BY DORIE CHEVLEN
RELATIONSHIPS
OF COURSE, THERE WASN’T A PLUNGER. THERE’S NEVER a plunger when you need one. But there’s always an audience: in this case, three women sitting on the other side of the thin bathroom door waiting for their turn to use a toilet that was now horribly, hopelessly clogged. I sweat over the lid trying to devise a solution, but could barely hear myself think over the chorus to Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time,” which played a relentless loop in my head, as it would every day of this retreat, at a perfect-acoustics, full-volume blare. I was three days into a 10-day silent meditation retreat, and absolutely at the end of my rope.
“Sorry to break the noble silence,” I finally told my fellow meditators. “But that toilet is clogged.” It was the first thing I’d said in three days. The words felt like poetry on my lips.
When I told friends my plan to attend the program, they were justifiably incredulous. “You can’t shut up for 10 minutes, let alone 10 days!” they protested. (They were—and remain—correct.) But my then boyfriend was an avid meditator, and had raved about the program since we first met. Vipassana, a meditation practice originating in India over 2,500 years ago, had utterly changed his life, he told me. It made him calm, self-connected. I had just quit my day job to pursue writing full time, and all I could sell was an article about how to make latkes. I had time to kill, is what I mean.
I said “OK!” to the 10-day Vipassana meditation for the same reason I said “OK!” to moving to Chicago with him. Because I thought there was something wrong with me for instead thinking, Run! Love, I speculated, was the noble pursuit of making two people fit together. My pieces didn’t quite squeeze into the jigsaw puzzle of our relationship, but I thought this might sand down their edges. My boyfriend was so good, I thought (still think), and I desperately wanted to be good too.
So off I went, first to Chicago, then to the middle of seemingly nowhere, for the retreat. I signed away my wallet and cell phone; I listened to the rules: no speaking, no eye contact, no physical contact, no drugs or alcohol, no sex or masturbation, no technology, and (scariest to me) no writing. I felt like screaming, but I trusted my boyfriend more than my own instincts; if this was good for him, this will be good for me, I assured my racing heart.
Had I bothered researching Vipassa
