Autumn is my favorite season. A time to reflect, withdraw, and begin the hypernation. This fall, I have complemented these natural seasonal inclinations with a meditation course that my boyfriend and I have both taken interest in.The course is 6 months in duration, and attendance is required 5 nights a week, Monday to Friday. It is a unique style of meditation that goes for an hour in duration. The unique part about it is that the first half an hour is ‘walking meditation’. It is really quite simple, technically. Meditators are organized into rows. Each person has a two-tile width space for walking, which stretches about 15 feet long. We walk from one end of our marked space and back again. There is a pause after turning around. That’s the walking exercise, combined with our meditation technique.
But I am distracted by pretty much everything around me. Sights, smells, noises, personality quirks. Thus, being put in a room with 40 other people and trying to meditate while walking back and forth, my eyes being caught by strange socks and even stranger walking habits, is already quite a challenge for me. So far in my third week, I have walked beside people who look like they’re trying to walk a tight rope, or play hop-scotch at their turning points, or sneaking up on someone. Despite these idiosyncrasies that go on around me, I am the one who seems to have been singled out by the teacher for conformity. The first time was my initial evening, because I had missed the previous class that explained everything, and no one instructed me on how the walking areas worked so I wasn’t walking within the allotted lines. The teacher scooted me over onto my track. Okay, no problem. But then, after I had taken maybe 5 steps, she tells me to walk a little faster. Um….okay. I was still trying to make sure I was focussing my mind properly. I told my boyfriend that night that I had been talked to, and he said that he had never seen the teacher say anything to anyone else before. This lead me to feel special, but in the ‘special bus’ kind of way.
Things progressed, though, and I thought over subsequent weeks that maybe I had properly conformed to the exercise because I was left alone for a while. I did wonder, however, that the teacher was NEVER to be seen when I had freaks beside me doing their freaky walks. They would have been so busted. Instead, I had to somehow shut out their hop-scotching, or their tight-roping, or their sneaky-like paces. But I persevered, for the most part. I managed a few moments of focus in my half hour stretch of walking meditation. Then last night, I was busted again. Taken down. Apparently this time I was pausing too long after my turn. Again, I struggled with trying to refocus my mind after that. Why is it that no one else gets corrected? This was the pressing question that stayed in my head in place of the mantra I was actually supposed to be focussing on.
Later, the wise voice in my head (that has answers which are so hard to heed) tells me that I need to learn to focus and calm my mind, which is why I am there. What better opportunity to learn how to focus and calm, than in absolute chaos and injustice? By virtue of being one of the meditators closest to the door, I have been inadvertently selected for honing my skills to perfection, while all the freaks that she never catches get to continue being freaks and doing it all wrong. But somehow, despite reason, I just can’t muster up the gratitude for having been hand-picked for perfection.
I guess there is always next time.
