Hate Becomes Fear, Becomes Peace: A Vipassana love story

The process that unfolds through isolation and a vigorous meditation schedule is never predictable. I’ve sat numerous occasions in Vipassana before and had a euphoric “I could be a monk forever” kind of experience, ready to jump ship and move to the Himalayas. But I find the lessons learned through my more difficult sittings to be the experiences that represent the moments in my history as a rebirthing. I praise the positive experiences that have changed my life, I bow down to the ones that have humbled my soul and broken me open. To receive these gifts without the gratitude of our darkness as well as our light is to miss the experience all together. This polarity helps us create new beginnings and moves us forward.  Integrate the shadow I discover that two sides of a coin contain the same worth.

On the eve of my second Vipassana after 26 exhausting hours of travel from Los Angeles via Tokyo I had finally arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia. After immigration and haggling a decent taxi wage I met my destination around midnight. Greeted by a friend who courageously decided to join, we discussed our expectations and emotions. I felt confident in my decision to participate in another 10 days of silence & meditation. I deemed it the “perfect" interim between my hectic summer and starting my new residency in Bali. A much needed break from society and distractions, I saw it as a time for contemplation and creation. 

On our way out of Jakarta we pass through the overpopulated city, military cargo trucks, mass construction, all tainted with a dense energy and suffocating smog. It’s not until about an hour into our drive that we begin to make our way into the lush green hills, finding peace, a fresh breath of air, and far less people to be seen. We speed by abandoned resorts, lavish golf courses, shanti towns, and everything in between. It has an eerie, post-dystopian energy and I can’t imagine any point in time where these places were vibrant with laughter and love. As we drive closer to the retreat center I feel a calmness about the space will I share with strangers for the next 12 days.

We arrive at the Vipassana center near Bogor around 7 pm. It’s loud and intense, I look forward to the upcoming silence. I sign in, hand over my passport, my phone, any any other form of potential entertainment and begin to immerse myself in the experience. After observing the spectrum of meditators, I have a chat with a few of the girls, wish my friend good luck and I retreat back to my private room after taking the “noble vow of silence”. I feel a sense of peace and relief that for the next 11 days my sole purpose is to focus on improving my mental-physical-spiritual health.

What began to happen, I hadn’t prepared for. 

Day one. After finally falling asleep on my bed (a sheeted wooden plank with half a blanket), and having adapted to the musty smell of the quarters,  I was abruptly woken at 7:00 am by the course manager who kindly, but intrusively, requested that I go eat. I stumble into the dining hall greeted only by a pathetic spoonful of soggy noodles left on the table. I try to enjoy as I look around and see the fresh fruit on everyones plate that had been claimed minutes before my arrival. My irritation blossomed into frustration and I creep out of the hall after a couple salty bites. I enter my dorm, which had already started to feel like a prison cell, and collapse on the bed. 

Thoughts start racing and I’m already regretting coming back here. What have I done. How am I going to get through this? Its only day one and my mood is fierce. This place is not like the others centers I’ve sat in. The food is terrible, this bed is unbearable, and now I have to go meditate for 10 hours? What? 

The first group mediation begins in the hall and my mind starts to go dark. I feel irritated, angry, still fighting I am there. I don’t understand why anyone would want to be here. How did I find so much bliss during my other vipassannas? I must have remembered it differently, I must have been lying to myself with rose coloured glasses. I try to surrender to the negativity and let whatever comes to mind pass through with no judgment.. but the feelings permeate with every one bad thought multiplying to two bad thoughts, turning to four bad thoughts. I think of how un-zen, and not at all enlightening this feels. It is torture and I want to run away.

I barely get through the first day, I can feel my negative energy oozing all over everyone I pass, like the toxic stench of a garbage truck in a hot & polluted city. I felt it moving out of my body, through the meditation hall and beyond. The worst part was that I didn’t feel guilty at all for what I was feeling, this was the fault of everyone else. This misery was brought on by all of “them”, and I truly believed it. It was the teachers fault, the participants fault for eating all the fruit, the cushions fault for not being comfortable. As a way to disconnect from the misery I was experiencing in the present I began to accumulate the irritating behavior of my closest friends and of society, into a tornado of fury. 

