Analog Love, Digital Yogi, Meditation, Grief and Growth

it's four am in seattle i am too heartbroken to sleep and have been up all night. ten days ago i returned from doing a vipassana satipathana retreat (the satipathana course is for old students only) to discover that everything in my life had shifted to the left and many things had fallen away as i let go of old sankara's (deep rooted complexes) while there, and in so doing, released a host of people and circumstances born of these complexes.

exactly 39 days before i took my ninth vipassana course in six years, and four days before the last mercury retrograde period of the year, i met a beautiful yogi via myspace with whom i fell madly in love. i should say here that we never met. he lives in shanghai (with my friends i referred to him as, among other things, "the only brother in china"), but the fantasy of spiritual partnership is a strong idea and he fed my craving with his beautiful letters and daily telephone calls and the promise implied by his insistence that he's been looking for me all the days of his life.

i didn't know how i would write about the end of our romance, which was also the end of my attraction to unavailable men, until a friend wrote to me today to give his condolences around the crashing of my digital love and to inquire about the process that led up to it. following is an excerpt from the email i sent to him only a few hours ago regarding what happened for me while i was on my retreat and what i found when i returned home:

vipassana is the meditation i've told you about that
you learn at the 10-day silent retreats
(www.dhamma.org). it's ancient therapy that goes
deeper and is much more efficient than psychoanalysis
or any of the modern therapies i've experimented with.

there are three parts to the technique: ana pana,
which is a meditation on the breath that is done for
three days so that you can sharpen and quiet the mind
enough to learn vipassana. then there is the
technique of vipassana itself which i will explain to
you by phone (although it's experiential and pretty
much impossible to get intellectually.) and then
there's metta which is a healing balm you apply during
the last two days of the retreat which acts to sew
you back up after the extremely intense work of
digging out sankara's.

sankara's are, in essence, deep-rooted complexes you
have about yourself and they are related to the karma
you've acquired over many lifetimes. during the
practice, these sankara’s, which you have stored in your dna, manifest themselves as
sensations on your body. the technique teaches you to
be highly aware of these sensations and to observe
them equanimously, that is, peacefully and without any
aversion, as they come to the surface of your body and
pass away (for example, a sankara might manifest itself as an itch on your nose that is so itchy it is painful. you must observe the itch peacefully without doing anything to quench it. with this observation comes an experiential understanding of “anica” which means change. everything changes. all sensations are transitory. nothing lasts forever.) in this way, you are able to allow old
karma in the forms of hurt, abuse, trauma, neglect,
addictions, abandonment’s etc. to come to the surface
and pass away. this is the basic teaching of Jesus’
"turn the other cheek" philosophy.

to elaborate further, the usual habit pattern of the mind is to react to the
old karma, that is, slap me and i'll slap you
back! the fundamental problem with this is that
everytime you make an action, whether it's "good" or
"bad" you plant a seed (as you sew, so shall you also
reap) and the basic karmic doctrine is that every seed
manifests as fruit when the conditions are ripe for it
to grow. so what you do with vipassana is create a
still place free from both craving and aversion to sensation so
that your deep-rooted complexes have an opportunity to
come to the surface and pass away without any
interference from you.

next is what is most glorious and beautiful about the
technique, but what is also sometimes the most
confusing and painful, although ultimately beneficial:
as you practice and let pass these deep rooted
sankara, your external circumstances automatically
change to reflect this, immediately and often in unpredictable ways.
for example, a major sankara that i passed during my
last retreat was the belief that my father never loved
me. now, whether this belief is actually true or not
makes no difference to my BELIEF that it was true.
i've believed this for many many years and this belief
has resulted in me attracting a particular kind of man
(and there are quite a few other things this belief
attracted, but that's another email). my beautiful
john (shanghai surprise) was this kind of man and when
i got out, he had been, in essence, removed
from my cipher because the deep rooted complex that
had brought us together has now been removed. i knew
while i was still at the retreat that he wouldn't be
in my life anymore because i felt him so entirely
dissolved, but it is still difficult for me in the day
to day reality to know that i will most likely not
ever talk to him again. it's like someone i loved
dearly had a terminal disease while i was on retreat and has died. even though it was the best thing
for all parties concerned, there's still an adjustment
period to the new reality.

at any rate, over the six years that i've been
practicing, i've been able to release many, though
certainly not all, of the complexes that i've
acquired over the years and built my reality around.

i can explain this better if you like the next time we
talk.

love (and some tears and sniffles),

christa