Page 45 of Status Undefined
“Um, okay I think. A bit nervous.”
“Well, that’s natural. But you don’t need to be. You don’t have to prove anything here. Just being here is enough.”
For someone I’d already decided was a spiritual nutcase, shesounded very down to earth. She brought me some indemnity forms to sign and explained the process.
“You leave all your electronics with us. Did you let people know you would be unreachable for a few days?”
“Uh, yes.” Truth be told, I’d posted it on Instagram, so I assumed they knew. I’d gotten tons of questions about where I was going but I decided I’d only share the name of the place after I left – if it was worth a good review.
“Great! You’re not to bring in any food, books, writing materials or anything else that could distract you from the here-and-now. If you have anything like that, this is where you leave it.”
I’d known all this ahead of time, so I told her I had nothing other than my phone. I wondered if they were going to search my backpack. I’d stashed a few energy bars in it; I can’t sleep if I’m hungry. There were supposed to be three meals a day, but the last one was at five in the afternoon – fruit – and bedtime was at nine. No way I’d survive that.
“Do you have any questions?”
“Yes, can I pay for a private room?”
She smiled pleasantly but was clearly trying to suppress a laugh.
“We don’t have the resources to offer private rooms. We’re supported by donations only and we don’t treat people differently based on the amount they donate. If you do want to donate, there’ll be a place to do that on the last day.”
She stood and led me to a large hall. Twenty other guys were there, talking quietly among themselves. To my relief, they didn’t all look like hippies. There were also two instructors in the room, and they huddled around Mia.
“Okay. It looks like everyone’s here, so I’m going to give you a few more rules. It’s important to understand that in the next few days you’ll be diving deep into your personal journeys to learn about human nature, independently of what society hastaught you. We won’t be lecturing you or trying to persuade you of any philosophy. We won’t ask you to follow a particular religion. All you will learn here will emanate from your personal, introspective experience. We’re only here to guide you and answer questions. So, from now until the tenth day, you will not speak to one another. We also recommend avoiding hand signals or eye contact. If you want to ask the monk questions, ask us and we will arrange a time for you to do that. We strongly advise against leaving in the middle of the process. Doing so can have serious spiritual consequences. After you’re assigned to your rooms, the monk will speak with you in the meditation hall and then you’ll go back to your rooms to sleep. For those of you who were concerned about not waking up without an alarm clock – we will wake you with a gong at 4:45 a.m.”
She read the room assignments – four beds to a room. We left the hall and I saw I’d been right. The Koh Phangan sea was visible on the other side. They had clearly chosen the location because of its natural beauty and serenity. The rooms were wooden cabins divided into sections to minimize interaction among us. Fifteen minutes later, a gong sounded, and we made our way to the meditation hall. I wished I had a buddy to share a laugh with about this bizarre situation. The surreal picture of 20 guys walking quietly to hear the wisdom of a monk was shareable material. But my mood changed fast, and nothing seemed funny anymore.
January 25
“Nothing is constant. Everything changes. Change is eternal. We are changing all the time. It’s a fact. Suffering comes when we do not accept this basic fact. We are attached to something or someone, we long for them, and then they change. We define ourselves as x or y, and we change – and are no longer x or y. The certain outcome is suffering. Our souls are trapped in the past, but the only time that exists is now, the present.”
The monk droned on every evening. And each time, I thought of what Amit had said – it seemed like a hundred years ago – “It’s something I’ve noticed with my clients. People hate feeling stuck in one situation when they’ve changed. Their external and internal realities aren’t in sync.”
And that’s what I’d experienced over the past few days. Memories. Endless memories. Painful, agonizing memories that were killing me on the inside. Memories I was sure I had left behind surfaced over and over. I tried to accept them, like the monk told us to, but it was too much. If it wasn’t memories, it was thoughts. What could I have done differently? What comes next? And after the thoughts came the hallucinations – as if my mind had to feed me something so I didn’t get bored. The experience ate at me. I suffered every minute of it. The image of Amit came to my mind so often. His whiskers, dimples, brown eyes, glasses, charming smile, smooth skin and small, slender body that looked like it could be knocked down with a feather. It hurt to know I was the one who’d landed a heavy blow. I screamed in pain that seemed physical. I woke terrified by nightmares. But no one spoke to me. No one looked at me. And, outside, I couldn’t relate to anything – the silence and calm, nature and sea were all alien to me, not connected to the awful world inside my head. I tried my best to practice meditation, but my mind wandered constantly – memories and hallucinations.I promised myself that if I stuck it out it would get better every day. Maybe after such concentrated suffering I would feel purified, cleansed of all the poison in my soul, the poison that made me hate myself every day for what I had done, and what I had not done.