My mind dives into every haunting experience I’ve overcome in my lifetime all at once. I was criticizing everything and everyone else to absolve me of my own inner work. My egocentric mind wanted answers to every bad decision made by humanity. Where are the people who wanted to empathize beyond their own world views, deepen their understanding of their own psyche, to sacrifice convenience for the sake of the environment, and abandon trends to pave their own way?  All I could see through my tunnel vision was the self-destruction and pain of the world, caused by division. All I could feel was the sadness of all of humanity and their masking it with drugs, over-consumption, partying, or simply accepting their numbness. 

I began obsessing over politics, consumerism, the destruction of the environment, all while flaunting my own sacrifices that I make every day so that we as humans have a fighting chance at survival over the next 50 years. How can they not see and hear the screams of our mother earth through her raging storms and violent weather? How can they not care about our oceans and the pollution killing our most vulnerable creatures? My anger began to resolve to sadness and I sat with my pain, earths pain, and the pain of all society. I wanted to give up. Not just give up on the Vipassana, I wanted to give up on humanity. 

The second day was equally as disturbing as the first, but sugar coated by having breakfast and large lunch. I knew stuffing my face would take away much of this obsessive energy to think, but my mind still felt like a prison. I locked eyes with my friend entering the pagoda for evening meditation and they shot a glare back at me. More fear and disappointment caused by my own ignorance. I tried to step into my presence on the pillows as the pain began to transcend from my mind to my body and realizing sitting still in mediation for that many hours became my new found obsession. I am in excruciating pain, my body hurts, and I can’t make it stop. 

I come into the third day sentry to sleeplessness yet simultaneously paralyzed in bed. The only inspiration I had to pull me out was peanut butter and banana. The glorious, salty, and creamy thought of peanut butter. Giant globs cementing my mouth and setting off the endorphins I very much needed. I’ve never dreamt about something so much in my life. It was the silver lining to what I predicted to be another miserable day. 

After the first meditation, I began to feel so much guilt about the last two days of chaotic projection onto others, I deeply began to witness all of my own short comings. I am not perfect. I am not this enlightened spiritual being that my ego will pretend to be. I am flawed, I am human, and I am humbled by my quick realization that my glass figure should not be throwing any stones. I argue with myself back and forth on who I truly am, my continuous behavior doesn’t line up to the high expectations I have set for myself. I want so much yet nothing at all. I feel helpless, hopeless. I begin to cry. 

This wasn’t a therapeutic release, a catharsis, or an epiphany, it was a cry that brought more shame to my being than before. Who am I? What is my purpose? Why do I hide behind this mask of confidence and certainty? What makes me think that the way I live my life is the right way? I don’t know where I am going, I don’t know who I have, I can’t feel any sort of gratitude for a life I have chosen for myself. I don’t even feel connected to the person I look at when I’m looking at myself in the mirror. I am a fraud. 

The sadness slowly progresses to hate and I feel a fire starting to burn my insides. A fire that could rival the suns. A passionate, furious fire that I cannot stop. Just like a moth to a flame I am killing myself without any sense as to how I can gain control. The rolodex of my imperfections begins a rapid swirl through my mind. I hate myself for feeling this way, in this place.  I hate myself for not working harder on these imperfections. I hate myself for everything I’m not. 

In dark periods I express nothing, a lot of times I feel nothing, I sweep things under the rug until I’m in a 10 day silent mediation and the only expression I can make is internal and it feels like my wounds will bleed out.

I think back to the past year and a half and the trouble I made with love. I see now what these fraudulent romances truly were as the excuses I would make for myself are finally stripped away. Feeling naked and exposed, unveiled in rawness, I see the disconnect I was living every day. The severing from my brain to my heart, and I couldn’t stand myself for it.  Why am I consciously and intentionally choosing lovers who will destroy me on the wake of their own path to self-destruction? 

