sitting which would then mess up her sitting arrangement and she would be up and starting all over again for that perfect meditation pose.

If by some miracle she found a semi-comfortable sitting arrangement, she would take out all her stones and start putting them on her legs and around her pillows which was slowly encroaching upon the two women’s meditation cushion on each side and the walkway behind her and in front of me. Every time she would get up, or move her legs, there would be numerous rocks falling onto the concrete floor and snapping me out of my meditation. Her body was at the retreat while her mind was at a dreaded summer camp somewhere else. And the funny thing is I can picture her talking to people after the retreat saying things like, “yeah, it was awesome. Like, I really dig this meditation. It is so cool, it is insanely good for you. Vegan food was the bomb. Like, I meditate now all the time.”

Let me put it this way: I would cut my arm off if she meditated once since the retreat ended.

Dear Amy, please come back when your mental age reaches 40 and you are actually interested in doing the work.

As you can see, I am still working on compassion. It is not easy. OK, it is easy when you are talking about a 2 year old kid who is abused by his crack addict mom. It is very easy to feel compassion for this child. Now, the compassion for the mom, which you should have more of, is another story. When you find that compassion, call me and we’ll exchange notes. Similarly, liking the deer family on premises and not wanting to kill the Bambi or a pretty poppy flower is very easy. Not wanting to swat the mosquito that is about to feast on your nose, cockroach in your room or the hairy dark mouse running under your foot in the dining hall are much harder kinds of compassion. Do you have it?