If People Were Trees, Would My Life Be Peaceful And Simple?

So, the meditation I practice - Vipassana has two modes of participation, generally speaking. One is as a student, taking the course, and the other is as a server, volunteering to serve the students. All the courses are run by volunteers/servers - no money is asked up front. (And the day that changes, we have lost the purity of the practice.) These courses are for ten days - finding time in one’s calendar to sit for ten days is a lot. So, for people to find the volition to serve is even more - it took me three courses as a student before the desire to serve arose in me. And I remember showing up at the centre in London and uttering the words - ‘I am here to serve.’

As a server, you can take on different roles, such as student manager, kitchen manager, gardener, or toilet cleaner. For my very first service, I was a student manager - and it was a practice in saying YES. A student manager acts as a liaison between the students and the teachers - anything the teacher asks, by that I mean anything (Except necessities like toothbrush/shampoo), you have to refer them to the teacher. Whatever the teacher says, you have to say YES, like check on the student, etc., etc. Since the volition to serve arises naturally, I instinctively decided to go with the flow. Post the service, I found myself saying YES/going with the flow in my daily life as well.

Before I go into the next student manager experience, a little bit about me. I grew up saying No. I was told to do a lot of things which, for reasons I cannot explain, I did not agree with, so I kept saying No, like wearing jeans, cutting my hair short, etc, etc. I said no to authority figures in society. Despite people’s dire warnings about the consequences, I not only thrived but also carved a world for myself in which rules apply differently to me. So, having things go my way and resisting when they don’t comes very naturally to me - but, as we all know, that’s how life works. I am fortunate that for the longest time ever, it did work that way.

My worldview is: - the way I do things, or the way things were done this way, would make life easier for everybody or be more efficient. It bugs me when things happen inefficiently or could have been done differently. Or, in cases, I can see how this action would pan out in the future, but others cannot, so they go down the path only to figure out what I had known right up front.

In my last course, I served as a student manager. And in the course, every student is assigned a specific seat so that it is easier for the manager to find out who they are, where their room is, etc. With roughly 50 students, it is hard to find or talk to them without a numbering system. As the course progresses, students can change their seats for a chair or sit against the wall if it is comfortable. And they are supposed to tell the student manager when they change the seats. In the current course, students changed seats on their own, which messed up my seating chart. I would go looking for a student only to find they had changed their seat. I brought this up to the teacher, who said, “It’s ok, he is not going to intervene.” But, by day five of the course, it had become unmanageable - even the teacher had trouble finding out where the students were sitting.

During the course, your mindset is trying to implement meditation practice in real life, so I thought about this. See, a part of me wanted the teacher to take action and tell the students not to change their seats without first informing the teacher. But that was not happening, so I created a new seating chart and shared it with the teacher as well. On the outside, it looks like the best course of action, but the key is on the inside. In the past, I would have generated so much negativity - why did the teacher not say anything, if only he had said something, now I have to suffer, etc - whereas this time I decided to go forward with what we have. This was the key insight for me: to go with the flow seamlessly without generating negativity or rancour towards others. There is so much freedom; suddenly, I was lighter and had so much more room inside of me.

This is the result of exercising your mental muscles in the Meditation Gym - it takes a long time, but eventually you change, even the stubborn habit patterns. The key is to keep practising, be kind and gentle towards oneself, and, as much as possible, accept what is happening without wanting it to change into what you want.

Are there any stubborn habit patterns that you are aware of?