Am I too weak and afraid to face my own issues with commitment and my deep rooted fear of finding love again? It’s logical to me, in some hard earned way, that I protect my heart by destroying it myself, on my terms, then to risk trusting someone who I fear will eventually lead me to the same tragic destiny. The Rolodex spins on. 

So helpless, so hopeless, if only I knew a way that I could forgive myself. Despising that I either feel nothing or everything and that balance is only a word I preach and never a feeling I retain. Fearing that others make assumptions of who I am and once again I will be misunderstood by the battles in my head. I am in a constant tug of war with my demons over who I truly am, defined by my past, suffocated by the thought of my future. In this moment my present shines no light. This is what I am dealing with for the next 10 days, and ultimately the rest of my life. This is it. This is all I get. 

Helpless, imperfect, misguided, vulnerable, soft, tiny, and broken. 

A sad sense of surrender begins to surface with the realization that yes, this was it, that I am it. 

I have to accept myself in my current state. Like a re-birth, beginning again as a helpless baby, I will crawl on my hands and knees until I can gain the strength to find the day where I can stumble to my feet. I pray for the protection granted to a child that I can trust in myself, the universe, and the people I love, enough to nourish me, and teach me until I grow strong and able to go fourth again.

  I can choose love, choose life, and I can choose peace. I don’t want to go on like this anymore. I don’t want to hate myself, I don’t want to cry over the past. I want to be free and I want to flourish from my heart. This one precious life deserves forgiveness, we all deserve to forgive ourselves, to forgive each other, if only for the freedom of ourselves. “I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you.” I desperately repeat the mantra until my tears soak my pillow and I finally fall asleep on that wooden board bed. 

I woke up the next morning and I felt different, I had a spark of energy. I jump out of bed with my thoughts in bright neon lights and with peanut butter on my mind, I rush out the door. I sink my mouth into the fruit provided by the center, and I joke to myself that it’s not the Ritz Carlton but that its really not that bad. I look to the Chinese woman on my right, Kim Sue Wung, Who I find out later is 75, and I contemplate her life, how different it must have been from mine, but how the universe some how conspired to bring us together, staring at the same fluorescent white wall. 

Together but apart. I observe the deep wrinkles in her face, her graceful composure as she looks down over the famed soggy noodles, I watch as she consciously spoons each bite into her mouth, and I notice how peaceful she looks. I begin to absorb her energy into my own field, emulating the peace I witness, and I start to list off all the reasons I am truly grateful to be in this place, at this time. Peanut butter taking one of the top places on the list.

Reflecting on the past two days of pure Hell, thoughts of confusion surface as to what that was detoxing out of my psyche, and why it was suddenly gone? Was it caused by the sudden societal deprivation?  Was it finally being able to look at myself and my subsequent actions of the past year? Was I truly not capable of being happy with myself?  Was it the peanut butter?

  I meditate on these questions, I let my feelings flow through every inch of my body, I don’t resist them this time, I feel no attachment to the anger as it releases through my achy knees cemented in lotus. I come to a relatively quick realization that all of that hate materialized because of my unwillingness to accept a feeling I have always attempted to ignore:

Fear. 

I have become an actor in my own life, saving face habitually, unable to see it until this moment. Breaking through my tough exterior, I am fragile and I am afraid and I haven’t let myself recognize it in a time longer than I can remember. It’s an emotion I shove down repeatedly again and again as a mechanism to keep my life pushing forward. 

To feel fear is to be weak, to be weak is to be unworthy of love, to be unworthy of love- is my biggest fear. 

The vicious cycle of suppression has finally broken me, I begin to sob. I remove myself from the meditation hall in this moment and I let it pour out of me like poison as I collapse onto the grass, my face blistering from the sun. I feel all of the anger, the confusion, the sadness, the depression as I circle it back to my own self inflicted torture. I have betrayed myself, I haven’t allowed myself to feel the things that scare me the most in this world. 

