Zen and the Art of Falling Out of Your Upper Bunk

One morning I woke up in midair.

Smack!

I painfully climbed into an empty lower bunk, apologizing to everyone I’d woken in the dorm, and tried to sleep it off.

Several hours of limping through the next day later, I suddenly remembered something I’d seen the previous night.

After our last meditation session of the night, I’d continued to sit outside on the steps to the gompa, staring at the full moon rising above the trees and taking in the scene before me. Below, someone was circumambulating the stupa not far away, immersed in a walking meditation. Every step he took radiated confidence, mindfulness, grace. There was such intensity and purpose in every movement that it was as captivating as the moon hanging in the air above.

Lama Yeshe's Stupa

Before going to bed I had walked around a couple of times myself but always felt clumsy and awkward in the process. I couldn’t sink my attention into my steps to the extent that I wanted to and my unconscious impatience with the task disrupted the rhythm of my movement. I felt like a bumbling idiot.

The next afternoon as I limped with every step while trying to walk at a normal pace, I felt the previous night’s clumsiness amplified to a comic level. Very funny. After a while I gave up and slowed down to a snail’s pace. And I noticed something. If I took small, slow steps, I could walk perfectly normally without any pain. Even though it was much slower and probably much less efficient, I immediately started to felt better about myself. I set my pace several notches slower.

Everytime I got restless and started to speed up, or ceased to be mindful and removed my attention from each step that I was taking, the pain in the hip that I’d landed on last night was quick to bring my attention immediately back to what I was doing. Inattention was no longer an option.


Before the day was through I found myself fully absorbed in every step that I took; giving my utmost attention to every shift in weight, bend of the foot, and change in rhythm that I experienced. As I walked around the stupa that night – intensely mindful and with a fluidity and grace that was entirely absent the day before, it all suddenly became clear to me. Life really has a funny way of teaching you what you need to learn sometimes.

All the same, I think might stick to the lower bunk in the future.

Add ‘walking with an elven grace’ to the CV…

Tushita Meditation Centre Mix '09

Definitely one of the most interesting things about spending a week and a half in a monastery is adhering the rule wherein you can’t talk or listen to music. Although I must admit that I did break the silence a couple times (A monkey made me do it! Literally), I was surprised how much I learned just by not talking. Everything becomes more immediate. Since there’s no words to hide behind or justify yourself with, every action you make screams out at ten times its usual volume. When five of you are standing around the sink brushing your teeth, that’s exactly where your mind is. You’re not fishing for thoughts, trying to express your feelings about anything, or worrying about anything other than the act of tooth brushing. You see people as your friends that you’ve never spoken to in your life. It was really intense! I learned at least as much from the experience as from the teachings.

On the flip side though, that many days spent in silence is a surefire invitation for any song you’ve ever heard in your life to pop in and get stuck in your head for a while. So, for your benefit (and that of all sentient beings), here’s my Tushita Meditation Centre Mix ’09 (alternately referred to as Drunken Elephant Mind Mix ’09) of all the songs that managed to get stuck in my head for the longest amount of time. Now you can reproduce the experience of being sequestered in a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center from the comfort of your very own home. Please note that a song’s inclusion does not necessarily indicate that I like that song. This especially applies to the conclusion that Clare Hill is about to jump to.

