How to Meditate

How to Meditate Brenda Miller Day One On arrival, huddle in the Volkswagen with your friends and eat aU the chocolate in the car. Chocolate chips, old KitKats, the tag-end of a Hershey Bar—do not discriminate. Feel deprived, then light up your last Sherman, pass it around. Watch your feUow retreatants flow into the meditation haU. Note how elegant they look, even in sweatpants and black WeUingtons. Wonder where they get such nice sweatpants. Look down at your baggyjeans, your dimT-shirt and say, I'm not dressedfor this, let'sgo home. Look beyond the meditation haU to the Navarro River, the cattails, the redwinged blackbirds. It wiU be raining, just a little. Remember that you've forgotten dental floss. Take a deep drag off the cigarette and wonder what you're doing here. Take a close look at your companions in the car: your boyfriend Seth, who is so much older than you, and your friends John and Marybeth. Remember how the four ofyou, just days earfier, wound up tangled in a bed together, a soft bed with a down comforter, lazily stroking each other's limbs. Feel ashamed. Feel superior. Say, Ready? A woman with bristled red hair leads you and Marybeth to the women's dorm. There wiU be a deck overlooking a marsh where the blackbirds clack and whistle in the reeds. Glance at the other women who are folding their extra pairs of sweatpants, their Guatemalan sweaters. Sit on the cot and pat it with one hand. It will be hard, unyielding, to help you obey the precept against lying in "high, luxurious beds." Scope out the meditation haU. Set up your pfllow, your blankets next to the wood-stove near the back door. Figure this wiU be a prime spot—easy in, easy out—and smugly wonder why no one else has nabbed it. Realize your mistake when, during the first sitting period, heat blazes from the 106 Brenda Miller107 stove, frying the hair on your shins. Slide away a little, quietly as you can, and bump the knees ofthe woman next to you. Irritation rises from her like a wave. Start to apologize but choke yourself off mid-whisper. Sit cross-legged on your pillow, your hands palm down on your knees. Breathe. Your teacher, who is from Burma, perches on a raised platform, his belly round, his knees hidden under his white robe. He speaks in a voice so deep it vibrates beneath your skin. He repeats the word: equanimous, equanimous . Invent a strange animal, an Equanimous, half-horse, half-dolphin, gliding through the murky sea of your unconscious. Feel where the breath enters and leaves your body just below the nostrils, like a fingertip tapping on your upper lip. Concentrate on this sensation. Within seconds find yourselfthinking about Marybeth s hand on your breast. Go back to your breath. Find yourselfthinking about pancakes, eggs, bacon. Go back to your breath. Spend your first hour of meditation this way. They caU it "monkey mind." Picture your brain swinging through the banana trees, its little hands clutching the vines. Feel the pain begin in your knees, between your shoulder blades. Shift a little and feel the pain travel up your neck, down into your hips. Open your eyes halfway and surreptitiously glance at the meditators around you. They look perfectly stiU, their backs straight, their zafus round and plump. Look at your own flat piUow spiUing from beneath your thighs. You don't have the right equipment for this. You'd better leave now, before you're paralyzed. Day Two Read the rules again: No talking, no reading, no sex, no drugs, no eye contact. Vipassana, they say, is the art of looking deeply. Be unsure about how deeply you want to look. Read the schedule six times—4 A.M.: waking bell, 4:30-5:00: chanting in the haU, 5-6: sitting, 6-7: breakfast, 7-9: sitting , 11:00: lunch, more sitting, nap time, more sitting, tea at 4:00, no dinner, Dharma talk at 7, more sitting. Add up the hours ofmeditation and come up with the number 16. Figure this must be a mistake and perform...