My body is stiffer than a two-by-four in a blizzard. Despite a brief dalliance with yoga, I have hips as creaky as the rusted hinges of a neglected gate, ankles that pop when I flex them, and a thrice-operated-upon knee that’s about as stable as a house of cards hastily erected in the drafty attic of a dilapidated San Francisco guesthouse perched precisely on the San Andreas Fault. Like Dennis Kucinich’s stature or Sarah Palin’s command of the English language, the rigidity of my lower body is a glaring, crippling liability.
And no position (outside the baroque postures of Rodney Yee’s Advanced Yoga instructional video series) poses my balky legs more problems than sitting cross-legged. Good ol’ Indian Style, preferred position of kindergarten story-times and campfire sing-alongs the world over. Second nature for most sitters, and a torturous contortion for Yours Truly.
Scrunching my legs beneath me is like trying to refold a gigantic AAA roadmap: the kind where, baffled, you spread it across the steering wheel and scrutinize the recondite chessboard of creases until the air conditioner blows the thing up into your face and you flap it around your head like a fucking accordion and you’re traveling 97 mph on the wrong side of the highway while being assaulted by a paper pterodactyl, and finally you just wad the map into a ball and shove it in the glove compartment and fishtail back onto your side of the road seconds before you would’ve been pancaked by an 18-wheeler. That’s what trying to sit cross-legged is like for me.
So, one thing I’m decidedly not cut out for is: meditation.
I could’ve predicted this, but confirmation came courtesy of a recent DSIL staff meditation retreat, a three-day process involving lectures from a monk, numerous breaches of Thai etiquette, and so much sitting cross-legged that I feared that my coworkers would have to bear me back to Bangkok on a divan, my legs frozen in permanent pretzel.
***
Most people pursue meditation to heighten spirituality, achieve mental clarity, or score hippie chicks; but the fruit that the Darunsikkhalai School of Innovative Learning apparently expected the retreat to bear were more pragmatic. Our school, you see, is run by ex-businessmen with little background in education. Therefore, when the school’s owner announced the retreat, he did so through a plenitude of charts and graphs dubiously demonstrating that companies used regular meditation to increase worker productivity – and profits. Far from pursuing nirvana, we would be meditating to boost revenue! (Or the educational equivalent: improved standardized test scores, I guess.)
This, to me, seemed somehow inimical to the spirit of meditation… but who was I, an unenlightened Westerner who can’t even sit on the floor for five minutes without setting off fireworks in his patellar meniscus, to pass judgment on what was or was not in keeping with said spirit? So I went.
***
The retreat took place at a hotel. The hotel, inexplicably, was situated at the heart of a gigantic tapioca plantation.
I didn’t know much about tapioca before the retreat (besides that it was the key and titular ingredient in a barely-palatable pudding), and I still don’t. At least I realize now that it comes from umbrella-shaped plants with shiny, yellow-splotched leaves – I’d always imagined tapioca pudding sludge being siphoned out of, like, a peat bog or a tar pit or something.
Who knew?
The plantation was stark: endless rows of churned clay either bristled with scraggly tapioca plants or stood barren, raw and red like the earth’s exposed flesh. Stagnant, murky puddles that you could just tell served as mosquito larvae nurseries dotted the tilled land. The farm was immense, miles in diameter. I abandoned the secret aspirations of escape that I’d been harboring. I had a hard time imagining who the hotel’s clientele was: maybe it typically served as a conference center for meetings of the agrarian minds. The complex itself was nice enough, but if you’ve seen a gated Floridian golf course community, you can imagine: palm trees, spiky grass crawling with red ants, a cloudy little water hazard, cottages with red sloping roofs. The biggest novelty was that the cottages were dubbed “Tapiocasas.”
Forty-two teachers showed up to the first meditation class wearing white shirts and dark slacks, customary meditation attire.* (The white represents purity and cleanliness; needless to say, I spent three days splashing luminous curry broths on myself.) We filed into a frigidly air-conditioned conference room and sat down on blue velvety cushions – forty-one of us immediately and effortlessly assuming proper cross-legged positions, and one lonely dissenter with legs stretched and crossed before him in heedless defiance.