My heart is pounding out of my chest even as I write this. My life-long defenses want to stay hidden & locked in their dark metal cage inside my soul, never to be exposed to those who can judge it. It hurts, it’s causing a physical pain inside my body, and I keep chanting the words from a voice within, “the only way we can heal is admit to the vulnerability of your truth”.

 The only way I can move forward is to recognize my fears. 

I'm gripped by an overwhelming fear for the fate of our precious planet, my community, and the future of humanity. I don’t want to see another war, I don’t want to see another species extinct, another chemical spill poisoning our rivers and food. I don’t want to have to make a decision not to give birth because I’m afraid for what kind of a world they will be born into. I’m afraid people will never care enough about each other to make peace, cultivate forgiveness, and endure sacrifice for the greater good of us all. That money will continue to dictate the world, and that corruption and greed will eventually end it all. 

I fear people don’t recognize the power they hold with each decision they make and how with better decisions we can collectively overthrow the powers that be and change our current path of devastation, but I’m afraid it all falls on deaf ears. I’m afraid that with time I will give up, I will completely isolate myself out of society because the burden becomes unbearable when I navigate this solitude. 

My tender heart sinks deeper into my chest. I fear for myself, my future partners, and my inability to heal thus far. I have to admit that I still carry the traumas from my past relationships and delegate my current ones based off the fear I have of them repeating. I keep myself, knowingly, in this cycle of unavailable people because of my own emotional unavailability. I think about my own potential to hurt my lovers and the mistakes I have made in the past. Never getting hurt, but never feeling love.

I’m afraid to get what I want, to find success, to find love, and to still feel sadness. I’m afraid to speak up, to be judged, to hurt others by mistake. Afraid of my feelings that they are wild and uncontrollable and too strong to handle during my darkest times. I’m afraid to have the perfect mind, body, soul because once I get what I want it still won’t be good enough. I’m afraid I’ll always feel like the disaster that was currently breaking down on the dirt behind the residential hall. 

I stand up, tears still streaming, and I walk into my bedroom. I hold my pillow, I try to muffle my sounds with it as I lose all control of my emotions. My mind is racing, every scenario, each poignant fracture, spinning the wheel of my existence from inception to the present, dances in the pain akin to a cerebral tornado.

I am my own disaster, but deep within I know I am my own healer. I am here for a reason. I recognize that I am cut open and I need to take the steps to suture my wounds with grace.  I allow myself this day of sadness, of regret, of pity. My soul continues to quietly cry through every mediation, through every meal, and throughout the night. 

The following morning I wake up without the relentless dread of the remaining days inside of the Vipassana. My heart echoes a beat of calm for the first time this week, my thoughts are passing as optimistic. I no longer feel a victim of myself as I gaze in the mirror while I brush my teeth. I don’t feel sad anymore. I feel the presence of gratitude for the previous days, honoring the days of hatered, the day of fear, and the day of sorrow to get me to today; a day of realization. 

Simple appreciation for who I was, where I came from, who my friends and family are, what this world is. Feeling that even though I was this sometimes broken girl, I was also on the way becoming whole, in the same way I view all other chaotic aspects of existence in evolution. Everyone  can learn from their times of sadness, depression, loss and become something beautiful throughout the process. 

To stop pretending, to admit my faults, to ask for help, and to live by example. 

Coming to this realization, allowing myself to feel through the anger and the pain without running away, and without seeking the temporary numbness of a substance or a person was my first big accomplishment acknowledged within myself. Happiness is here again, I can feel it. I can stand again, and I can feel the presence of the earth beneath my feet instead of on my chest. I feel grounded, I am ready for it all; the remaining days of the vipassana, the continuation of my life. My past, my future. I’m ready for happiness, for sadness, for love, and for heartbreak for I know that without one you cannot feel the other.

 Without the darkness you cannot recognize the light, so I begin again, my journey to wholeness, guided by love, accepting of pain, and nurturing of fear.