Sitting With Determination, Part 3: Soap and the Art of Letting Go
It is so hard to just let go.
If you never thought so, then try sitting in meditation for any number of days, or even just a few minutes. The mind will always fight back like the untamed beast it is, running wild and free with reckless abandon. Each time I've sat a long retreat, I have come away with a greater knowledge of what is actually happening inside my own mind (hint: it's not pretty!) and get to probe into the reasons why I do what I do.
I find it fascinating, if not exactly easy, to dive deeper and deeper into my own personal abyss, to sift through everything that I think about who I am and what I stand for in this world. In other words, I get to come face to face with my own persona, my own story, the one I have been fighting to keep alive for 38 years on this planet. And the longer I look at it, the more clarity I get.
Truly, the story of who I think I am is paper thin. It is a tissue paper facade at best.
During this retreat, I surrendered. I had to. In my opinion, there is no other way to go into something like this. Why sit in silence for ten days, in the middle of nowhere, only to go halfway? Faking it didn't seem like an option. I couldn't hide from anything, and as time went on, I started to see how incredibly willing I was to just let go already.
Unlike my first experience, I never looked around during meditation hours to see what everyone else looked like, to wonder what they were going through, or if they were in as much pain as I was. This time around, I just didn't care. I needed my attention, my very own undivided, compassionate, loving attention. Everyone else would have to wait.
It no longer mattered what was happening around me. I was having my own experience.
Plodding through a particularly intense group sitting on Day 5, something occurred to me. Even without opening my eyes to see it, I took note of my own posture. I would sit cross-legged on my cushions, and instead of my hands resting on my knees or legs, day after day I found them in my lap. One hand holding the other one, often very tightly. This was giving me comfort, probably more comfort than I had ever known. In the midst of all this surrendering, I discovered something very important, something that I hadn't planned on unearthing. But ready or not, here it was.
I had ME. And there I sat, holding my own hand through it all. I was going to be ok.
In the midst of the bodily pain from sitting, I smiled from ear to ear. The pain retracted momentarily. I felt more balanced than at any other point in the retreat. I stopped giving my energy to the pain and remembered (at least for one brief moment) that it would all change in time. I saw it taking place in my own body, this impermanence that we were being instructed over and over again to appreciate. Change is a constant, and yet through it all I had found something to rely on, something inside of me that seemed eternal. I knew I was going to be fine.
For the rest of that hour, though filled with tears, I kept my eyes closed tightly.
During those ten days on the farm, I also learned to appreciate my own quirky ways of learning lessons and seeing the world. On the first morning, I realized I had forgotten to bring soap. After a few minutes of chastising myself, I wound up asking the male student manager (the one person we were allowed to communicate with verbally) if he could find me some.
He did. Inside one of the showers was a small bottle of organic soap labeled "community soap--do not take!", which instead of making me grateful, immediately got me thinking worst-case scenarios. There was no way it would be enough to see me through the entire ten days. I watched it run lower and lower until finally there was barely enough to last through the next day. With several days still left, I had to get my fill! So I sneakily signed up for an early morning shower that very next day (we had 3 minutes to get ourselves clean), figuring that the early bird gets the soap.
I grabbed my towel and ran over to the shower area, which was basically two sprinkler heads buried beneath a patch of trees. Both showers were occupied. According to the sign-up sheet, both of them should have been empty. There was my name, the lone name on the list. And there I stood. Dry. Smelly. Pissed off. Overlooked. Again.
That was the final straw. I was heading into a tailspin of unprecedented proportions.
I angrily stomped back to my tent. Was I invisible? Why can't everybody just follow the rules? And worst of all, what if there was no soap left for ME? I found the manager again and advised that the soap was running out, and pleaded with him to find me some more. He said he would do what he could. That was not nearly good enough.
I could not let it go. With nobody to talk to, nobody to vent my woe-is-me story to, I returned to my tent to marinate in my own bitter juices. My heart was racing. I started to sweat, and not because of the warm Hawaiian weather. Once again, I had been left out in the cold. Nobody helps poor pitiful Paul. They never have. I would have cried if I hadn't felt so insanely outraged, yet what I was raging against I could not decipher. I just knew I couldn't let it go. Not yet.
I headed into the next meditation session in a full-fledged panic attack.
I have had these episodes before, but they always were because of something external, or so I told myself. But now here I was. No coffee, eating as healthy as ever, resting in silence for days, and yet sitting in meditation with my heart beating in my throat, my only option to just observe all the sensations that were occurring while simultaneously keeping from running out of the meditation hall like my butt was on fire.
It was quite possibly the worst hour I have spent in recent memory.
Yet somehow I made it through. Later on, in the solitude of my own tent, I kept thinking about the soap. That damn soap. I was so agitated, and I knew it went far beyond not taking a shower.
