Impermanence.
Her name escapes me now, but her face was unforgettable. The woman—I will call her Sarah—had half-inch fake eyelashes, sparkly pink lips, and her forehead, cheeks, and chin were plumped and plastered unnaturally smooth across the broad bones of her face. She had long inky black hair pulled up in a bright scrunchy, and her voice, simultaneously booming and breathless, could be heard in the furthest garden behind the meditation hall whilst Sarah was still inside the communal dining area.
She looked much younger than her age—fifty-five! she bellowed gleefully to everyone she spoke to within minutes of the introduction. Sarah beamed, and although the skin on her powdered face didn’t move much when she smiled, her eyes twinkled with childish delight. You couldn’t help but smile with her.
She was a refreshing eccentric, amongst the quiet crowd of introspective acolytes. We were a pretty mild mixed-bag of a retreat crowd: we were accountants, lawyers, or something in IT. There were a few yoga teachers and a handful younger, more overtly alternate-types, adorned in cheesecloth skirts and crop-top bodices and tattoos of Sanskrit symbols.
Most of us wore shy, thoughtful smiles that did not reveal our teeth, as we milled about the orientation hall. We were contemplating the days ahead, and what we’d just signed ourselves up for: ten days of no speaking, no reading, no writing, no eye contact, no exercise, and sitting Vipassana practice in the meditation hall for around ten hours a day, starting at 4:00 a.m.
If Sarah was nervous, she didn’t show it. She wore a fluorescent Hawaiian jumpsuit, very short, and she appeared to be fizzing with excitement. Within half an hour she’d bounced through the shy fidgety crowd and introduced herself to everyone, leaving laughter, furrowed eyebrows, and darting glances in her wake. Sarah, as everyone soon heard, was anartiste, an actress. She’d played minor roles in a few minor movies, and received some minor awards—here, right here, see? And look—she swiped—here was another photo of her at the award ceremony, and here—look! look!– another one, in a different dress. She had a beautiful daughter who was twenty, who was an actress also—see? Sarah’s day job was proprietor and clinician of a Botox clinic. COME! She grasped the arm of her startled interlocutor. Oh, you really must come, come and stay in her home! She would cook for you! She would give you Botox treatment, no charge, not for such a friend as you. She beamed with the earnest warmth of a doting aunt and the appraising eye of a fond expert. She could also do something with your hair and make-up, too, she added warmly. Sarah did not seem particularly nonplussed by the fact that none of the other women, from the strait-laced accountants to the cheesecloth-bodiced seekers, appeared to be wearing, or exhibiting any interest in, makeup. Nor did she seem to notice the startled quality of the stuttered thanks and smiling murmurs of Oh, Uh, Maybe. She just bounced off to the next person and repeated her kind offers of hospitality and free Botox. She was a fountain of beneficent enthusiasm.
That first evening, when the retreat coordinators reviewed the schedule and reminded us all of the 4 a.m. start, Sarah gasped loudly and sat bolt upright. Her shock was not affected; it seems she genuinely hadn’t thought to check the program of this funny place, before signing up. This amazed me. It filled me with something like awe, given the hours I’d spent scowling cynically at my laptop, making absolutely certain this wasn’t some kind of weird, woowoo cult that would make me wear flowers in my hair or flop around on the floor to the beat of amateur bongo drums. I’d vetted the philosophy and reputation of the practice and the facility for weeks before deciding. Sarah, it seemed, had just rocked up.
She was there at 3:55 the next morning, pacing silently in the cold and dark in front of the meditation hall. She was there, on her cushion, every single morning, by 4:00. She was there even on mornings when a good deal of the surrounding cushions were empty; when sleep had won out against the bristling self-serious determination of many of her more somber retreat companions.
Sarah never spoke a word in the meditation hall. She belched. She belched noisily, pleasantly, and un-self-consciously. She was several cushion places and one row behind me, and I could hear her exhale contentedly after each burp. I bit my cheeks, trying not to laugh.
Like all of us, Sarah shuffled. We could all hear our companions’ shuffling, in the sitting hall; the quick shift of a painful knee, the discreet stretch of an ankle on fire, or the muffled re-fluffing of cushions. We all experimented with the cushions in those first few days, apparently reasoning that if we got the configuration just right, we’d be able to avoid the pain of sitting motionless for hours at a time. We took another, and yet another, cushion from the rack before each sitting. We built clever cushion ziggurats to perch on, certain we could avoid discomfort if only we kept experimenting. After a few days, most of us finally realised the futility of this; and that there was a path through the pain, to the other side of it, that was far more interesting than our squirmy, fruitless attempts to avoid it. But Sarah didn’t bother with cushion configurations for a straight-back sitting posture. By the end of the first morning, she chose a back-support chair, oblivious to the nonsensical imaginary stigma of weakness the rest of us had subconsciously assigned to that humiliating crutch, as we eyed it ruefully beside the cushion rack.
The days passed. Soon, we shuffled less. Then, we barely noticed even the silence of the still, quiet crowd, as all of us individually sank deeper into the fascinating experience that is an intensive Vipassana retreat.
