Girl Most Likely To (18 page)

She bent down, lifted my backpack and held it out to me. “You let me deal with them.”

As it turned out, they had already managed to start dealing with themselves. I found the following note tucked inside my backpack somewhere high above the clouds a few hours later.

“O
bserve
your sensations. Do not react to them.”

The meditation leader’s voice came from every direction as I struggled to sit perfectly still. My right leg had fallen asleep, my back was beginning to ache and the wool blanket in which I was wrapped mercilessly tickled my left cheek. And keeping my eyes shut for any length of time was driving me insane.

Serious meditation is about as exciting as an audit, and about as easy as trying to convince your hair not to grow. But in the best of cases, it can be emotional detox. It requires patience, seclusion and a complete disinterest in returning to your actual life; and at times it felt like forcing nails down the chalkboards inside my mind. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I desperately feared returning to New York without anything to show for it, I probably would have crawled out of a window by the end of the first night. Sitting still had never been my forte.

“Whenever you find your mind wandering into the troubles of the external world, simply bring it back to observations. Be aware of the emotion just as you are aware of the physical sensation. It might be tickling or prickling or hot or cold or itching. It might be anger or regret. Do not be frustrated with your mind. Simply observe your mind’s behavior and laughingly bring it back to the observation of the physical sensations of this moment. Focus on the breath.”

I was sitting myself into a coma in the meditation room of a secluded retreat in Fiji, along with forty-nine other seekers-of-mental-stability, all of whom were clearly better at this than I was. I knew this because, even though I wasn’t supposed to, I kept opening my eyes to check if everyone else’s were closed. They always were. The only person who was having a worse go of it than me had been sobbing for the past twenty minutes. The meditation must have begun to take its effect, since my auditory perception had been sharpened enough for me to deduce, without so much as looking in that direction, that she was seated two rows before me and to my left. Day One was brutal.

Group-directed Vipassana meditation was a centuries-old peace-seeking technique requiring a strict vow of abstinence, silence and vegetarianism, along with the renunciation of reading, writing, television or any other external stimulants for the duration of an eleven-day introductory retreat. The sexes were separated, and encouraged to focus inward. Even eye contact was discouraged. So by the end of Day One all I really knew for sure was that of the two sets of feet sharing my bedroom, neither had apparently ever met with a pedicure.

Day Two wasn’t quite as bad as the first. Still, I wondered how I managed to land in what felt like an adult version of television’s
Brat Camp.
The daily schedule was as follows:

Perhaps I had gotten in over my head. The purpose of Vipassana seemed to be learning how not to react. But my people are from a part of Punjab where even a heartfelt condolence can become animated enough to erupt into a sloppy boxing match. And I was raised in New York, where most of your neighbors would just as soon throw a hockey puck at your head as look at you. I grew up thinking that only druggies and Californians managed to keep a straight face when saying things like
Take it as it comes.
The rest of us reacted to life, and we did it loudly.

Thankfully, by Day Three, it appeared that my mind had called off its rebellion. It had concluded that if it continued to insist on thought, it risked being deprived of meat indefinitely. Instead of spiraling and circling and bumping into one another like many drunken hamsters inhabiting my skull, now my thoughts only interrupted my concentration every once in a while.

I am observing the sensations between the bottom of my nose and the top of my lip. It is cold…now warm…now cold….

I am observing the sensations on my chin, which feels as if it is being tickled by a tiny piece of hair…. Which I am sure is not there…Although it could be the beginnings of a woman-beard. That’s gross. I should look into electrolysis. I wonder if it’s prohibitively expensive. But I must focus. And that’s not relevant, since no one here will look anyone else in the face. Right…There is no such thing as a permanent tickle…. I no longer feel the tickle…. I am observing the lack of a tickling sensation….

What the hell did Cristina’s date mean when he described the mushroom soup as “interesting” at my last dinner party, anyway?
Everyone loves my mushroom soup. I’m so glad she dumped him. Maybe I should try making Lobster Bisque next time. But what am I thinking? I can’t afford to throw a dinner party! I don’t even know if I still have a job! Bad Vina. Bad, bad Vina. I am observing the sensations on my neck….

I am observing the sensations in my right arm, which is warm and surrounded in blankets at my side. I can feel the harsh wool on the skin of my forearm, which is beginning to itch. But there is no such thing as a permanent itch….