I wondered how I ever made it through my life this long. Everything led me back to a solitary thought that sat at the heart of all this anxiety, one that I had bumped into over the years but was always frightened to face head-on. That is, until now.
I was nothing. I didn't deserve a shower, soap, or anything at all. I was a complete and utter mess. There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.
I felt my own worthlessness like never before.
In silence, I just sat there with it. It was ugly, a train wreck of such immense proportions that it does not allow you to look away. Everything was falling apart, and I had no strength to keep it together. In my weakness, I examined these feelings with a brand new microscope. They were all very familiar. But the more I looked at them, the less real they became, kind of like staring down the boogey man when I was a kid, only to realize that he never actually existed anyway. He was never really hiding under my bed. Whew! All it took was to stop being afraid of the dark and just look around at what was really there. Nothing. Just darkness.
It was the same thing now. My own adult boogeyman was losing his grip.
The longer I sat, the more I saw what was really happening. The fog slowly started to lift, and the truth became crystal clear. Nobody meant to do me any harm. Everyone is having their own experience, and you know what? Those people just wanted to take a shower. So did I. They didn't sign up. I did. Big f-ing deal! I was very likely the only person who cared about that damn soap. Yet I took it like a personal attack, as just another moment where I was not being acknowledged or respected, another time where I wasn't getting what I deserved out of life.
What a crock.
The truth was, these people didn't even know me. But I knew me. And I knew I had seen all of this before, oh so many times. I just couldn't look away any longer.
Could it be all of this anxiety was stemming from my own fears of not being taken care of? I mean, I had smelled the odors coming from some of the other students. During most warm afternoons, the meditation hall smelled like a dirty tennis shoe at best. Nobody would notice my funk, not with all of the other funkiness already wafting through the proceedings.
Suddenly it was obvious. I was so tired of feeling like this. I couldn't stand myself, my own whiny self, not for one more minute. I had no other choice but to give it up. Screw it all, I reasoned silently. It didn't matter if I took a shower for the rest of my time there, or even for the rest of my life. I would just go sit under the hot water, at whatever time worked out for everyone. If soap showed up, bonus. If not, tough patooties. It really didn't matter anymore.
Lo and behold, the anxiety disappeared. And that afternoon, soap showed up.
I laughed at its presence in the shower, figuring the male manager had delivered it per my request. But mostly, I laughed at my own incredible insanity. I saw the thought patterns that had driven so much of my life up to this day. Instead of feeling sick, guilty or ashamed, I laughed. This particular facade of mine, the one whereby I am left behind by everyone and everything, the one where I believe wholeheartedly my own paper-thin story of victimhood and self-pity, was evaporating before my very eyes. And all I could do was laugh. It was never about the soap, I decided.
Of course it wasn't.
The evening of Day 8, after a powerful group sitting, the male student manager approached me. In my haze, I heard him whisper that he was sorry he didn't get me soap sooner, but he finally found some. With that, he handed me a small, trial-size bar of white soap, the kind you find in most hotels. Turned out he wasn't the provider of the soap that had been cleaning my overmeditated body the past few days after all, not that it mattered much. I thanked him through a huge smile and headed out of the tent, clutching this small present which, to my mind, was a gift of far greater satisfaction than he ever would know.
Under the canopy of Big Island stars, a chill runs down my spine. I spin around, head gazing upward, taking in every last sparkling diamond in the night sky. It's a big universe out there, I think to myself. Huge. And in that vastness lies everything we need, and yes, this even included soap. All I had to do was let go, not just of the need to be clean, but also the thoughts that were holding me prisoner inside.
This was all part and parcel to having my own experience. It was nobody else's life. I had to fight out my own battles. Besides, nobody could save me from my own mind. I never actually needed to be saved anyway. Heck, I didn't even need soap! I didn't need anything but to see what beliefs I was holding on to, and how they caused me so much misery.
But even letting go of negative thoughts feels like throwing away that old, tattered blanket that we always thought provided so much comfort. Giving it up can feel like a death. Yet once we are able to see it for what it really is, we wonder why we ever held on to such a moth-eaten, dirty piece of material in the first place.
The truth lies in this discovery, that the only reason it hurts is because we fail to see it for what it really is. It is just a blanket! No more, no less. Likewise, thoughts are just thoughts. Neither good nor bad, they still find a way to drive our behaviors as if we have no choice in the matter. But we do. Blankets are just blankets, soap is just soap, people are just people. It's only our own attachments to them which make us miserable.
Looking deeper at my life, I see that to be true. In my own way I can acknowledge this reality with a big sigh of relief. I know I will get attached to things and people in the future. In this ever-changing landscape of life, it is bound to happen. It's how the mind works after all. But this lesson was an important one, and having experienced it feels like a mystery revealed.
