skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Tim Parks in"Teach Us To Sit Still" describes the ways in which first relaxation and then meditation brought him relief from very unpleasant symptoms (pelvic pain) and associated anxieties. He manages to avoid drastic surgery, and he eventually does a 15-day course of meditation at a Vipassana centre. I haven't been to such a centre, but he writes in what I guess is a fair-minded as well as an engaging way about the process. He certainly reaches a new understanding of the relationship between mental states and physical symptoms. And he stops hurting.
After "Teach Us To Sit Still, Parks used his experiences to write a novel about young woman at a Vipassana centre. The novel's title is "Sex Is Forbidden." Which it is, along with an awful lot of other things, including an evening meal. (Tea and a piece of fruit only.) No intoxicants, and of course, no coffee, or other "toxins."
Both the central character of the novel, and Parks himself, came to the Vipassana Centre in dire straits. I expect that makes one readier to put up with things that would otherwise seem objectionable, worrying even, and for many people the rigour of the 15 days' isolation from the world no doubt works.
I have a big reservation about a central concept in the experience, as described on a Vipassana Centre's website: "purity." There is much emphasis on purifying the mind, and the body.
It's not so much the rigour of the code that alienates me; fair enough, they are aiming at eliminating distractions and diversions, hence segregation of the sexes, no reading materials, mobile phones, etcetcetc.
It's the idea that we can be purified, the emphasis on ridding the mind and the body of impurities, that doesn't work for me. Isn't that the old dualism, mind/body, pure/impure, the idea that a drive towards ridding ourselves of our beastly bits will make us good, holy, enlightened, better members of society.
I can't remember who it was who said that the difference between a medicine and a poison is the size of the dose. Anything can become a toxin if you take too much of it, perhaps even meditation; we can't spend our lives in the lotus posture. (I can't spend five minutes in it.) I don't accept there are pure and impure beings. We are mixed creatures, morally fallible, and I don't trust any kind of moral or physical absolutism.
Still, it worked for Tim Parks. Maybe if I was in a jam, I'd put up with ten days of rigid social and physical control. But it seems to me there are kinder meditation routines and retreats that can also result in awakening, "Insight, " "Seeing things as they truly are" (translations of "Vipassana").
(I should emphasise that "Vipassana" is a broad term for ancient Buddhist and pre-Buddhist techniques, and that the regime Parks describes is simply one interpretation and one methodology for delivering it via an intensive - to put it mildly - silent retreat.)
Now I have a clearer understanding of the effect of caffeine on my system, and on the assumption that it affects others similarly, I need to look at the question: is caffeine useful to keep us awake when we meditate?
Because people do nod off when they're meditating. I find that even if I've had a reasonable night's sleep, it can be hard to stay awake, particularly during the body scan stuff. Lying down, eyes shut....you can't tell the difference. Until someone starts snoring.
So why not caffeine up and stay awake?
Doesn't work, I think. The pick-up isn't even. Either I'll find it harder to maintain a level sort of presence because the the old bonce is off running scripts, jabbering away, hopping around and has to be hauled back to the present moment even more often than usual. Result = jumpiness, and dissatisfaction with self more likely. Total equanimity burn-off. See pic below.
Or the caffeine has faded, and that's when I'll feel even sleepier. Peaks and troughs of stimulation don't help meditation, I find.
Better to meditate before coffee in the morning, and maybe later in the day, by which time the caffeine level should have subsided. Or cut down on the caffeine and try for more even energy levels throughout the day. Our culture seems addicted to the idea that we need large shots of sugars and coffee to make us function.
I now have an enhanced respect for the old Java, the cappucino, the..well, you know the bewildering variety of ways you can slurp up caffeiene. (I write not of useless fattening caffeinated fizzy drinks....)
I have also added to my understanding of caffeine levels in different teas. Did you know that, contrary to propaganda, white tea, lovely though it is, has one of the highest concentrations of caffeine of any tea? And that decaffeinated tea and coffee still retain small quantities of caffeine? You did? OK, on we go.
I've been trying to find out what might be causing a reactive skin rash I've been proudly nourishing for at least 18 months, so I am trying the procedure of leaving out of my diet one at a time the most common suspects for triggering histamine reactions in the skin.
You may imagine my relief when after an alcohol-free 19 days I discovered that keeping clear of the Merlot the G&T and the foaming pint of Adnams made absolutely no difference. I was still "scratchin' like a hound" (Coasters, 1959, "Poison Ivy.")
So next I tried caffeine. I stopped drinking teas black green or white, and coffee. Stopped abruptly. Big mistake. Headaches, generally feeling well below par (and par isn't what it used to be. Do you find that? You're obviously over 60...) grumpy (-er), mood (-ier) swings.