Except for the itch I have to make Jon pay for what he did! I should have slapped him in the subway when he said he loved me. I should call Alan and Steve in prison to tell them to go to hell. Why don’t I stand up for myself more? Oh, what the hell am I doing in Fiji with all these freaks? Because I deserve it, that’s why. I’m a mean, judgmental person who jumped to conclusions about Nick and then fled the city without even apologizing. Maybe Prakash is right; maybe Nick’s better off without me. Why would Nick want to hear from me again? And why the hell won’t that woman stop crying! I am observing the sensations in my fingers….

My bra strap burned, my thong was riding up, and once an hour I had to reposition my legs to prevent them from falling off from a lack of blood f low. Despite my growing resentment of the meditators who remained smugly in the same position hour after hour while I struggled, I started to work up my tolerance bit by bit. Maybe competition wasn’t so unhealthy. I had reached the point where I could clear my mind of virtually anything but the sensations of the moment. The discomfort, the exhaustion, and the general lack of stability. For about five minutes at a time.

This was the point I had reached by Day Seven, when I had learned to pay such close attention to my body and to my mind, and become so attuned to the impermanence of my every itch and tingle, that the only thing left was the stillness. And in my observation during the calm, I could see clearly that what festered inside was the truth. The truth was that my inability to be fair to myself was the culprit for all of my problems. The truth was that if I had been honest and more tolerant of myself and my imperfections, I would have questioned things more. I would have noticed things sooner. And I would have sent out signals deterring the world from ever trying to deceive me. My eyes could not be open to the world in any real sense until they were open to what was going on inside me.

Now I was experiencing disappointment, observing regret and feeling the tears streak the curves of my face. There was regret for how I had treated myself. There was sorrow for how far I had let things go. And then, there was an indescribable, sweeping, physical sensation. Beginning on top of my head and showering through me, like so many tiny orbs of energy from nowhere and everywhere. The sensation cascaded warmth in slow motion through the tips of my fingers and the edges of my toes. For the first time in my life, I was able to listen to what was coming from within me because I was truly alone with my self. I recognized her, and I felt nothing but compassion. I apologized to her for everything I failed to protect her from, and I forgave her for every time she managed to let herself down. And then I sat ever so still and I held her while she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

A
t root I think we’re all pretty simple. Men want to be appreciated by someone who tries to accept them. Women want to be adored by someone who tries to understand them. Lacking the patience to wait for people to ask me the right questions as a child, I had developed a habit of overexplaining myself. Not that I was the only one; the average woman uses approximately 5000 words per day in comparison to the average man’s 1500. Therefore, my announcement of plans to take an extended vow of meditative silence met with less than enthusiastic support from my friends and family. Like most people, they assumed that retreats were akin to cults. Normally I would have cared what they thought, but as bad as things were by then, I admitted that when you’re barely hanging on by a thread, you’ll grab for almost anything.

And so it was that after what seemed like a hundred days of battling my mind into submission in a cabin in the hills of mainland Fiji, I was exhausted and refreshed, yet unprepared to return to the sharp lines of my actual life. I had grown comfortable inside my mind, and rather attached to the idea that my judgments were the only ones that mattered. Thankfully, after spending so much time immersed in meditation I also felt resensitized to the world. I’ll admit that at first, even my own speech sounded to me like the road-raging shouts of a teamster who had been cut off on the Queensborough Bridge. Each word was amplified as it bounced off the insides of my skull. But I knew that it was worth it. Sometimes letting go of everything you think you know about yourself is the most premeditated thing you can do.

When our meditation leader lifted our vow of silence on the final morning of the retreat, I met my cabinmates formally for the first time. Valentina was a Spanish woman in her thirties who was pursuing meditation as a vacation from the pressures of raising three children in New Zealand. Lindsay was an English twenty something with blond dreadlocks and a pierced eyebrow who made her living as the voice of corporate voice mail recognition systems, asking people to
Please press “1” for the company directory.
To my surprise, Valentina waved my words away when I tried to introduce myself over the juice and cookies they laid out for us.

“Well, I’ve already
heard
your voice,” she said. “You’ve been talking in your sleep every night!”

This must be how a serious actress feels when her tasteful, artistic nude photos show up on the Internet. I knew there were other people in the room, but I never really thought it would get out. I wanted to apologize profusely and beg her and Lindsay to forgive me. But I also felt a little violated by the fact that they had listened.

“Why didn’t one of you just shake me awake or throw something at me from across the room?”

