Pretty thoughts
Giving space to thoughts, both gracious and grave
“We’re trying to keep you as bored as possible,” explained one of Dipabhavan’s staff, a French meditator named Pierre. “So that you have nothing to do but to toy with your thoughts.”
It worked. Silence, little food, little sleep, no distractions; I can’t remember the last time I’d been so bored.
During the sitting and walking meditations of the retreat, I spent most of my time lost in thought. I’d fade into some fickle subject and then flow from there, not realizing where my mind was journeying.
It was great practice, catching myself. So much of life is spent lost in thought, and so many lives roll along without people ever realizing what their minds are doing. Off the cushion, I’d watch myself wander some sweet dreamscape and note, kindly, “Well, that is a pretty thought.”
We have so many pretty thoughts. We’re flooded with them. Thoughts of those we love, thoughts of our aspirations and visions for a bright future, thoughts of past moments that fill us with joy. This thinking is wonderful. “Thought is not innately negative,” Pierre emphasized.
It’s what we do with these pretty thoughts that impacts us. The most beautiful become insidious as soon as I give them more power. I can’t conjure my loved one in front of me. I can’t build that future now. I can’t return to the past. Attaching to the thought is what catches me, every time, and spins me to distraction as I try to sit still on my pillow.
In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki compares the behaviors of our mind to livestock. When I first read it, I was staring out of a Vermont window into a wintery pasture of cows. Cows who, little did I know, had a knack for busting out of fences if they were hungry enough.
"To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him."
My mind wasn’t used to this degree of focus, to this level of quietude. It’d get hungry and bust through any barrier I placed. “Focusing on the breath” fell like a frail railing, then any technique of counting the breath got muddled and trampled on. All my mindfulness tactics or hand postures would slowly relax and the thoughts streamed in and out as they pleased, grazing happily.
So, I widened the meadows. I didn’t focus so much on perfect mental stillness. Sometimes, I’d willfully follow along a thought to see where it led on the edges of my conscious pasture. When I did that, it often took me back to North Carolina. To my family.
“One of the reasons I fell in love with your momma was how wonderful her family was.”
Losing Bennett, my mom, impacted everyone around her. Suicide reverberates through all matter like an earthquake, shaking foundations and exposing cracks that have been long-ignored. When we talk about her, my dad is full of insight and pain.
“When someone dies, you become the keeper of all your shared memories,” he said, in the weeks after her death. They didn’t talk often, especially after losing my brother. “I’d still had such comfort knowing she was there in the world, just a call away.”
A few weeks ago, my dad called my grandmother, his ex-mother-in-law, to thank her for the years that they were family. For the time that he’d been a part of it all.
Like most children of divorce, years of my life were cast in overtones of animosity between adults about something I didn’t ever fully understand. Still, as children do, I stood in the fission, tying two worlds together.
I came to Thailand to be near my dad. With no mother left and my only parent half the world away, I couldn’t help but feel alone. On my darkest days, orphaned. Not from any neglect on my father’s part—I’ve never known someone to call with such consistency. But because I’d lost my tether. I’d never lived a life without my mother. Without her voice, I may as well have been completely isolated.
“My dear, my dear, my dear, my dear… You’re not alone as you think you are.”
In June, I went to see a medium. A channel. It was a powerful experience, unlike anything I expected. It wasn’t a television-style showcase, spilling out details and messages from someone on the other side. It was more like a stuttering, laughing, bellowing message from some universal voice, telling me many things that I already knew but had never put to words.
“You’re not alone as you think you are.”
Each day of the meditation retreat, we had a metta, or loving-kindness, meditation session. It’s a meditation practice to cast love on all humanity; it’s a great practice for those who harbor resentments and anger. I fit the bill. I have seeds of deep-buried loathing that, over the course of life, I’d like to uproot. I’m digging very slowly.
One method to summon true, real love (which you will transfer to yourself, to acquaintances, and to your enemies over the course of the meditation) is to imagine a dear friend in front of you. Or someone who sets your heart ablaze with unconditional love, love without attachment.
There are countless people whose faces melt my heart and warm my skin just out of the pure joy of their existence. But chief among them, the person who upwells gratitude and love like a geyser in my soul, is my grandmother, my mother’s mother.
Relationships between parents and children are so fraught with attachment and expectations; worries and wants are constantly being exchanged. Perhaps it lessens over time as the child grows into adulthood, but from what I’ve seen, there’s always some degree of tension.
Grandparents and grandchildren are more like companions. Peers on opposite wings of lived experience, both learning from the other.
During my week of silence, I had many pretty musings. Many painful ones as well. There are some thoughts that are so acute I’ve trained myself to veer away from them. I don’t dream of my wedding. I tread carefully around thoughts of future children. I stay well away from funerals.
All these things, when pictured without my mother, turn from normal landmarks of life to bleak washes. The thought of a wedding brings the image of an empty chair. The thought of children reminds me that she will never hold them. The thought of a funeral makes my eyes burn and my mouth crumple.
Chewing slowly and silently at breakfast on one of the first days of the retreat, my brain was toeing along this path.
What if I get out, check my phone, and I’ve lost my grandmother? What would I say? What words exist to encompass all the things she means to me, all the moments we’ve shared?
I stop chewing. Set down my metal spoon. Grab the table. Hold back tears. Everyone around me is mindfully engaged with their meal, slowly peeling bananas or looking closely at their rice. Meanwhile, I’ve been stolen by a thought. It’s just a thought. It’s just a thought.
What will you say at your loved one’s graveside? If you died tomorrow, what would your father, sister, friend, have to say about you?
These are painful, sacred mental explorations. I don’t like sitting with them more than anyone else. But I was given the space and time to be with them for a week, to look closely at them, or to run away. I mostly chose running, but at least I was aware of the choice.
The reality of loss is not just a thought. It’s the nature of being. To live is to die, to love is to lose. They’re inseparable. I’m trying, in incremental ways, to appreciate shadow as light and death as life and loss as love. But I’m human, caught in my thoughts and dreams and a desperate, clawing aversion to pain. I don’t want to lose anyone else. But there’s no helping it.
So, I sat with the image of an empty chair at my wedding. And I trailed on a few scraps of a not-yet-needed eulogy. I had more dark thoughts than I’d care to share. But I also pictured my grandmother holding an infant, some delicate thing swathed in hope. And I smiled to myself with racing words of love, imagining the speech I’ll give at my best friend’s wedding.
All of these are fluctuations of the mind. Maybe one day I’ll quiet them and focus when I sit. But for now, I’m grateful just to notice them, the ugly and beautiful, and watch them pass.