It is never really about the soap, is it? Nope. Never has been. Not even for a second.
If you never thought so, then try sitting in meditation for any number of days, or even just a few minutes. The mind will always fight back like the untamed beast it is, running wild and free with reckless abandon. Each time I've sat a long retreat, I have come away with a greater knowledge of what is actually happening inside my own mind (hint: it's not pretty!) and get to probe into the reasons why I do what I do.
I find it fascinating, if not exactly easy, to dive deeper and deeper into my own personal abyss, to sift through everything that I think about who I am and what I stand for in this world. In other words, I get to come face to face with my own persona, my own story, the one I have been fighting to keep alive for 38 years on this planet. And the longer I look at it, the more clarity I get.
Truly, the story of who I think I am is paper thin. It is a tissue paper facade at best.
During this retreat, I surrendered. I had to. In my opinion, there is no other way to go into something like this. Why sit in silence for ten days, in the middle of nowhere, only to go halfway? Faking it didn't seem like an option. I couldn't hide from anything, and as time went on, I started to see how incredibly willing I was to just let go already.
Unlike my first experience, I never looked around during meditation hours to see what everyone else looked like, to wonder what they were going through, or if they were in as much pain as I was. This time around, I just didn't care. I needed my attention, my very own undivided, compassionate, loving attention. Everyone else would have to wait.
It no longer mattered what was happening around me. I was having my own experience.
Plodding through a particularly intense group sitting on Day 5, something occurred to me. Even without opening my eyes to see it, I took note of my own posture. I would sit cross-legged on my cushions, and instead of my hands resting on my knees or legs, day after day I found them in my lap. One hand holding the other one, often very tightly. This was giving me comfort, probably more comfort than I had ever known. In the midst of all this surrendering, I discovered something very important, something that I hadn't planned on unearthing. But ready or not, here it was.
I had ME. And there I sat, holding my own hand through it all. I was going to be ok.
In the midst of the bodily pain from sitting, I smiled from ear to ear. The pain retracted momentarily. I felt more balanced than at any other point in the retreat. I stopped giving my energy to the pain and remembered (at least for one brief moment) that it would all change in time. I saw it taking place in my own body, this impermanence that we were being instructed over and over again to appreciate. Change is a constant, and yet through it all I had found something to rely on, something inside of me that seemed eternal. I knew I was going to be fine.
For the rest of that hour, though filled with tears, I kept my eyes closed tightly.
During those ten days on the farm, I also learned to appreciate my own quirky ways of learning lessons and seeing the world. On the first morning, I realized I had forgotten to bring soap. After a few minutes of chastising myself, I wound up asking the male student manager (the one person we were allowed to communicate with verbally) if he could find me some.
He did. Inside one of the showers was a small bottle of organic soap labeled "community soap--do not take!", which instead of making me grateful, immediately got me thinking worst-case scenarios. There was no way it would be enough to see me through the entire ten days. I watched it run lower and lower until finally there was barely enough to last through the next day. With several days still left, I had to get my fill! So I sneakily signed up for an early morning shower that very next day (we had 3 minutes to get ourselves clean), figuring that the early bird gets the soap.
I grabbed my towel and ran over to the shower area, which was basically two sprinkler heads buried beneath a patch of trees. Both showers were occupied. According to the sign-up sheet, both of them should have been empty. There was my name, the lone name on the list. And there I stood. Dry. Smelly. Pissed off. Overlooked. Again.
That was the final straw. I was heading into a tailspin of unprecedented proportions.
I angrily stomped back to my tent. Was I invisible? Why can't everybody just follow the rules? And worst of all, what if there was no soap left for ME? I found the manager again and advised that the soap was running out, and pleaded with him to find me some more. He said he would do what he could. That was not nearly good enough.
I could not let it go. With nobody to talk to, nobody to vent my woe-is-me story to, I returned to my tent to marinate in my own bitter juices. My heart was racing. I started to sweat, and not because of the warm Hawaiian weather. Once again, I had been left out in the cold. Nobody helps poor pitiful Paul. They never have. I would have cried if I hadn't felt so insanely outraged, yet what I was raging against I could not decipher. I just knew I couldn't let it go. Not yet.
I headed into the next meditation session in a full-fledged panic attack.
I have had these episodes before, but they always were because of something external, or so I told myself. But now here I was. No coffee, eating as healthy as ever, resting in silence for days, and yet sitting in meditation with my heart beating in my throat, my only option to just observe all the sensations that were occurring while simultaneously keeping from running out of the meditation hall like my butt was on fire.
It was quite possibly the worst hour I have spent in recent memory.
Yet somehow I made it through. Later on, in the solitude of my own tent, I kept thinking about the soap. That damn soap. I was so agitated, and I knew it went far beyond not taking a shower.