“Honestly? I was grateful to hear a human voice,” Lindsay explained. “This is the first time I’ve tried anything like this. This meditation stuff, you know? And I was beginning to go batty by the third day. Frankly, I was glad to have the company at night.”

“Yes, yes,” Valentina agreed. “It was very entertaining.”

“Oh, okay.” I forced a smile. “Then I guess, you’re welcome?”

“So…can I ask you a question?” Lindsay leaned in while Valentina nodded at her. I braced myself.

“Who is this Jon, and why did he give you a photograph of his freezer?”

Thoughts that need to be heard will find their way out of a person, spilling and tumbling however clumsily over one another, making a mad dash via enlightened dream-state or drunken circumstance, simply because they’re determined toward some audience they are convinced will be waiting.

“So what brought you here?” asked the housefrau stuck beside me on the floor of the van. “You don’t seem like the usual meditator.”

Shoulder-to-shoulder in the vehicle, whose owner had offered a few of us a lift to the nearest town, I felt we were already too close for comfort. Before I could come up with an appropriately evasive answer, somebody else decided to speak on my behalf.

“I don’t think she’s so unusual,” a man in a windbreaker with a British accent, an uncommon warmth and a head of salt-and-pepper hair replied. “Perhaps there is no such thing as a typical meditator.”

“I guess I’m trying to make sense of some things.” I smiled thankfully at him.

“That’s garbage,” my neighbor concluded. “We’re all here for some reason. Some very specific reason.”

“Oh, you think so?” I turned toward her. “Then what’s your very specific reason?”

“Okay, I’ll tell you.” She took a breath and thought about it for a moment. “I was a perfectly typical housewife, living in the suburbs of New Zealand, and all was well. But when my children left home for college, I found myself feeling terribly lonely. So I started to drink. Too much. And it got to the point where honestly I frightened myself. So I told my sister, and she recommended that I try this, since a friend of hers swore by it. I came to see if it could help me.”

“And has it?” Salt-and-Pepper asked.

“I won’t know until I’m home.” She shrugged. “But I am glad I came.”

“I believe that it will,” Salt-and-Pepper said, smiling graciously at her, “because if it can help me, I’m fairly certain it can help you.”

“Why?” I interjected. “What’s your story?”

He leaned back, and looked out the window at the countryside that was zooming by. “I should be dead. Five years ago my doctors diagnosed me with leukemia. I tried every medical treatment possible, but my body was just ravaged. It seemed like nothing could be done for me. When I was at the end of my rope, I decided to look outside of the hospitals. To open myself up to other kinds of healing. So, one day someone told me about Vipassana, and I figured I had nothing to lose. The doctors said I was too weak to get through it, but I came anyway. I’ve come back for an intensive retreat once a year ever since, and my doctors say I’m a miracle. By all accounts, I should be dead.”

“You can’t honestly believe that this cured your cancer,” the housefrau protested.

“No, no,” he insisted. “But it helps me tremendously, and that’s all I really need to know.”

All eyes were back on me.

“I…I felt like I was drowning,” I blurted out. “Inside my own life. Like I had no voice. And it was all my fault. I couldn’t explain myself to anyone, because I couldn’t even explain myself to myself. So I felt as if I couldn’t even breathe. I needed help getting back to trusting myself. I needed to be alone with myself. I’m from New York, and it’s not easy to do that there. I guessed this was as far away as I could possibly get from my life.”

“What are you?” she asked, then bent forward as if to sniff me. “A writer?”

I laughed. “Not exactly.”

“So what are you gonna do with it?” he asked.

“With what?” I looked up.

“With what you have learned about yourself, little girl.”

I paused. “Breathe, I guess.”

“Are you ready to go back to your life?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” I hugged the backpack in my lap. “At least, not yet.”

“Then where
are
you going?” the woman asked.

“I guess I’ll get to whichever town we’re headed to, and figure it out from there. I still have some time off from work, since most of my colleagues probably think I came out here in search of my marbles.”

“If it’s not entirely out of line—” Salt-and-Pepper lowered his voice “—might I make a suggestion?”

I was wrong, I thought to myself the next morning after hopping out of a seaplane into the knee-deep waters off the coast of the remote island of Kandavu.
This
is as far away as I could have gotten from my life.

Faced with the evidence of a continuing struggle in my psyche, I decided to take more time to tame the cacophony in my mind. Besides, I had yet to attempt the practice of Vipassana outside of the confines of the meditation retreat, and was less than convinced that plunging right back into the chaos of New York City would do me any good. That would be like taking a f light to Vegas right after paying off your credit card debt. So when the Brit explained that fellow retreaters often rented huts on the beach of this tiny Fijian island, a sort of halfway house, to ease their way back into the world, my only question was,
When do we leave?

