Or, How I Lost My Ass and Everything Attached to It
Somebody lied to you.
Maybe it was the app with the rainfall soundtrack and the voice like warm honey. Maybe it was the magazine cover: a woman in white linen on a dock at sunrise, eyes closed, not a thought in her head and not a hair out of place. Maybe it was the wellness seminar promising that ten minutes a day would lower your blood pressure, sharpen your focus, and deliver a calmer, more productive you by the third quarter.
Meditation, we are told, is relaxing. Anyone who has actually sat down and stayed down knows better.
Sit for five minutes and see what shows up. The knee that never hurt before begins to hurt. An itch arrives on the one spot you cannot reach without moving. The grocery list recites itself. A conversation from twenty years ago replays, and this time you have better lines. The spice rack, suddenly and urgently, needs alphabetizing. The mind, given nothing to do, does everything.
You came looking for peace. You got a front-row seat to the circus you have been living inside all along. Is that failure? Or is it the first honest thing that has happened to you in a while? Let me tell you about my ass.
My Ass
I used to have
The most obnoxious
Worrisome, and stubborn
Ass
It was a bother and burden
I would wish on no one
So, I could not
In all good conscious
Rid my self of it
Then, a Friend
Told me of a method
To break my ass
Of all its contrariness
So, I bought a chair
And every day
I made my ass
Sit in that chair
O! What fights and struggles we had
That lazy ass so resistant to ever
Going anywhere or doing any real work
Now, could not and would not
Sit still
But, my Friend
Had warned me of this stage
So, I persisted
In putting my ass in that chair
Ignoring all of its
Childish braying and petulance
Slowly over time
That chair
Responded to the weight
Of my ass
Molding itself
Into the only place
My ass was ever
Really relaxed and comfortable
Now
I could not get my ass
Out of that chair
It refused to be
Anywhere else
So, I left my ass
In that chair
While I went about
My daily affairs
Until one day
My ass
Disappeared
And
Took me with it
Saint Francis called his body Brother Ass. He knew the animal. Stubborn, skittish, forever braying about its needs, happy to stand in one place for a lifetime so long as no one asks it to carry anything. Every one of us has one, and it’s not only the thing sitting on the cushion; it’s the whole contrary creature of habit we have been calling “me.”
Notice the poem’s first great turn; the ass that never wanted to go anywhere, never wanted to do any real work, suddenly cannot sit still.
This is the first joke of practice, and it’s on us. The inertia we lived in all our lives was never rest; it was motion so constant we mistook it for stillness, the way a spinning top, seen from across the room, seems not to move at all. Only when you ask it to truly stop do you discover how fast it has been going.
So the braying begins: “Not now. This is pointless. You’re doing it wrong. You have emails. What was that noise? Is this enlightenment? No? Then what exactly are we doing here?”
My Friend had warned me of this stage.
Who is this Friend? A teacher, yes. Someone who walked the road and came back to say the road was real. But look again at that capital F. Has there been a Friend whispering sit long before any teacher said a word? What, in you already knew the way to the chair?
The method is not violence. There is no beating the ass, no arguing with it, no winning the debate. Just putting it back in the chair. Ignoring the petulance. Again. And again. And again. Something humbler than discipline is at work here, something closer to the patience of a parent at bedtime, or the tide.
And then the chair begins to change.
Here is what the brochures leave out: you do not learn to sit; the sitting learns you. Day after day the chair takes the weight of you, molds itself around the exact contours of your particular resistance, until there is a place that fits the way nothing else in the world ever has. The only place your ass was ever really relaxed and comfortable.
Then the second reversal: now you cannot get your ass out of the chair.
What would that be like? To find that the sitting refuses to end when the timer rings. That it follows you to the kitchen sink, the checkout line, the gate agent announcing another delay. You leave your ass in the chair and go about your daily affairs, and something keeps sitting. Something stays still beneath the dishes, the driving, and the argument about whose turn it is to take out the trash.
Until one day my ass disappeared, and took me with it.
I will not explain that line. It does not want explaining. But I will ask you this. Who was it that wanted to relax? Who was sitting? And when the sitter goes, who is left to be comfortable, or uncomfortable, or anything at all?
