Work and Play - The Dance of Life

Yesterday morning I found myself laying in agonizing pain on a mattress in a small Kuti in the temple area of Wat Chom Tong outside of Chiang Mai. I was 6 days in on a 21-day meditation retreat, the 3rd one running. As I had reflected, the day before had marked a month of back-to-back meditation retreats, only a few days inbetween for the travel required. I was staring up into the ceiling, barely able to move from the abdominal pain that had been growing for the last month, and realized that this necessarily marked the end. I could continue no further. Pressing on had gone from the stubborn, almost childish, undertaking it had certainly already been for the last week, into a comedical implausability. Yet, despite the pain, this admittance was the hardest part. The sounds of defeat echoed in my ears. Yes, I was looking up at the ceiling, but my mind was going further, gazing upon the heavens. “Okay. You win. I give up.” I almost audibly uttered. With that, I sighed, knowing the struggle was over, and relaxed unto the the mattress, sinking into the ground. A few more hours of actually working up the courage, and waiting for the pain to subside enough to gain the strength for what was next, I contacted my teacher who drove me to the hospital.

I come to reflect upon the attitude which has led me here. The strong feeling of defeat which, still as I’m writing this, is running through my veins. What was the quest? Where does it leave me, now? The foolishness of my undertaking was not a new recognition. Quoting a message I sent the day before starting this retreat:

“I am in agonizing pain. My stomach is.. not good. Yet I will go tomorrow. Out of fear? A misconstrued notion of duty? Pride? Or maybe just because I want to. I don’t know.”

Reading this now, it is laughably prophetic. I knew very well what I was in for. For a week I persisted, meditating inside pain worse than I had ever dared to look at. The day I entered, there was an introduction form that you had to fill out. One of the questions was “Why do you want to practice Vipassana at this time?” and I answered “To attain liberation from suffering.” Although not wrong in itself, the question posited earlier points out the issue. “What was the quest?” All my actions shows me precisely this; I was out on a mission. Although Nirvana itself was never realistically on my mind, the concept of attainments certainly was. Attaining… something. Altered mind-states, peace, serenity, wisdom… something. I was out here, “putting in the work”. Chasing, from time to time, but even when I wasn’t, I was working. The encouragement of my behaviour by the places I went to, and the people I talked to, spurred this on. The first day meeting my teacher here, though, he saw right through it. I had told him I was meeting my family and girlfriend “when I get out of here.” “When you get out?” he laughed. “You say it like we’re forcibly keeping you here and when you finally get out…”. Perhaps he wasn’t so far off.

To understand what this concept of work entails, and what it meant for me personally, I have to go back a bit and reflect on the last couple of months. In September, I met my girlfriend in India. There we decided to travel together to Nepal, to join a hippie-gathering in the mountains and live out of a tent for a month. This trip, and the time we spent there, was by far the hardest in my life. Possibly my most fruitful too, something I’m still realizing, but even now after a month of meditation the hardships I’ve been through doesn’t come close. Finally we were fed up and decided to leave, at that point just a few days before we had meant to anyways. We traveled to Pokhara, a travelers paradise unlike any other. We had planned to stay for a week or two and then move on to hiking in the Himalayas, but in the end we spent 6 weeks there and never made it unto the hiking trails. We were first caught in the, justifiable, reasonings of resting, but it soon crossed over into indulgance, and, once there, snowballed into an avalanche of enjoyment. We had rented an apartment and were getting to know another side of eachother, having spent time together only in harsher environment. Spiritual practice, the reason we had left our respective homes, the reason we had met, the reason we were together, faded more and more into the background. Our neglect took a toll on us both, and personally I never quite recovered as we (temporarily) parted ways and I flew to Thailand with my mind fixated on practice. My commitment was all the more strong with this indulgance still ruminating in the background of my mind. Shame and fear were as much fuel as the more wholesome desires of liberation.

Work and Play: this was the framework in which I found myself, the dichotomy that ruled my life. The absence of one implied the existence of the other. In my eyes: Meditation, or indulgance. Every day we recited: “Effort is the duty of today, even tomorrow death may come.” At every meal we recited: “With wise reflection I eat this food, …, only to maintain this body, to support the Spiritual way of life.” Not meditating meant failure, meant recession, meant, in short, Death. On my doorframe I had hung a note saying “Death awaits” in bold letters. With this amount of pressure, self-imposed or otherwise, what can one really expect in a practice defined by letting go of past and future? In learning to appreciate life itself rather than its contents? Combined with a chronic abdominal sensitivity, well, I found out rather harshly what such a concoction brings.

Now I have to ask myself if this dualism is the only way. I remember reading Marcuse’s work “Eros and Civilization” where I first learned to analyze this, in fact, ruling law of our life. The title gives most of it away. There is work, progress, civilization, and then there is play, enjoyment, pleasure. They are, as a fact, different. Most of the utopian explorations look at achieving the one and minimizing the other: at gaining a strong enough foundation for Eros to take over. Nibbana refers precisely to this. Translated as “cessation”, it’s the overcoming of dualism, of all dichotomies. Meditation is nothing but this notion put into a practice; of letting go of all movements to one side or the other. Perhaps I might take another look at just what this means, at the fundamental level. Perhaps the path I’m walking is rightfully called The Middle Way.