The Yasawa chain of islands was about as remote as you could get without space travel. And I’m not just talking about the absence of a Starbucks anywhere on the island. There are no paved roads, telephones, locks or indoor plumbing. An “Airport” sign above a shack on the beach marks the location of the lone daily seaplane’s arrival, which carries supplies, food and up to four people who hop into the water and wade to shore while holding their belongings above their heads. To my surprise, once we made it onto the beach, Salt-and-Pepper motioned a friendly salute and started heading off in one direction.

“Where are you going?” I asked, hoisting my soggy backpack up over a shoulder.

“Up there.” He pointed toward the peak of the only mountain on the island. He planned to camp at a clearing on top of it for a few days and enjoy the silence.

“What about me?” I asked his back, which was shrinking into the distance.

I heard the seaplane taking off behind me. Just as Salt-and-Pepper had explained, I was able to rent a thatched-roofed, sand-floored, hammock-furnished hut on the beach from the descendants of tribal cannibals. It came with all the fruit I could eat, and all the privacy I could hope for, so long as I didn’t mind having no one to talk to, and nothing to do. Nothing, that is, for about three days, during which I wandered the beach, slept and meditated, and resented the idea of having to return and explain myself to New York. But one evening, I received an unlikely invitation to join in an evening fireside drinking ritual with the local family from whom I was renting my hut.

Kava is a native intoxicant with roughly the consistency of muddy water, whose popularity is owed entirely to the fact that it numbs the bottom half of a person’s face within minutes of ingestion. It looks like chalk and tastes like water that has been used to rinse out the insides of a cement mixer. I didn’t want to appear rude or ungrateful, and I was well aware of the fact that there were no locks on the door of my hut. Anytime anyone said
Bula,
I gathered, everyone was supposed to chug it down. Then the storytelling began. So I drank the Kava and appreciated the fire, while listening to what I hoped was merely folklore about the cannibalistic prowess of their not-so-distant ancestors. As unappetizing as it was to stare into the concoction contained in the hollowed-out half coconut I held, these drinks were still a welcome departure from the predictability of their rosy-tinted, sugar-rimmed Cosmopolitan cousins in New York. I wanted to stay on that island; reality just seemed like it might have too many sharp edges. Though I resented its power, I secretly feared that the comfortable solitude of that island might be the only thing preventing me from shaving my head and jumping naked off a cliff.

“Well…don’t
you
look like a postcard?” a familiar voice woke me from my nap on the beach the next morning. This was odd. Usually I was completely alone.

I had been sleeping off a sort of hangover from the previous night’s Kava, hoping that the water might wash away some of what I’d taken in. Nearly a month from the day when I scraped myself up off the floor of that stalled elevator, I was baking in the sun on a beach where the only footsteps in the sand were my own. Miles removed from anything reminiscent of civilization, I savored the sun on my eyelids. Using a coconut for a pillow and allowing the warm waters to carry the powdery sand through the gaps in my toes, I was more than slightly jarred by this unexpected intrusion.

“Where did you come from?” I asked, fumbling to balance on one elbow while shading my eyes with the other hand. “I thought I was alone.”

“We’re
all
alone,” Salt-and-Pepper replied with a grin.

“Don’t be smug,” I said. “You surprised me.”

He shrugged.

“You know, I don’t even know your name.” I tilted my head to hide from the sun behind his shadow.

“Does it matter?” He dropped his satchel and took a seat beside me, facing the ocean.

“I guess not,” I replied. “Anyway, how was it up there?”

“You don’t look so good.” He ignored my question, focusing instead on the bags under my eyes. “Are you hung over?”

“No,” I protested while struggling to sit up. “Well, not exactly.”

“Don’t tell me you got into the Kava with the cannibals,” he said, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about our conversation.

“They’re not cannibals. Some of their ancestors were.”

“Oh, okay.” He grinned, clearly amused.

“Did you come over here and intrude on my privacy just to judge me?”

“No, I’m quite sure you do enough of that for yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look, you’re scared. I get that.”

“You’re a nice guy, but you don’t know me.” I looked away.

“I think I do.” He paused to remove and then re-don his baseball cap more than once. “You know, I didn’t always have cancer and study meditation and camp out on mountains in the South Pacific. Let me tell you more about myself.”