Adyashanti likes to say that if meditation isn’t scaring the hell out of you, you’re not doing it correctly.
The chair is funny, until it isn’t. Somewhere along the way, maybe the thousandth sitting, maybe the third, the braying stops. Not because the ass has finally learned its manners, but because it has seen where this is going. It has caught the scent of its own disappearing.
What trembles then? Not the knees or breath. The one who has spent a lifetime being somebody, holding the shape of a self together with memory and opinion and the endless small effort of remaining who it thinks it is. That one suddenly senses the whole arrangement is optional, and it does not take the news well.
Most of us, arriving at this edge, reach for the remote. We decide meditation isn’t really our thing. We go back to breathing for stress and call it practice. Who could blame us? No one plays rainfall sounds over this part.
But listen to the phrase again. Scaring the hell out of you. Out. What if the fear is not a sign that something has gone wrong, but the sound of the hell leaving?
Now for the other trial; the one no one mentions in the introductory class.
Meditation will ruin your sleep; not the way coffee ruins your sleep; something stranger; something that does not keep office hours.
If you want
A good night’s sleep
Stay away from meditationA good meditation
Is like a homeless drunk
That won’t leave you alone
He wants to follow you home
Eat your food and drink your wine
Talking about nothing but himselfIf you want
A good night’s sleep
Stay away from meditationA good meditation
Is like a lonely old dog
Baying at the door
Until you let Him in
He jumps in your bed
And snores all nightIf you want
To sleep soundly
Stay away from meditationEnough said
Pass me another
Cup of that Wine
A good meditation is not a guest you invite over for twenty minutes and then politely walk to the door; it’s the drunk who follows you home. Once it has latched on, it will not leave you alone. It wants your food, your comforts, your well-stocked pantry of explanations. It wants your wine, the small consolations you have been sipping to get through the evening.
And it talks. Talking about nothing but himself.
Say that line slowly: Talking about nothing. But himself.
At first it sounds like the mind, the drunk at the end of the bar who will not stop telling his story. For a long time, that is exactly what it is, but sit with him long enough and something shifts. The rambling becomes a kind of listening. The one who talks only about himself turns out to be the only one who has ever been talking. And what has he been talking about all this time? Nothing. Bottomless, luminous nothing, which is all he has ever been.
Then the dog.
A lonely old dog baying at the door. Not the snow lion, or golden Buddha, or the angel painted on the cathedral ceiling. An old dog, a little mangy, bad breath, and worse timing, howling at three in the morning until you finally give up and let Him in.
Did you catch the capital H?
This is how the Beloved actually arrives. Not in the light show. Spiritual experiences are a dime a dozen, and most of them leave you exactly who you were, only now with a better story to tell at parties. The Real comes as something far more inconvenient and far more intimate. It jumps in your bed, takes more than its share of the blanket, and snores all night.
And you lie there, wide awake beside the snoring Divine, and you cannot remember why you ever wanted to sleep.
Could this be the whole of it? That the holy does not lift us out of our humanness but climbs into bed with it? That the old dog of Being wants nothing more than to be near us, ordinary and warm? What use is any insight that does not land us right here, awake in the dark beside something we cannot name and would never send away?
The first cup of wine was yours, and the drunk drank it.
But listen to the last line. Pass me another cup of that Wine. The small w has grown into a capital. Hafiz knew this Wine. So did Rumi, and every tavern-haunting mystic who ever scandalized the pious. It’s not the wine that helps you forget; it’s the Wine that will not let you.
This is the trial and the tribulation. You came to meditation to feel better, sleep better, and become a calmer, more manageable self. And meditation, being a terrible salesman and an honest friend, offers you none of it. It offers you a chair that swallows your ass. A drunk who eats your food. A dog who steals your bed. A Wine that ruins you for every other kind of drinking.
If you want a good night’s sleep, stay away from meditation.
And if you want something else? What do you want, really? Beneath the relaxation and the productivity and the better blood pressure numbers, what has been baying at your door all this time?
The chair is right there; it’s been waiting longer than you have.
Enough said.