~
On the tenth day, the final morning session came to a close, and several dozen pairs of eyes opened slowly and serenely inside the hall. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who felt I’d just barely scratched the surface. I spoke to several people later who agreed that by the end of Day One, they were mortified by the torturous stretch of time ahead; and by the end of Day Nine, they desperately wanted to stay another week. It’s difficult to describe the tangible quality of the joy and tranquillity the teacher guides you into over those ten silent days, and difficult to explain what you learn about your own mind and body. It was utterly unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and as a sat there in the hall, my eyes slowly becoming accustomed to the light again, I felt semi-intoxicated. The breakfast bell sounded, peaceful faces smiled all around, arms stretched, and necks slowly craned. From the row behind came a loud, blunt, holler:
“SO! Uh . . . can we talk yet?”
We were indeed permitted to talk in those last few hours, and the atmosphere that day was one of surreal communal elation. Strangers wandered over to a random table; the seated company warmly welcomed them; everyone inquired with warm interest as to who their companions were, what in their lives had brought them to this place, how they felt now that it was over, what they hoped to carry away from such an intense experience. Our faces glowed and our eyes shone, giddy and brimming with metta.
Sarah, too, was thrilled to be able to commune verbally again, although she didn’t seem much interesting in discussing the previous days. Within a few minutes, her conversation had returned to the appearance of the other female attendees, to enthusiastic invitations to come and stay at her house and get free Botox, to commentary on more photographs of her in evening dress at the award ceremony. She darted and flitted around, but now lingered—I noticed—a little more closely to those who seemed more kindly disposed to her. Some people were finding it difficult to hide an awkward desire to—kindly, smilingly—put some distance between themselves and Sarah.
Her conversation was mostly cheerful and bubbly, but some of it was genuinely disconcerting. She held her phone aloft for the benefit of the others at thetable—wanna see a picture of my BOYFRIEND? Haha! Just kidding. Oh my god, oh my god. She swiped, and a ridiculously tense-looking muscular young man appeared in a variety of selfie poses. Sarah dissolved into raucous giggles. My boyfriend! My boyfriend!
Some people pressed their lips into a gentle smile, gave her a warm nod, then turned back to their conversation. Others made a cheerful rejoinder, patted her shoulder, then edged away. One or two of the younger ones simply stared at her, genuinely amazed. And it was a little surreal. Sarah was, it must be said, a fifty-five-year-old woman whose conversation skills in many ways had not developed beyond those of an adolescent. She squealed and clutched your arm, giggling over the kind of things very young girls giggled over. Her seeming indifference to the profoundly intense experience she’d just undergone was absolutely bizarre. Seated amongst a cluster of women talking intensely about their sittings in the hall, I heard Sarah blurt out unselfconsciously that she’d mainly come to lose weight. A stunned silence followed. Oh, sure! she beamed. Locked into a rigid retreat schedule where you weren’t allowed off the grounds, and only served two vegetarian meals a day—what better way to shed a few pounds? Sarah was perfectly serious. The group dissolved in kindly, stupefied laughter. Really? Oh yeah, she shrugged. Sarah had never missed a sitting; she’d practiced all those long, long hours, felt her spine and all her joints burn and ache with pain, listened to the madman ravings of her mind, and passed through to the other side of the gruelling experience, just like the rest of us. And all to lose a few pounds. I watched one young woman—dressed in a scarlet satin number reminiscent in design of Princess Jasmine’s outfit in Disney’s Aladdin, and covered in Buddha-themed tattoos—as her jaw dropped open.
Soon Sarah was enthusiastically soliciting numbers for a WhatsApp group: so that everyone could stay in touch! All friends together. Given that we were all, essentially, strangers and had only really spoken to each for the last hour or so, she was met with more surprise than enthusiasm. Some people froze, when she handed them her phone to enter their contact details. Others, after only an imperceptible pause, shared their contact, thanking her warmly for considering them. Some stuttered apologies: they didn’t have WhatsApp . . . no, nor email either, they were not really email people. I watched people tactfully duck and dart around the dining room to avoid her.
It was the group photo that Sarah insistently arranged, on the stairs in front of the meditation hall, that proved the final straw. Ok! she boomed to the tightly packed group. Now, everyone, smile for the camera! She handed her phone to the server, then bolted back to the front row and spread out peace sign fingers wide beneath a cheesy grin. Again, again, another photo! The young woman in the Princess Jasmine suit with the buddha tattoos groaned audibly.
Ok, ok, one more! Sarah shouted up at us.
Now:
Everyone say:
ANI-CHE!
The Jasmine-suit woman hissed loud enough for the whole company to hear: this is embarrassing.
And I completely fell apart.
I never got a copy of that photo. The truth is—and I am not proud of this—that I was one of those that smiled and stammered something about not actually possessing any contact details, the automatic reaction of most introverts, when a stranger solicits phone numbers. So, I never made it into the WhatsApp group. But I’m pretty sure I know what the photo looks like. It looks like a group of people pressed tight into a stairwell, wearing facial expressions ranging from tranquil to perplexed to baffled and dread-filled. I’m pretty sure the Jasmine-suit woman is clenching her teeth. I recall a handful of kindly quiet older ladies whom I’m certain are wearing warm, loving smiles. One or two of them had even agreeably murmured the sansrkit word ‘Anicca!’ (pronounced ani-che), upon Sarah’s insistence that we all shout it, as if there were nothing odd about randomly substituting the Buddhist term for impermanence, for “CHEEEESE!”. And then there’s me, about row five, my cheeks pink and my mouth idiotically agape. I was shaking with laughter.