1. The Art of Dying – George Harrison (Reincarnation and other obvious reasons)
2. Tomorrow Never Knows – The Beatles (song about The Tibetan Book of the Dead)
3. A Taste of Honey – The Beatles (I put a lot of honey on my bread and this song arose in my mind. This one’s really sad)
4. It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding – Bob Dylan (Just cause it’s too good to stop thinking about once you start)
5. Daddy Cool – Boney M (I think it may have something to do with my Mr Cool T shirt. I felt particularly lame having this in my head)
6. Like a Rolling Stone – Bob Dylan (The constant ‘how do you feels’ in analytical meditations)
7. I, Me, Mine – The Beatles (Got some ego dissolving to do)
8. Stop Your Sobbing – The Kinks (Just stupidly catchy)
9. I’m Down – The Beatles (Actually pretty fun to have stuck in your head. Maybe my favourite of the lot. I may have been feeling down at the time, I don’t know)
10. Human – The Killers (Lord knows what this was doing there)
11. Om Mani Padme Hum mantra (That’s one catchy mantra! It doesn’t help that it was playing in every CD vendor’s shop on my trip in Nepal either)
12. I Dig Love – George Harrison (Bit of compassion and loving kindness. It’s a pretty cool song too)
13. Moose and the Grey Goose – Paul McCartney (I was reading one of the Jakartas about one of the Buddha’s previous reincarnations as a goose)
14. Lady Be Good – George Gershwin (I was just really happy. It was the version from the film Manhattan)
15. My Sweet Lord (Pirate Version) – George Harrison (I have no idea)
16. The Levee’s Gonna Break/Plastic Man mashup – Chris Ciosk (Bob Dylan/The Kinks) – (Guess I was just bored)
17. Oh! Darling – The Beatles (There was a gorgeous thunderstorm after a great meditation session and I was feeling a bit intense)
18. Falling Slowly – Once Soundtrack (Gotta have some romance in there somewhere – I certainly wasn’t going to get it from the monks)

The Road Goes Ever On and On

After having spent some time with the Tibetans living in the mountains of Nepal and read the Dalai Lama’s autobiography, “Freedom in Exile” (really worth a read), I’ve realized that a change in plans is in order. There is now absolutely no way I could even entertain the possibility of paying a mandatory Chinese tour guide hundreds of dollars to take me through the few reconstructed areas of the country that they’ve spent the last fifty years destroying.

The best alternative I can see is to head up to Dharamsala in northern India instead – the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile (and the western backpacker population in exile as well, as I soon came to learn). The result of this decision turned out to be perhaps five of the most uncomfortable days of my life. My travel itinerary:

Riding the roof of a bus in the Terai

1. Thanks to the strikes in the Terai, it takes a single 19 hour ride in a bus whose seats are designed for someone a foot shorter than me to reach the border (which is maybe 200 or 300 km away at most). Between hours spent waiting for enough passengers to show up for the trip to be profitable, being stuck in traffic, and countless snack and meal stops, the bus manages to get me there at 2am.
2. From the bus stop it’s a one hour walk to the border. A nice chance to stretch my legs actually.
3. After spending a couple hours finding the bus despite endless misdirection from Indians trying to scam me into buying expensive private transport (nice to be back – and I say that without sarcasm), a 4 hour bus trip through the plains almost makes me wish it was a 19 hour bus trip through the mountains thanks to the 40 degree pre-monsoon heat.
4. After a night of marinating in my own sweat in my hotel room, I get to the train station for a trip that gets me to Amritsar 27 hours later.
5. I spend the night in the Sikhs’ extremely welcoming and friendly Golden Temple (where I seemed to be of more interest than a temple made of solid gold to half of the curious pilgrims there). The next morning it’s a 3 hour bus ride to Pathankot where I transfer to another 3.5 hour bus ride into the hills to lower Dharamsala and finally one more half hour ride up to McLeod Ganj. Phew.

Next time someone goes on about how tough it must be to sit on a plane with meals and movies for 20 hours to get to New Zealand I think I may have a fit of the giggles. I may as well have made the journey to Mordor to get here as far as I’m concerned.

I'll Soon Be Seeing You

After a few days in town, I’ve finally found the Kathmandu that Cat Stevens was singing about.

To be honest, I was by no means looking forward to arriving. When you’re talking to trekkers you can’t mention Kathmandu without being barraged with words such as loud, pollution, beggars, dirty, and awful, to name a few. In fact I’d only met two people who seemed to really like it at all.

So it was with much trepidation that I peered out the window of the bus as we started to roll in to the outskirts of the city. Not so bad yet - maybe it doesn’t really hit you till you get to the city centre…

Kathmandu from Above - ok, a bit polluted

I step off the bus. Huh. There’s no shit in the streets. I can’t see a single person relieving him or herself at the side of the road or even detect the smell of urine. A cow politely moves out of the way for the traffic – consisting mostly of pedestrians and just a few motorbikes.