*Besides reasons of symbolism, you also wear white to avoid distracting your fellow meditators. This precept seems reasonable, but uniform whiteness isn’t always a guarantor of non-distraction: one of the instructors, a woman named Ploy, wore a sparkling white shirt with the word Freak printed in huge green letters. This shirt proved an immense diversion, as my flighty mind wasted untold minutes pondering what the illegible fine print below Freak could possibly read. I’m guessing …in the bed. (Incidentally, Ploy’s shirt was the latest example of my favorite phenomenon in this country: Thai people wearing shirts that bear bizarre, perverted, or nonsensical English slogans. I can only wonder if they know what the slogans mean; I usually suspect not. I once traveled with a tour guide whose t-shirt declared, “I’d rather be smorting cocaine off a hooker’s ass.” Yep, smorting. With an M.
***
The monk who led the retreat turned out to be quite the character. Far from the taciturn figures of stolid piety I’d encountered in the past, this man was animated, wise-cracking, and, thanks to years of education in Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, surprisingly Western in speech and attitude. He spoke excellent English, and he delighted in telling stories about his secular past – about his years as a university student hell-bent on pleasing his father, about his time as an economist and banker, and, with the most relish, about some “nighttime outings” that sounded distinctly unmonastic in nature.
But although learning of the monk’s tribulations provided some human-interest value, I was expecting him to deliver the philosophical and spiritual goods. In that regard, I was disappointed. His monologues were familiar and blandly aphoristic: topics included disavowing materialism, self-identification and labeling, and self-acceptance. As Elise cynically but succinctly put it, “If he’d been wearing a suit instead of orange robes, we could’ve been at a self-help seminar.” (Cinematic analogs include Obi Wan-Kenobi and Greg Kinnear's character in Little Miss Sunshine.)
A heretical comparison? Maybe not. (Also, this is actually not the monk who led the retreat... but, you know, all those guys in orange robes...)
Although he framed his talks as ‘inquiries,’ they were almost totally one-sided; instead of sparking dialogue, his questions were leading and mostly rhetorical. (“Should you identify with your Mercedes Benz and your Rolex or with the person inside?”) He had a rubbery, emotive face, and every time he posed a Life Coach-ish query or recited a maxim, his mug stretched into this pop-eyed expression of joyous disbelief, as though he’d inadvertently stumbled upon the secret to lasting happiness and wanted to be sure that we were sharing the revelation. He was congenial enough, and I liked him, but nothing he said came close to rocking my mental boat.
When we weren’t absorbing treacly wisdom, we were meditating. Sitting cross-legged proved as untenable as I expected. Thanks to my intractable hips, I couldn’t sit in true knee-touching-the-floor butterfly posture; my legs kept popping back up like squeezed-and-released bedsprings. And thanks to my balky knees, I couldn’t even maintain that half-assed facsimile of Indian style for more than a few minutes before my tendons began to twang like plucked banjo strings. I was constantly fidgeting, readjusting, complaining. The first time we attempted meditation, I almost instantly attracted a small crowd of instructors and well-wishers offering me advice* about how to sustain a proper meditative posture, their frustration deepening as I failed to heed their suggestions: “Relax your hips… Breathe deeply…. Not that deeply… Okay, now a little more deeply… Straighten your back… Don’t be rigid… Why don’t you just breathe normally?” Through it all, I was in orthopedic agony, pain that proved incompatible with maintaining proper breathing rates.
*I knew I could count on the monk for a meaningless shibboleth or two, and he didn’t disappoint. His words of wisdom: “Instead of thinking about what the pain should be, or what you want the pain to be, or what you hope the pain to be, accept the pain for what it is.” Cue eyes widening, brows rising, toothy grin broadening as though he’d just given me the formula for turning lima beans into M&Ms.
Now, among the first culture mores you learn upon arriving in Thailand is that one should never, ever, under any circumstances, point one’s foot at another human being. I don’t know why, exactly, but doing so is gravely disrespectful, an act of appalling insolence and insult that only a truly uncouth, ill-mannered lout would ever be thoughtless and/or malicious enough to perpetrate.
Of course, every time I crossed and uncrossed and recrossed my legs in desperate search of a comfortable position, I was inadvertently pointing my bare, calloused, broken-toenailed, size-15 dogs directly at the monk.
This faux pas was brought to my attention by the audible gasp that escaped from my Thai co-teachers whenever I twitched, the kind of not-quite-stifled exhalation of shocked embarrassment that was probably breathed by millions of puritans during Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. I was, it seemed, bringing deep dishonor to DSIL whenever I moved a muscle. Eventually I was pointedly asked to sit elsewhere, so that my enormous feet would direct their toxic insults away from the holy guy.* The ignominy!
*While the Thai teachers were stunned, appalled, etc., I’d like to point out that the monk didn’t seem to notice that I was dissing him; or if he noticed, didn’t give a shit. Or at least his saccharine patter wasn’t affected. Which, I mean, good for him.