I couldn’t stop laughing. Sarah made such perfect fools of us all. We’d all just spent ten days in a state of deep concentration, practicing how to notice and transcend reactions of aversion. And the instant I came out of my bliss trance, here was Sarah, squealing about Botox and fad diets, thrusting grotesque amateur muscle-man photos in my face. The departure of bliss like water down a plug hole, and the resurgence of aversion was so strong I could feel it prickle up my whole body, albeit mingled with a kind of bovine, bleating denial of my own urge to run away from her.
The last day in particular had focussed on metta meditation practice, on cultivating loving-kindness and compassion for all beings. I had stumbled out of the hall feeling such abundant, overwhelming loving-kindness; for my silent companions, for that big yellow spider near the gate so beautiful it brought a tear to your eye, for the swaying bamboo overhead, for All Beings, Everywhere. And after two minutes of being cornered by Sarah, listening to her giggle and shriek about sexting with her make-believe boyfriends, I found that my cheeks were beginning to stiffen and twitch. Sarah simply refused to fit the noble, beautiful, tranquil mold into which I had mentally squished All Beings, Everywhere, in order to love them.
She revealed me—all of us—as so laughable in our earnestness, so adorable in our newfound contemplative gravity. Sarah was so kind, so generous, a woman whose frailties were no different than the rest of ours, and yet who was—in a way—so much more transparent about them. Sarah, it seemed reasonable to conclude, was one of those women who had never, her whole life, been given any respect or any regard, save in relation to how she looked. It was painful to picture her as a little girl, staring wide-eyed all around her, searching for a role model; someone to teach her how to be kind to herself, how to value herself, how to connect with others in a meaningful way. Beneath her raucous overtures was a real longing, the same longing as all of us felt, to connect; please, come to my house. Please, let me call you. I’ll give you things for free. I will feed you.
There are a great many stories in various spiritual traditions about the importance of showing compassion and loving-kindness to all kinds of supposed undesirables: to beggars in the marketplace, to whom you should give your cloak; to adulterers and thieves, the outcast and condemned; to the poor, the incarcerated, the proud, the cruel, and the wicked, for they know not what they do. It seems to me this list of potential compassion targets is some pretty elementary stuff. In my experience, it’s far more difficult to feel loving-kindness for the average stranger loudly crunching an apple in confined public transport space than it is to give alms to the poor and embrace the pitiful and outcast. It’s easier to love the downtrodden than the noisy and flamboyant aspiring pop culture icon. Sarah was not an outcast of the world, she was everything the world had told her to be: an Instagram starlet, a woman so desperate to avoid aging she had devoted her career to artificially forestalling it, a noisy, bubbly, wealthy, body weight-obsessed, Pretty Girl, earnestly enacting a role that masked all the deeper and more vulnerable parts of herself.
Ajahn Chah says: Anything which is troubling you, anything which is irritating you: that is your teacher. Sarah was my teacher. She made me see, for a fleeting instant when that ‘ani-che!’ photograph snapped, all of us within each other, all our states of being morphing and sliding in and out of one another. The vision wasn’t beatific, but it was rather beautiful, in a hilarious kind of way. A lovely human collage of fused-together impermanence. The stricken-faced girl with the spiritual tattoos and the Princess Jasmine outfit: that was me. I hid it better, but there I was, deep inside my innermost thoughts and feelings, cringing and groaning and deeply embarrassed to be posing for the cheesy ‘peace fingers’ retreat photo. The kindly older women who smiled for the camera so as not to hurt Sarah’s feelings, that was me too, in a way; deep, deep down, there was still a part of me able to choose kindness and compassion, despite the bleating protest of my pompous spiritual dignity. And Sarah, the odd one amongst us all, who showered generosity so profusely, whose desire for connection manifested so desperately, who wore her insecurities and misguided longings on her sleeve—that was me, too, although I wore my afflictions on a far less prominent place than my sleeve. That was all of us. People whose lives are all hunky-dory, A-Ok don’t bother signing up for an experience like that.
I’ve forgotten a lot of the recorded teachings from those ten days. I can’t remember much beyond the gist of the teacher’s evening talks. I did not march forth from the retreat and commence a stringent, unshakeable daily two-hour practice at home. I still find time on the cushion every day, sometimes for five minutes sometimes for thirty, sometimes in a state of deep tranquillity, sometimes as skittish and neurotic as a short-changed squirrel. But I’ve never forgotten Sarah, or whatever her name was (I’d know, if was in the WhatsApp group). I’ve never forgotten that mirror she held up to my face, captured in a photograph I’ll probably never see. I’ve never forgotten her inadvertent admonition to remember my own state of being, and the state of all things: all things sacred, and all things silly.
This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.