Snakes and Dragons: Breathing in order to Walk Down the Street

Though I'm embarrassed to say it, after several days in a whole different country, with an entirely different way of dressing, a complex set of cultural norms to learn and experience, and no small amount of political upheaval, my first blog post is about, well, me.

I haven't been sleeping. I'm full of anxiety. I've been really sick with a chest cold. I love my sister's apartment and it makes me happy to share the space, even though she's far away. My Google web sites are showing up in Bengali/Bangla because I had to change the timezone on Google calendar.

And it's hard right now for me to leave the house. Not just because I'm sick -- because I'm anxious. I try to leave the house early in the morning, as a kind of vaccination for the rest of the day -- if I do it once, I can do it again. The guidebooks tell you as a white person here you're always the center of attention, that especially for women it's worse and, of course, more dangerous to be on your own. I get so anxious thinking about it that it's better just to do it. A walk down to the river with some people staring is not nearly as bad as the books make it sound. You really do get to greet almost everyone. People smile. You get to read people's faces, see what they bring to the interaction, without any words. This lady asked me to take a picture with her kids.

Generalized anxiety is like a set of boa constrictors, which never quite kill you but choose a different part of your body and squeeze and squeeze until you're all worn out and scared. And if anxiety is snakes I guess fear is dragons -- enormous obstructions that stand in a path you might take and breathe fire at you until you either give up, or steel yourself to walk through the fire.

I've meditated once since I've been here, a simple vipassana. This I find very nourishing. While I am labeling thoughts and focusing on breath, it becomes clear where my mind is, the patterns it is falling into.

At the end of this vipassana, realizing how much anxiety and fear were present for me, I decided to do a bit of tonglen meditation: breathing in the heavy and icky, breathing out light and effervescence.

I have always done tonglen with some degree of reservation. Pema Chodron describes the practice as breathing in the crap of the world without resistance -- as she puts it, the practice "dissolves the armor of self-protection we've tried so hard to create around ourselves." I strongly resist the idea of breathing in the crap of the world. I never know how to breathe in the heavy, polluted yuck that exists in the world without allowing it to stick to me. Sometimes when I do tonglen, I keep that thick, heavy feeling all day.

But this time I read Pema's passages on tonglen differently -- she really sees this, too, as a place to confront our inner demons. "Start where you are. This is very important. Tonglen practice (and all meditation practice) is not about later, when you may get it all together and you're this person you really respect... You don't have to transform anything... That light touch of acknowledging what we're thinking and letting it go is the key to connecting to the wealth that we have." (Start Where You Are, 1994, Shambhala, 35)

The beauty here is that whatever you do for yourself, you do for others, and vice versa. Breathing in my snakes and dragons, being with them, their fangs and fire and scales and terrible constricting bellies, I had to breathe in fully. And, the next moment, I was still there, breathing. The snakes and dragons weren't gone, but they weren't freaking me out so much. Chodron writes, "When the resistance is gone, so are the demons."

I always thought that finger-wagging phrase, "Wherever you go, there you are" had a deterministic and judgemental cast to it -- I have often interpreted it to mean that my wanderlust was sort of an ill-disguised attempt to try to escape myself. The puritanical schoolmaster in me tells me to stay where I am, don't try to get fancy, don't focus all that energy on getting away.

In fact, "wherever you go, there you are" is an amazing and expansive truth --  wherever you go, you find opportunities to work on different things about yourself, you get to know different things about yourself. Different pieces of you are exposed to the light. Wherever you go, you discover new and beautiful and crazy things about you. There you are.

Here's a funny thing from today... I asked a friend if we could go to a bank, and we ended up at an ATM in Baridhara. There's a smiley guy who sits at the little ATM kiosk and opens the door for you. All day! He sits with the bank all day. There are no tellers, no bank managers, just this guy and the ATM kiosk. And he was pleased as pie to see us.

Renunciation

I'm listening to an online lecture on the Eightfold Path.

I think it's Ajahn Thanasanti Bhikkhuni speaking. She spoke at Harvard several weeks ago. I missed it. (I'm missing a lot of things lately. Good things, things that I want to be a part of. I did something else that morning. Maybe I shouldn't have. But I remember that morning, and I had a great time.)

There's a lot about internal dialogue in this talk— something that at this point in the semester I have to watch carefully. What is our "background noise" like? Ideally, she says, it will be full of "creation, goodwill, harmlessness to our selves." Yes.

First head-shave, maybe 2009

But the thing that caught my ear, early on in the broadcast (about 8:00?) is when she speaks about renunciation. She talks about fasting and "giving up cuddles," two renunciations I have not tried. She also mentioned ... head-shaving!

I hadn't thought of it this way before. Renunciation?
I shaved my head knowing that it felt freeing in social and aesthetic ways. I did it knowing that it adds an edge to the way I look that is both frightening and illuminating for me. I did it knowing that I fit in better with the people I like to fit in with, and get gawked at less by the people whose eyes I don't want to figure into my daily navigation of the world. I did it knowing that it gives me less to hide behind, but also less topographic space to worry about.

If the hair is there, and I'm in public, it should be intentional and lovely. My hair should be somehow welcoming... It should invite conversation. It should allure.

If the hair is not there, I don't have to worry that it's not perfect. And having a shaved head — I don't think there can be a way in which a shaved head on a white woman is perfect, and not jarring to most people, who might think (and actually sometimes say) "Cancer?" or "Sinead O'Rebellion!" as I walk down the street. In shaving my head, I think I accept this.

Head-shaving feels like some kind of renunciation, yes. And liberation. But not neutrality. It protects me from something. It also isolates me from something. It draws me closer to some people, and creates odd, unspoken chasms with others. What have I renounced? What have I welcomed in its place?

The Universe Machine?

So, I missed Bhikkuni in person. Bummer. Now I'm listening to her online instead, and she's still passing along something powerful. I don't think I "cracked the cosmic egg," as my friend Emma is fond of saying. I didn't break the universe. I sometimes envision a really complex machine, something out of Jules Verne, and I'm this little funny-shaped part, and if I don't do my "supposed to" thing, the alarms and whistles start going off and the entire thing comes to a screeching halt and we lose production time.

Or perhaps the machine just embarks on a slightly different project. Because the machine is organic. Perhaps as I am shaving my head or showing up somewhere other than where I meant to, the machine is growing another arm or gear to allow me to do what I do and still exist within the grand scheme and the productive whole. If that's true, in a universe of interconnectedness, not only can't I break the machine — the springs I picture ricocheting across the room are purely imaginary — I can't do even something so weird/bad that I'm really separate. And neither can you.

So, that's all right then.