Stuck it for two days then re-caffeinated gently, with Darjeeling tea. Fizz pop went the day, back up to par. That's just two cups of Darj in a day, no more.
And that was and is my usual daily dose, apart from an espresso in the morning. Clearly, even my moderate caffeine intake makes a big difference to my metabolism, and I have an addiction. I'm so proud to have discovered that, since I've always been too cowardly to contemplate getting addicted to anything else much. Apart obviously from Cotes du Rhone. And music. And being in the countryside. And....h'mmm.
There is a point to all this. Which is: what effects are caffeine levels likely to have on meditation sessions? Should one espresso up in order not to nod off, or shun the stuff because it disturbs equilibrium?
I shall address these crucial issues in my next post. Please try to contain your impatience.
Nothing.
Do not try to become anything.
Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
When you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.
Ajahn Chah
The temporary dislocation of the continuity of my ordinary self (see last post) may relate to what neuroscience seems to be telling us: that the ego, the strong sense of myself as a continuing presence, is re-constructed "as we go along," continuously. There is no solid place inside all this flux and change that is "me." "Me" is part of the flux. But that's OK, because out of the flux comes a pretty useful thing: the illusion that "I" is separate from everything else. Well - useful in a social sense, but not actually accurate.
(I don't know what the pretty patterns mean either, but it shows different areas of the brain lighting up, as different patterns of neurons fire, re-making "me" by the moment.)
I think that's what the unusual, alienating, dislocating state of mind I referred to in the last post comes from. Without any analysis on my part, and certainly with almost no understanding, my mind sets aside the usual clatter and chatter and exists in the present.
Although mindfulness meditation methodology has no doctrinal, religious content, it derives from Buddhist meditation practice. And maybe that's because it was Buddha who had the insight (revelation, nirvana, whatever you like to call it) that the self is an illusion - at least, the self as we usually inhabit it.And he did so once he'd given up starving himself and pursuing asceticism and bodily denial because it proved futile. He just meditated, and out of that came his enlightenment, his insights into human suffering and the nature of the self.
Understanding that the self as we usually think of it and feel it - i.e. as a constant entity - is an illusion, and living with that understanding, in the reality of the present moment, seems to yield great benefits. Even the NHS recognises that now.
So there you are - from 12-year-old oddness through Buddha and neuroscience to the NHS. I have linked it all up for you.
Is that my Nobel Prize you're holding? Oh no, it is Nurse Ratched with my medications....
When I was quite young, maybe 12 or 13, is I think about when I began to note, occasionally, an unusual feeling, or state of mind. Being a state of mind, I find it almost impossible to describe, but I'll try.
The usual flow of thoughts and feelings seemed to have stopped, quite suddenly but for no particular reason. In its place was the feeling that my prior experience had been de-coupled from where I was at that moment. I felt newly-arrived in the present. If I thought back into the immediate past, the feeling disappeared as quietly and quickly as it had arrived, and that's what I used to do at first, because the feeling was disturbing. I felt slightly remote, a little alien to my usual self.
As I grew older and I guess busier with the world, family, people, work, it happened less often. If anyone spoke to me, it vanished, as I turned to engage with them. But in the last few years, I've felt it more often, and it's a welcome guest; it helps me to exist for a while in the present moment.
I can't hang on to it - it disappears, if I try to keep it, or assess it, or "do" anything else to it. All I can do is be in it for a while.
Does this make any sense to anyone else, at all, I wonder?
(I expect Nurse Ratched and the ambulance will be here any moment...)
Those who have absorbed the wisdom of that enlightened being, Po, the Kung Fu Panda, transmitted as it is via the blessed vehicle of DVD, will remember two key moments.
The first one: his dad (OK, his dad's a goose and he's an overweight panda, but that's explicable in the follow-up movie) has told customers at his noodle stall that there is a Secret Ingredient to his delicious noodles.
Eventually, he finally admits to Po that there is no secret igredient. (i.e. he just makes noodles his own way and they're very good.)
The second moment (spoiler alert) is when Po finally gets his hands on the Dragon Scroll, source of wisdom, power and general Awesomeness, unrolls it, and finds...the scroll is blank, except for a surface sheen, reflecting his own face. The only real Awesomeness (as you will have guessed, it's an American film) we can find is within each of us.
We love the idea of exclusivity, a secret only we know, the source of in-crowd power. But to engage fully with reality, to be ourselves, now, this minute, we have to realise, and to internalise, the fact that there is no Secret Igredient, the Dragon Scroll is blank. There is just each of us, in the present moment. Living that truth is the only way to be enlightened, whatever that means to you in your own life.
