top 10 things about a 10-day vipassana retreat

of course, part of the point is that there shouldn't be any "top" or "bottom" or preferences of any kind, but i'm not yet fully enlightened, so i think there can be some leeway.  spoilers below, so if you don't want to know anything about vipassana, don't read the rest of this post.

10. yoga at sunrise, every day.  its not widely advertised that it is totally ok to do yoga during the course, as long as you have a mat!  which i did.  o, i am so smart!!  [pats self on back.]

9. falling for s.n. goenka.  i was so angry with him at first.  what is this chanting?  isn't it time to get up already?  why does he gurgle at the end of some words as if he is slowly dying?  and this, the kicker: "you may experience some sensations, maybe tingling, heat, cold, vibrating, throbbing [the list goes on], maybe even pain ..."  o, what a joke.  maybe pain?  how about definitely.  and he mentions it so haphazardly, as if an afterthought.  mental growling at s.n. goenka.  but ....  hm.  a few days pass and i am humming the chanting in my head.  a few days pass and i am giggling at s.n. goenka's little jokes and mannerisms in the dhamma talks.  a few days pass and i am loving s.n. goenka.  who knew? 

8. the male chorus of burps and farts and loogie-hocking from throat to mouth.  i thought it was rudeness, but later it was suggested that perhaps the vibrations produced by a free belch into a silent room are helpful to the throat chakra.  maybe.

7. the bus ride from bangalore central to the course location in alur.  have you ever tried to catch a local city bus with your massive american backpack strapped to your massive american self?  it took doing.  so now i'm shoehorned on to the bus, backpack on lap, pouring sweat, while the bus lurches its way out of the center of town.  next to me, an ancient woman is spreading white powder onto her betelnut leaf with a shaking hand.  a tiny face looks up from the scrum in the aisle: someone's little girl is underfoot, and within a second her mother plunks her down on the old betel-woman's lap.  someone hits my shoulder from behind with a rolled up newspaper ... its another older lady, grimacing, pointing to me and my offending bag ... i think she wants my seat.  my seat, mind you, not the seat of the other younger folk who are also sitting down, without massive bags.   i tell her she's welcome to it if she can figure out what to do with the bag.  she moves on.  i pass out, and am woken up at my stop by the little girl's mother. 

6. all of the incredible ideas that i get when i'm not supposed to be thinking of them and am not allowed to write them down!  i wish i could list them all here but many have retreated back into my unconscious mind, to re-emerge when i have a paper to write or some such.  i suppose i will go back to work eventually, and then these ideas will come out and play again. 

5. the food.  especially this warming drink called raggi mald, made from crushed millet and 21 spices, complexly delicious and (astonishingly) healthy.  i got the recipe from one of the other ladies and i promise to make it for you. 

4. srinivasi, the beautiful, compassionate dhamma worker who found me crying one day and helped me out.  she said not to thank her ("thank the dhamma and the guru-ji") but i told her nothing doing, she was getting thanked by me whether she thought she deserved it or not!  apparently i reminded her of a friend's daughter, a 19-year-old martial arts expert named giti, which i took as a super-good compliment.

3. definitely feeling at least one spider drop from the ceiling to my head, and scurry around on my face for a spell, and not freaking out or opening my eyes. 

2. living for 10 days with 21 strangers, mostly indian women, and watching us all come alive from the distant to the immediate when noble silence was broken.  the teenaged girl who i thought so stern as she marched back and forth during break-times, fists clenched, always swathed in white on white on white, turned out to be an adorably giddy 30-year-old mother of 2 (a son, 14, and a daughter, 12), still so much in love with her husband that she cried with missing him, just one day before seeing him again.  tiny lakshmi,who put her baby-sized shoes in the same precise corner every day without fail, was as sweet as i had imagined.  the imperious, bejeweled grandmother, who regurlarly ignored noble silence to chat with the garden workers and to catch my attention for help up and down stairs, unclenched her jaw and started smiling.  and the tall lady, who i thought so modern because of her short, iron-grey hair, had just completed her 20th vipassana and wore her hair short because she was in chemotherapy -- in fact, had arrived a bit late to the course because she had come straight from a chemo session. 

1. purifying my mind!   but don't worry, it's not that pure.  :)

shravanabelagola

i am sitting in front of the gomateshwara on a 1000-year old temple wall on indragiri hill, 620 mountain-carved steps above sravanabelagola, while all around me the stone temple complex echoes the prayers of the jain priests within, at once smooth and staccato.  i have just been blessed by a man who, under any other circumstances, would remind me of an indian al bundy, with his faded orange dhoti and white -- well, in a priest, it doesn't seem right to call it a wife-beater, but that's how i think of it, still.  i feel absurdly gratified that he remembers me from yesterday evening's sunset at chandragiri, across the village tank from my perch this morning.  i shouldn't: i am the only westerner in town, so far as i can tell, and i am wearing the exact same thing i wore yesterday. 
it is my 14th day in a row getting up before sunrise.  last night was shivaratri, a festival that i can't quite understand the purpose of, but the celebration of it involved fasting all day yesterday, then staying awake all night -- singing, chanting, going to temples and the like -- and this morning, cooking, for a big feast this afternoon.  i wandered the town last night, ostensibly in search of dinner and a jain temple, and ended up finding a sacred hanuman tree with what looked like an enormous monkey face emerging from a bole in the trunk, the resemblance accentuated by white-painted eyes and an orange-covered muzzle.  the tree, and the pavilion surrounding it, were festooned with strands of wire studded with colored lights, and worshippers had hung ropes of white and orange and yellow flowers on every conceivable surface of both tree and pavilion, including some i wouldn't have thought of, personally.  above the place, "welcome" blinked in colored paper lights, or rather "welco" -- four boys were trying to fix the "me" which would not stay lit.  they had not fixed it by the time the power went out all over town.  i was, idiotically, headlampless. still, there were enough bikes and stuff around that i could find my way to the shiva temple, generator-powered, with thousands of white lights and the inevitable ear-shattering sound system. in one corner, two priests were handing out flowers and kumkum powder for forehead-dots.  in another, worshippers circled a lingam with incense sticks.  i wish i could say what the place smelled like (besides heavenly, which is true) but the only label i saw for the sticks was "shiva pooja," which isn't really a scent, but a purpose.  and all around, people:  sari'd women sitting cross-legged on a raised platform, groups of skinny boys with their cellphones, little kids running at breakneck speed up and down stairs and bouncing off the walls, the little girls all short-haired and sporting elaborately flounced princessy-style dresses.  o, and me. 
someone cut the power to the sound system, and the piercing screech of amplified cymbals was replaced by real live women singing and clapping and ting!-ing real live cymbals, which sound so pure and beautiful in their natural state.  one woman in the singing group met my eye and patted the ground next to her.  the next moment, i was plopped down and peering at the words to the song we were singing (in kannada, which was unhelpful), joining in for the choruses and the clapping bits.  india rocks.