“My friend! My friend!” Here it comes. Time to get besieged by touts, shop owners, and beggars. “No thanks.” I reply (unusually polite after my time in the friendly mountain villages). He nods and walks away. Wait! What? He left as soon as I said I wasn’t interested?.

Big stupa in the middle of a square

This doesn’t seem right. As far as I can see, Kathmandu is an India veteran’s wet dream. It’s as though someone took note of every cry of frustration I’d ever uttered about all of the worst problems in big Indian cities and just removed them from Kathmandu. Walking through Thamel (the big tourist district), I’m surrounded by comfortable hotels and immaculate restaurants serving spot on western food. This place just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the subcontinent! It’s like a theme park!

Expensive Thamel restaurant

But then again, it’s like a theme park. I didn’t come all this way to sip chai (inflated to six times the normal Nepali price!) and munch on salads and pizza with Westerners on short vacations whose budgets are as big as they are boring. After a few days it’s time to migrate to Freak Street (yup, that’s actually what it’s called). I don’t even think I rationally played any part in making this decision either – I suspect that my month and a half old beard in conjunction with my Aladdin pants made that particular decision for me.

Looking down Freak Street at night

Away from the travel agencies and souvenir shops, and right next to the city’s Dubar Square, it was seriously like walking through a time portal. Four decades melted away before my eyes. A few hotel inspections later I chance upon the Moonstay Lodge (costing about $2.50 a night). This is more like it!

My room!

In the Jungle

I’ve been picking up skills in the jungle that I’d never even thought about learning.

For instance, we’ve all heard of how incredibly quiet and stealthy elves can be. I had a bit of a crash course in stealthy movement the other day actually with perhaps the best teacher that one can have - a wild rhinoceros. When you’re less than ten meters away, on foot, in the middle of nowhere, from a two ton animal that can run at 50km/hour and regularly attacks visitors to the area, you find that you’ve suddenly become a very stealthy person indeed. Your breathing slows down; each foot is softly and deliberately place on a spot on the ground carefully preselected for its absence of dried leaves or twigs; and all the while you’re intensely aware of the smallest movement or sound anywhere around you. Luckily the rhino saw and heard a lot less of us than we did of him. And my guide graciously decided to tell me all the terrible stories about people he knew who had been irreparably damaged in rhino attacks.

Not quite the rhino in question. I saw this one from safely atop an elephant - the last thing we needed at that time was the whirring of a comera turning on.

I also took a bit of time off to practice for my next battle with a war oliphant, although in a much more relaxed setting. I think I may just be the only with ‘elephant climbing’ on the skills section of my resume when I go for the part of an elf. Legolas would be proud.

Climbing onto an elephant via its trunk.

Yak Attack!

Got charged by a wild yak today up on a steep path off the main track.

Too bad old four legs couldn’t scramble down to a lower platform like I could (and oh how I scrambled).

Standing in the middle of the path in front of me before it happened

Makes a much better story than an experience. Not fun.

Rockslide

Most people complain about the road on the other side of the pass, and quickly express their disapproval of roads being built along treks by paying a large amount of money to take a jeep along it and proving the profitability of its existence.

I personally found the road to be an excellent excuse for some of my better adventures that came about looking for ways to avoid walking along it.

For instance, how often has an opportunity come up in your life to ride a rockslide down a steep slope into a river valley? After following a smaller path several hundred meters down, I found that it had come to and end leaving me with two options: to scramble up hundreds of meters over loose rocky ground to the road high above me or to sit down, slide the couple hundred meters down into the valley and then follow the river to the next town. One option struck me as being considerably more entertaining.

Looking up the slope I went down to the top of the valley where the road was. Me and the road met up later a few hours down the line.

Even walking at the bottom of the valley was an exciting experience – looking for safe spots to ford the stream, finding massive fossils the size of my face lying around the ground, and just getting an opportunity to explore the landscape along a route that no one else had taken.

Sure it took me twice as long to reach the next villiage, but it was definitely worth the extra effort. All in all, a quite successful detour.

My next attempt to avoid the road ended up with me falling into a river though. Maybe it’s not entirely the worst idea to just follow the road…