posted by Paige on Uncategorized

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May, 2003
Mount Koya, Japan

I hate this. I fucking hate this.

The thought curled up into my consciousness like a coil of smoke from the incense burning on the dais. The monks leading our meditation practice sat silent, as did everyone else. My thoughts were the loudest things in all existence.

Sitting back on my heels, a position called seiza in Japanese, my legs had already lost all sensation. As unobtrusively as possible, I wiggled myself back and forth. It helped momentarily, but then the tingling deepened, expanded, painfully filling my experience so no other thought could enter.

Opening one eye, I snuck a look at the friend I’d come with. She was sitting in seiza with seemingly effortless ease, breathing deeply, her stomach expanding and contracting with a naturalness I envied.

I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not cut out for this.

It’s not that I’d planned to be there. Having arrived in Japan less than a month earlier, I hadn’t made any plans for the holiday week that straddles the end of April and beginning of May. When my coworker mentioned the trip she was taking to Mount Koya, I’d asked if she minded me tagging along. She’d seemed happy to have a companion, and I’d been thrilled with the trip up to that point.

But somehow, sitting there trying to keep completely still, I felt that everything about the situation was wrong. I wanted to get up and run, twirl, kick, move. Feel my body. Shout. Scream, even, just to feel anything at all.

How much longer?

We’d trundled up there in a very old train, only a few cars long. It’d been charming and beautiful, climbing the mountain that way, watching the towns and villages pass by with their tiled roofs and hilly streets. As we’d climbed it’d gotten colder and colder until, at the very top, the weather was almost winter-like even as spring had fully descended at the mountain’s base.

Upon our arrival, a kindly monk had led us to our small tatami room with a sliding door, two futons stacked on the floor, and a kotatsu, the room’s only heating source. Before dawn the next morning, the same monk had come to get us for meditation practice. Following him along the path tracing the rock garden, I’d been excited to experience sitting in meditation. But the sitting itself felt interminable, unbearable, physically impossible.

What’s wrong with me? I can’t even meditate for half an hour. I suck in every way.

The taunting of my mind was far more painful than the experience in my body. Comparing, complaining, worrying, wondering, my mind mocked me ceaselessly, telling me how bad I was, how stupid. How I’d never be right. How everything I was doing was wrong.

I cracked open my eyes again to surreptitiously study the faces of the monks sitting in front of us, peace saturating their features. What was it they were experiencing? And could I ever find it too?

Tags: body, emotions, mind, spirit, the 500-word project