Part Five: Gift of the Scorpion

Ten Days of Hell

Yet another entry in the ongoing saga.  As usual, here's the column as published, then followed by additional notes:

On Day Six, I’ve reached a great pinnacle in my meditation practice.  I experienced ‘dissolution’ whereby my entire body was buzzing with vibration and energy.  I’m proud of myself for coming so far in so little time, and I’m eager to learn the next steps of the practice.  Surely, there are more twists and turns in the slowly unraveling practice that is Vipassana.

Except that it doesn’t work that way.  The practice does not change.  Throughout Days Seven, Eight and Nine, the practice is exactly the same as it’s been: remain aware of sensations on the body and do not react to those sensations.  It’s pretty stark to see how quickly my sad little monkey mind goes from eager pride to boredom and disappointment.  In less than a day, my so-called “accomplishments” are gone and I am left, once again, with nothing but my unhappy self.  I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that Vipassana is about accomplishment, about reaching the next step, about prideful progress.  And this leads me into a painful trap of disappointment and dreadful boredom.

The first three days of this retreat were about pain.  The next three were about discovery and excitement. These three days are by far the longest of the Retreat, and are excruciatingly boring.  I’m so eager to go home that I can’t focus to meditate.  Instead, I daydream about the morning of Day Eleven, when I leave this place.  I dream about having an egg omelet (all the meals are vegetarian here), listening to music again, and hugging my kids.  I fantasize about sleeping in my own bed, and even about going back to work. 

By Day Nine, I am so wrapped up in my fantasies that I don’t really pay attention to what is around me.  I stumble into the Meditation Hall for the first group session of the day after yet again sleeping through the early morning “on your own” meditation session.  I expect to sit there for a full hour without doing Vipassana at all.  As I plop down on my pile of cushions, a small scorpion scurries out from underneath.

I remain relatively calm, but know something must be done. Smaller scorpions are the most poisonous, and I can’t let it sting me or any of the closed-eyed meditators nearby.  But I can’t kill the scorpion (which is what I want to do), because upon arrival at the Retreat we promised to abide by a Code of Conduct – one of the codes is not to kill any living thing.  For what feels like twenty minutes but is only a short time, the Course Manager and I try to lure this scorpion into a cup for removal from the hall.  We get close, then the scorpion jumps away from the cup, and we both leap backwards with fear.  I’m sure we look silly, and I assume everyone thinks we are only battling a harmless cockroach.  I want to call out to all 125 of them, “This is a dangerous deadly scorpion! We are trying to save you from doom!”

Once the scorpion is taken to greener pastures, the session begins.  It takes thirty minutes for the adrenaline rush to wear off, and when it does, I am able to meditate with strong focus.  The daydreams are gone.  I move my attention throughout my body and again find myself experiencing dissolution. 

As the retreat comes to a close, I am thankful for my little scorpion friend.  He was a fairly ordinary scorpion as far as I can tell.  But I know this: Day Nine is the final full day of silence.  By midday on Day Ten, we’ll be able to begin speaking again, and I will leave on the morning of Day Eleven.  It was the scorpion that shook me out of my boredom, frustration and haze, and brought me squarely back into focus so that I could benefit from the last moments of these truly powerful ten days. 

~~~~~

Some follow up notes to this post:

1. This is one of the pitfalls of being around 125 people while in Noble Silence.  You can't tell them about the scorpion you're hunting.  You also can't apologize.  One time I sat down at a table in the dining hall with four other meditators already there, and I bumped into the table, spilling the soup of two of them.  "Oops! I'm sorry" is not the way to handle this.  You can't even make gestures to apologize.  All I could do was grab a bunch of napkins and help clean it up.  

2. The dissolution thing is a topic of much discussion.  After my third retreat, I befriend a man named Mike.  In a conversation after the retreat, he reveals that he didn't experience dissolution at all during the retreat.  But then he got home and two days later, experienced it after a meditation session (not during).  He said that he spoke to another meditator at the retreat who had attended 12 ten-day retreats but had never experienced dissolution.  Clearly, everyone has different experiences in the practice.

3. The Course Manager's name was Yogi.  Seriously.  I never had to think up a nick name for him. 

4. His response when I whispered to him that I had a scorpion under my cushions was the quietest-loudest exclamation "WHAT?!?" ever.  He went and got a cup and tried to hand it to me.  "Will this work to catch him?" he asked.  I nodded yes, but did not take the cup from him.  Sorry, dude, titles like "Manager" have their privileges.