I wondered how I ever made it through my life this long. Everything led me back to a solitary thought that sat at the heart of all this anxiety, one that I had bumped into over the years but was always frightened to face head-on. That is, until now.
I was nothing. I didn't deserve a shower, soap, or anything at all. I was a complete and utter mess. There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.
I felt my own worthlessness like never before.
In silence, I just sat there with it. It was ugly, a train wreck of such immense proportions that it does not allow you to look away. Everything was falling apart, and I had no strength to keep it together. In my weakness, I examined these feelings with a brand new microscope. They were all very familiar. But the more I looked at them, the less real they became, kind of like staring down the boogey man when I was a kid, only to realize that he never actually existed anyway. He was never really hiding under my bed. Whew! All it took was to stop being afraid of the dark and just look around at what was really there. Nothing. Just darkness.
It was the same thing now. My own adult boogeyman was losing his grip.
The longer I sat, the more I saw what was really happening. The fog slowly started to lift, and the truth became crystal clear. Nobody meant to do me any harm. Everyone is having their own experience, and you know what? Those people just wanted to take a shower. So did I. They didn't sign up. I did. Big f-ing deal! I was very likely the only person who cared about that damn soap. Yet I took it like a personal attack, as just another moment where I was not being acknowledged or respected, another time where I wasn't getting what I deserved out of life.
What a crock.
The truth was, these people didn't even know me. But I knew me. And I knew I had seen all of this before, oh so many times. I just couldn't look away any longer.
Could it be all of this anxiety was stemming from my own fears of not being taken care of? I mean, I had smelled the odors coming from some of the other students. During most warm afternoons, the meditation hall smelled like a dirty tennis shoe at best. Nobody would notice my funk, not with all of the other funkiness already wafting through the proceedings.
Suddenly it was obvious. I was so tired of feeling like this. I couldn't stand myself, my own whiny self, not for one more minute. I had no other choice but to give it up. Screw it all, I reasoned silently. It didn't matter if I took a shower for the rest of my time there, or even for the rest of my life. I would just go sit under the hot water, at whatever time worked out for everyone. If soap showed up, bonus. If not, tough patooties. It really didn't matter anymore.
Lo and behold, the anxiety disappeared. And that afternoon, soap showed up.
I laughed at its presence in the shower, figuring the male manager had delivered it per my request. But mostly, I laughed at my own incredible insanity. I saw the thought patterns that had driven so much of my life up to this day. Instead of feeling sick, guilty or ashamed, I laughed. This particular facade of mine, the one whereby I am left behind by everyone and everything, the one where I believe wholeheartedly my own paper-thin story of victimhood and self-pity, was evaporating before my very eyes. And all I could do was laugh. It was never about the soap, I decided.
Of course it wasn't.
The evening of Day 8, after a powerful group sitting, the male student manager approached me. In my haze, I heard him whisper that he was sorry he didn't get me soap sooner, but he finally found some. With that, he handed me a small, trial-size bar of white soap, the kind you find in most hotels. Turned out he wasn't the provider of the soap that had been cleaning my overmeditated body the past few days after all, not that it mattered much. I thanked him through a huge smile and headed out of the tent, clutching this small present which, to my mind, was a gift of far greater satisfaction than he ever would know.
Under the canopy of Big Island stars, a chill runs down my spine. I spin around, head gazing upward, taking in every last sparkling diamond in the night sky. It's a big universe out there, I think to myself. Huge. And in that vastness lies everything we need, and yes, this even included soap. All I had to do was let go, not just of the need to be clean, but also the thoughts that were holding me prisoner inside.
This was all part and parcel to having my own experience. It was nobody else's life. I had to fight out my own battles. Besides, nobody could save me from my own mind. I never actually needed to be saved anyway. Heck, I didn't even need soap! I didn't need anything but to see what beliefs I was holding on to, and how they caused me so much misery.
But even letting go of negative thoughts feels like throwing away that old, tattered blanket that we always thought provided so much comfort. Giving it up can feel like a death. Yet once we are able to see it for what it really is, we wonder why we ever held on to such a moth-eaten, dirty piece of material in the first place.
The truth lies in this discovery, that the only reason it hurts is because we fail to see it for what it really is. It is just a blanket! No more, no less. Likewise, thoughts are just thoughts. Neither good nor bad, they still find a way to drive our behaviors as if we have no choice in the matter. But we do. Blankets are just blankets, soap is just soap, people are just people. It's only our own attachments to them which make us miserable.
Looking deeper at my life, I see that to be true. In my own way I can acknowledge this reality with a big sigh of relief. I know I will get attached to things and people in the future. In this ever-changing landscape of life, it is bound to happen. It's how the mind works after all. But this lesson was an important one, and having experienced it feels like a mystery revealed.
It is never really about the soap, is it? Nope. Never has been. Not even for a second.
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