***
Even in the best of times, I might not have been able to sustain three days of meditation. But Bangkok, as any person who’s lately picked up a newspaper knows, is not enduring the best of times.
Wednesday, May 19 was the first day of the meditation retreat, and the climactic day of Thailand’s ongoing political conflict. The Thai military finally followed through on its threats of a crackdown, invading Ratchaprasong Square, where the Red Shirt protestors had amassed. Although the Red leaders surrendered, the radical Red fringe went nuts, burning thirty-six buildings in downtown Bangkok, including the nation’s largest shopping mall, before finally being quelled. (Weirdly, a lot of the most violent rebels weren’t Red Shirts at all, but Black Shirts – the term for politically unaffiliated rabble-rousers who seemed to exploit the breakdown of law in Bangkok as an opportunity to act out anarchical fantasies.)
A Thai soldier subdues a Red Shirt.
Although the government suppressed the protesters within 24 hours, we had little way of knowing what was happening in Bangkok during the isolation of the retreat. We clustered around the TVs in our hotel rooms, trying to parse scraps of news from the disquieting cycle of images, most of them involving some edifice being swallowed by flames – or if not that, then Red Shirts operating grenade launchers; or casualties, perhaps corpses, being toted away on stretchers; etc…
Then, sometime Wednesday afternoon, most of the TV stations mysteriously malfunctioned: live feeds were replaced by test patterns and the national anthem on repeat. Classic disaster movie cliché. We imagined the worst: Bangkok razed, thousands dead, enraged and machine-gun-toting rebels tearing through the streets. Many of my co-teachers were unable to contact their friends and family. I began to plot my escape from Thailand. Only later did we learn that, though the TV stations’ power sources had been destroyed, most of Bangkok was still intact, and that the uprising had effectively been put down – for now, at least*.
*I’m still trying to decide how to feel about the Red Shirts being so thoroughly vanquished. Their cause isn’t unjust, and the government committed some real atrocities during the standoff, often using excessive force. But the Red Shirts’ methods were equally barbaric, if not more so, and I never quite cottoned to rooting for terrorists. And then there’s the fact that the end of the protests means a dramatically increased quality of life for moi, in that I can now go almost fearlessly into downtown Bangkok again. I’m glad, selfishly, to see it end, but I also hope that the Reds someday accomplish their aims – next time, non-violently.
Anyway, in the middle of this chaos and uncertainty, we were whisked away from our TVs by the unyielding demands of the retreat’s schedule. If you can clear your mind when your own city is in flames, you’re made of sterner mental mettle than I am. I struggled to forget the conflict raging just a few hours from our bucolic tapioca paradise, and just a few miles from my apartment. Focusing on the synchronized movements of my breath and navel proved beyond the powers of my distractible mind. To my surprise, though, most of my Thai co-teachers seemed remarkably sanguine (at least compared to us distressed English teachers). Either they knew something we didn’t, or they felt the numb faith in Bangkok’s ultimate invincibility that comes with having lived safely in a place for a long time. (Think: the people who stayed in their homes on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens.)
Regardless, the next couple of days vindicated the Thai teachers’ nonchalance, as the fighting died down and the TV networks were resuscitated. Even so, my concentration never recovered.
***
What with the formulaic talks and the pain of meditation, I don’t think I got a whole lot out of the retreat (aside, that is, from a renewed appreciation for tapioca). There were times when I thought I was maybe on the verge of a breakthrough, when I nearly managed to tune out all external stimuli and extraneous thoughts, when I was conscious of the pain in my legs without allowing my mind to be its captive. I think I came to understand why meditation is valuable for other people*.
*I suspect that sitting meditation may never be for me, but I also maintain that physical activities can be equally meditative: I’ve always found that a special focus comes over me while running or biking; I grow attentive to the movements of my body to the exclusion of all other thoughts, and often – especially while biking – find myself miles from my place of origin without realizing that any time had elapsed. That, to me, seems like the kind of utter mindfulness (manifesting itself as absent-mindedness) that seated meditation is aiming for.
I probably 'meditated' more successfully in Glacier National Park last summer than I did at any point during the retreat.
Mostly, though, I felt restless, and my leg muscles tighter than tennis racquet catgut, and by the third day the weather was too nice and my mind too errant to stay seated in a small, crowded, air-conditioned room, and Elise and I wound up wandering the grounds amongst the Tapiocasas. And that, I think the monk would’ve said (if he hadn’t been sleeping serenely in his armchair), was okay too.
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