Inner Peace

Shanti was sitting cross-legged on a wall. She had just finished a 1-hour period of meditation, and her legs had completely gone to sleep. She carefully moved her feet, one at a time, down to the ground, and sat there, readjusting to the world. 

Everything looked different. Before sitting down to meditate, she hadn’t actually been looking. Now, because she had un-hooked her thinking mind, she could take in her surroundings all at once. The flowers were brighter. A cat moved cautiously behind the bushes, stalking its prey. She caught its movement in the corner of her eye.

Despite the miraculous effects of this practice, there was something puzzling Shanti. She could not understand the need for the rule about strict silence in the retreat centre. Even worse than that, they were not allowed to make eye contact with anyone. She’d managed 4 days out of her 9 day retreat so far. And the meditation itself was lovely. But her heart ached for some human contact. Not sex, not love, maybe not even talking - just to sit with and be with another human felt like an incredible luxury. It didn’t make sense to deprive herself of it, and she spent a lot of time in her head making up angry tirades to explain to the retreat leaders why she disagreed with their principles.

As she knew she was supposed to be meditating, she then felt guilty about the angry tirades and criticised herself instead.

Self-criticism was one of her strong suits - she had inherited it from her mom. Shanti’s mom, Pia, was always niggling at Shanti for poor posture, poor performance in school, poor violin practice: a classic Asian-American tiger mom. Which meant Shanti now had a little tiger mom inside her, constantly scratching at her for everything she did wrong. 

After her legs had come back to life (she had pins and needles while the circulation returned), she carefully stood up and started her timer again, this time for a walking meditation. She chose to follow the path between the riotous flowerbeds up towards the pagoda which housed the temple bell.

One foot down, other heel up.

Glide foot through the air, place heel down.

Breathing, gliding sandaled feet, transferring weight. Feeling into the ground.

Shanti found that the rhythm of the walking eased her mind, and instead of battling she was able to go with the flow.

She knew she should have her eyes half-lowered, but up ahead she sensed someone coming. Like the cat, it triggered a shift in her awareness when she saw another living being. It was the abbot of the monastery himself. She felt self-consciousness immediately creep in. 

The Abbot was the one person she had spoken to since the official start of the nine-day intensive. Each day she would come to report how her meditation had been going, and he gave her another technique to try. This meant that she naturally over-focused on impressing him, as he was the only social opportunity in her calendar.

Was she moving her feet in a mindful way?

Would the abbot think she was a specially adept meditator and give her some kind of extra blessing? 

She scolded herself for the egoic thoughts as she stepped forwards. Each movement became painfully difficult as she judged it harshly, then well, then harshly again.

On her right, someone else was moving. Fast, actually running towards the abbot. A young Westerner, over two metres in height, wearing shorts and a white tee shirt, and actually sprinting.  

Shanti stopped walking and just looked on in horror as the Westerner rugby-tackled the abbot and brought him to the ground.

“You fraud,” she heard him shout. “You total asshole…” His rough American voice rang out, breaking the temple’s silence.

The poor abbot, old and corpulent, was trying to free himself from the choke hold that the kid had on him. Shanti pulled up her skirt and sprinted towards them. 

It felt so good to run, instead of the painstakingly careful steps. Her body flew.

She arrived, panting, to the scene, and pushed the guy in the arm. He barely noticed; he was practically foaming at the mouth. 

She would have to speak. She hoped the abbot wouldn’t rebuke her.

“Hey you! Westerner! Get off him!”

She pushed harder into the man’s muscled flesh, then dug her nails into his shoulder and pulled him away. Eventually the guy released his grip on the abbot.

Shanti sat on her butt on the ground, temporarily disoriented.

The abbot rose to his feet with some difficulty and dusted himself down.

There was a general state of alarm in the surroundings; monks started to approach from several directions.

It was absolutely forbidden for her to have any contact with the opposite sex at the monastery. 

Would she be kicked out?

Yet she still felt a glow in her hands from where she had touched the Westerner. She looked up at him. He was trying to get a grip on himself, but he was boiling with rage. Her hands burned.

“These stupid rules,” he said. “They’re designed to send us crazy.”

Suddenly they caught each other’s eye. It was directly against the rules. Even because it was against the rules, it felt good to do that. They held each other’s gaze right under the nose of the Abbot, and they didn’t care because they both needed the connection so badly. Her chest released a huge knot of tension and she let out a long exhale. The young man was starting to calm down. His eyes were bright blue, and his face was broad and sunburned.

She smiled at him, but she also smiled for herself. She felt compassion for his stressed-out condition, obviously, but at the same time she wanted to sing with joy. It felt so good to know she wasn’t the only one going crazy in this place! The whole time, the whole of the past four long, long days, she had felt like screaming at herself as everyone else looked so calm, so concentrated. Maybe they weren’t as perfect as they looked.

Somebody had cracked. And it wasn’t her.

The abbot beckoned the young man to come with him. Two attendants arrived at a fast walking pace and accompanied them. Presumably the young man was going to leave, in disgrace. Or perhaps he would stay, brought to some new level of enlightenment by his breakdown. She hoped he’d stay. She would catch his eye again, she felt sure.

She didn’t see him after that.

In her next meeting with the Abbot, he gave her a small bowl of fruit, explaining that it was okay to break the rules in an emergency, then he thanked her for rescuing him from his assailant. Shanti felt honoured.

That one moment of frantic movement gave her strength. She was able to complete the rest of the nine days without difficulty. She wondered a little if she’d cheated: without that buzz of human contact on her skin, that surge of adrenaline when she realised she would have to intervene, the extra attention, she wouldn’t have been able to do it. The scene played again and again on loop in her mind over the remaining days.

The meditation continued to be beautiful. She enjoyed the flowers. Her mind and body felt safe. The silence felt protective, even vital.

Would she try the retreat again some time? Maybe not. She was so proud of herself for having gotten to the end.