Upon waking on the fifth morning of silence I tried to be optimistic. I hoped I’d processed all the bad memories and that it would be easier from then on. I was proud of my positive attitude. I knew that at the end of the day I could say I’d made it halfway through. But I wasn’t a child. Bad memories I had forgotten had not disappeared, they were just hiding behind more recent ones. I scanned my body during mediation, examining every inch, trying to sense my skin. I discovered, sadly, that even the skin remembers, and has bad memories that have never gone away.
I remembered the night Amit and I danced naked in his apartment. It was a wonderful memory. But there was a moment when my body pulled back from his touch. I knew it wasn’t because of him, and I hoped he wouldn’t think it was. Some wounds are buried deep within us. We try not to recall those memories. We tell ourselves it’s not important; ask: what’s the point? The truth is we usually suppress memories that are so profoundly painful. Sometimes, for a fleeting moment, we realize they’re there, we’re not surprised, and then we go about our business as if nothing happened. But I was meditating and there was no way to escape that memory from when I was thirteen. I remember being excited about my first visit to themikvehafter my bar mitzvah. I always loved new experiences and going to the ritual baths – forbidden to children – was like a dream come true. The rabbi greeted me at the entrance to the building. I headed for the water, but he said he had to undress me before I went in. Of course I agreed and then we both got into the cool water. It felt wonderful, but then I noticed that the rabbiwas close to my body. I thought it was part of the ceremony, that he was guiding me, that it was supposed to be like that. But then I saw him touching himself and touching me down there and I didn’t know what to think. He went into a weird trance and didn’t answer my questions. I don’t remember how long we were there, or exactly what happened. Part of the memory just vanished, but before we left he told me to keep what had happened between him, me, and God. That it was an importantmitzvah. I believed it was normal – no one had told me about it so it must be a secret that everyone kept.
I never went back to the mikveh again. That first experience was more than enough. But a year or two later the rumors started. Nobody dared admit it had happened to them personally – it was always to someone else. I started to understand that what had happened to me in the mikveh was not meant to happen. That was when I lost my respect for religion. I did what I was supposed to, of course, but I didn’t feel the actions had any meaning. When I was 16, my parents invited that same rabbi for a Shabbat meal. I was repulsed by him and didn’t want him in our house, so I told my parents about what had happened at the mikveh three years earlier. They didn’t believe me – to put it mildly. They told me I was insulting a decent, important man in the community; that I had been a child back then and had either imagined or misunderstood the events. A chasm opened in me as they spoke; I felt like the loneliest person in the world. No one would ever understand me, believe me. Maybe rightly so.
The awful thing was, I wanted to believe them. The memory got shoved aside and overshadowed by other memories. But it wasn’t really. It was always there – burned into my skin. It was there when I avoided talking to my parents about my problems and just ran away. It was there when I didn’t want to come out to them or hear what they had to say about it, even from thousandsof miles away. It was there that night with Amit, and it was there when I couldn’t say yes when he asked me to go to New York with him. Amit once asked me what my story was. I told him I didn’t have one, but maybe he knew before I did.
Gong! Break time.
Shit, I’d forgotten to even try and meditate.
January 26
“Some of you can already feel it on your skin, how sensations come and go, never lingering…” It was the end of the sixth day and I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to listen to him anymore, and another day of memories and thoughts would send me over the edge. I stood up and walked out. That may have been the first time they looked at me. I went to get my bag from the room and headed for reception.
“Hi, can I have my phone please,” I asked smiling Mia.
“What happened?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore. Where’s my phone?”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s really important that you stay to the end because…”
