Still­ness comes to the mind

Yes­ter­day, I went to Bud­dha and the Body retreat orga­nized by Jonathan Foust from the Insight Med­i­ta­tion Com­mu­nity of Wash­ing­ton (IMCW) in a rented base­ment of a North­ern Vir­ginia church. Life has been so hec­tic over the past six-​​nine months, I’ve stopped attend­ing the Wednes­day evening IMCW ses­sion with Tara Brach, and not been able to find a more con­ve­nient time slot to engage in group med­i­ta­tion. I fig­ured that I could cram my med­i­ta­tion require­ment into an inten­sive day-​​long ses­sion (9:30-5:00, with sev­eral breaks).

What I did not count on was the phys­i­cal beat­ing that my body would take from being seated in easy pose for much of the day. Because my hips have opened up over the past year, I decided to bring my zafu cush­ion and sit on a yoga mat, rather than be a wimp still­ing on a chair. What was decep­tive was that I felt extremely com­fort­able seated in easy pose, propped up on a folded blan­ket and my cush­ion, and could keep my spine poised ver­ti­cally over my hips with ease. Both legs (thighs, knees and calves) were rest­ing on the ground (my right left tends to rise). But I did not real­ize how gru­el­ing the expe­ri­ence would be. My mus­cles were not used to sus­tain­ing the pose for hour after hour (with breaks, of course), espe­cially in the deep­est reaches of my core mus­cles. In pre­vi­ous extended ses­sions of easy pose,  I found myself slump­ing over and tilt­ing the hips back, being unable to hold the arch in the small of my back, which was a clear alert to shift to a dif­fer­ent pos­ture or seat­ing arrangement.

All this fatigue crept up on me. After the lunch break, I noticed that it became harder and harder to keep my mind focused on med­i­ta­tion. I was so numb and fatigued that I could not iden­tify where the prob­lem was. Even when we were lay­ing down, I could not keep my mind on tar­get. I felt as if I was just skim­ming over the sur­face of my mind. If there had been symp­toms, such as leg cramps or going to sleep, I could have iden­ti­fied it and changed my sit­ting posture.

After the retreat fin­ished, I took the long Metro ride home from Ball­ston, Vir­ginia. It seemed to take ages (more like 90 min­utes, with a trans­fer at Metro Cen­ter, thanks to the slower Sat­ur­day train sched­ule). I had din­ner, took the dogs for a walk, and then took stock of my body: I real­ized that I was extremely exhausted, even though I did not have any sore mus­cles,. I hit the bed and did not regain con­scious­ness until 7:00 the next morn­ing. Once I was back on my feet, I could tell that my hips and asso­ci­ated mus­cles had the post-​​exertion ache of being pushed beyond stan­dard limits.

Of course, I should really be talk­ing about Jonathan Foust’s dynamic med­i­ta­tion method and the impact of the med­i­ta­tion itself, but it will have to come in another entry.