More than 10 years passed as I bounced between the different meditation techniques. Some days I practiced TM; some days I tried Zen; other days I tried kriya. My confusion grew worse, so I thought maybe I would benefit by some serious academic study about these different forms. Maybe there were subtle points I was missing. I still didn’t realize that no amount of intellectual head tripping could make up for consistent meditative practice.
My library was filled with powerful books like the fourth edition of Knowing and Seeing by vipassana master Pa-Auk Tawya Sayadaw, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and The Book of Secrets by Osho. I even read novelist and poet Jack Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and was haunted by his words —
“Because there is no definite teaching; the world is
undisciplined Nature endlessly in every direction inward
to your body and outward into space”
He seemed to be saying there was no single path anyone can follow on the spiritual journey, but I still felt like a failure because I hadn’t found my own restful golden eternity. I didn’t want to get any older without picking a path and sticking to it. I believed there were mysteries my books could reveal, I read every day. I got flashes of intellectual understanding, but my meditation still did not settle down. Too many ideas and concepts kept buzzing around in my mind. I could not relax into the process.
I remembered the old truism that says when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, but I worried that would never happen to me since I’d had so many teachers already. Despite my doubts, that old saying was about to come true for me, and it happened in the most random way……
When I was a child, I suffered from acute bronchial asthma, which made sleep almost impossible. I would lay awake all night listening to AM radio to keep me company, and luckily for me, some nights that habit returned though the asthma was a thing of the past.. One early morning at 2:00 a.m. I heard Roy of Hollywood on his KPFK-FM ‘What’s Happening? show introduce Shinzen Young, a vipassana mindfulness meditation teacher. Roy was playing CDs from Shinzen’s program “The Science of Enlightenment”. With one sound of Shinzen’s voice my imagination was captured. Maybe here was another chance to find a path to meditative stability.
Roy announced that Shinzen was leading a vipassana workshop at the Santa Monica Zen Center the next weekend. When I met him, Shinzen proved to be affable, accessible and perfectly willing to listen to me talk about my meditation dilemma. We walked around the streets of Santa Monica and he said one thing I’ll never forget………. “Maybe you’re so hung up on finding the perfect way to meditate that your mind can’t relax and see things as they really are, just a continual flow of vibrational experience.”
I was transfixed as Shinzen explained the history and lineage of vipassana mindfulness meditation. The sheer simplicity of the practice relieved me of of all the unnecessary worries I’d had about meditation needing to feel highly structured and doctrinaire. Here was a technique that let all mind and body experiences be OK just as they are. There was no struggling to control thoughts or sensations, no chanting of mantras, no absolutes about body posture. It seemed like vipassana could open a new door that the formalities of TM, kriya and Zen kept closed to me.
A month later I attended my first vipassana retreat with Shinzen at Casa de Maria Retreat Center in Montecito, CA. Ironically enough, this was the same place I had heard my introductory lecture on TM, and the sweet memories of those days early meditative hopes still filled the air.
At the evening dharma talks, Shinzen explained the Buddhist theory of vipassana. He explained the human mind and body as quantum vibratory organs, capable of perceiving and delighting in their own energy. The talks were pretty far out and stretched my understanding to its limits, but I intuitively trusted Shinzen. I learned to sit and observe anything and everything happening in my mind and body without reacting. I could watch pleasure and pain arise and pass away repeatedly until I sensed a rhythmic vibration to it all. Shinzen explained that vipassana creates a warm feeling of equanimity with whatever comes up in meditation simply because of the ability to observe mindfully without judging or the need to figure out what any particular experience means. I felt free of meditative rules for the first time since learning TM decades before.
That Casa de Maria retreat took place over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays of 1992-93. Now more than 20 years later I’ve been consistent in my daily vipassana practice. I go to at least two week-long retreats every year. Compared to the religious structure of Hindu meditation, Buddhist philosophy makes a lot of sense to me. There’s no pantheon of gods to worship, no magic words, no need to try to levitate above my meditation cushion. I just sit and watch my mind and body perform their rhythmic dance. For someone with an overly analytical mind like mine, the simplicity of vipassana is a blessing. That doesn’t mean it will be right for you. Like Kerouac said, things can be a little perplexing on the path to higher consciousness. You might not stumble upon the right meditation for you by listening to late night radio, but I promise you one thing…if you keep looking you will find it and when you find it dig that well deeply.
About Michael Hoffman
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