Post #189: Ragged Meditators of the World, Unite!

25 Aug–8 Sep 2025

     Vipassana courses in the Goenka school typically conclude, after nine days of no talking (except, briefly, to the teachers) and a buffer-day on the tenth, with everyone’s honorable discharge in the morning of Day 11. Thai centers offer the added convenience of a chartered bus back to Bangkok, and that is where I was finding myself on Sunday, a fortnight ago.

     A newfound Dhamma buddy and I were making merry at having passed through the wash-cycle more or less in one piece yet again, and he had just mentioned, in passing, that a good ninety percent of the thousands of hours he had clocked over the years had been not of the sunny but of the stormy and arduous variety. I laughed with delight, not only in recognition, but because I was so glad to hear someone else say it: mine too, brother, mine too! I didn’t think of it on the spot, but for lack of a more orthodox word to capture the vast spectrum of rough, scattered, disjointed, and otherwise unpleasant or unfocused moments on the mat, let’s call them ragged meditations. (Thus the entry for ragged in my Shorter OED: of a rough, irregular, or straggling form; having a broken, jagged outline or surface; full of sharp projections; faulty, imperfect, irregular; harsh or discordant; rent, torn, or frayed.)

     The two of us must surely see the value of the practice, or how could we have persevered for so long, when it has been anything but smooth sailing? Even so, we can both think of more enjoyable things to be doing than to struggle with the equivalent of cold, brittle, cracked wax—not at all the tender, warm, fragrant, soothing experience that one might wish to have in a world in which dissatisfaction and suffering are already so rife. (Observe my discomforts and miseries, you say? Are you kidding: why would I come to Vipassana for that? I’ve got more than enough of it in my life already!) Of course even for us ragged meditators, spells of softening do occur here and there in our practice, even moments when the stuff melts or dissolves into air and bubbles for a bit. But this is not, for the ragged crew anyway, either the everyday texture of their practice or the point of the exercise. To go looking for these delights (chasing the pleasant ten percent, as it were) would be nothing other than to play that “game of sensations” which Goenka identifies as the one sure way to miss the rationale of Vipassana practice altogether.

     This side of Buddhahood we will all sometimes lapse, under the influence of our deeply engrained (but not altogether inescapable) hunger for the pleasant, into practicing for agreeable sensations, despite the repeated warnings against proceeding in such a manner. That one might, nay will, slacken in one’s resolve at times and give in to the wish for more cool, calm, and collected sittings, more smoothness and polish, more clarity and serenity on the mat, is only human, all-too human. This desire for things to be pretty and pleasant in our lives is normal and not very objectionable, so long as it is understood to be little more than wishful thinking. Vipassana is not to condemn these yearnings, but to understand that we cannot become more free in life by painting things in dreamy colors, only by engaging as closely and equanimously as we can with the very Dukkha that shadows our lives—the haunting presence of the Unsatisfactory in all its myriad forms, from the subtlest and most passing to the crudest and most agonizing. In this bid for continual awareness, we will often falter and fail; that too is part of the journey. Start again, as Goenka likes to say, start again (no. 11). If you trip and fall, or your paces seem altogether too irregular and undignified to feel quite right, console yourself that a Beggar’s Buddhist is at home in his rags, and leave the ceremonial robes to others.

     “It’s not much of a sales pitch, is it,” I kept laughing with my buddy: “Come join us on the mat and spend a decade or two fighting it out with ever-renewed waves of boredom and torpor, alternating with agitation and restlessness; with an endless stream of magnified cravings on the one hand, myriad discomforts and pains, or outright agonies, on the other! And the “whole catastrophe” (Zorba the Greek) seasoned with recurrent pangs of doubt about whether you are doing things right (to be getting such unedifying results so much of the time) and whether it is really worth the trouble. A far cry from the quick fixes offered by others, or even the promise by our own Papa Goenka that after a year of serious practice “it all gets so easy.” No, it doesn’t, not in our experience, anyway…

     “But wouldn’t it have to be difficult?” my buddy mused with a smile. “Or how else could it be so precious?” (An attitude perhaps a little more congenial to him, as the owner of a gym, among many other caps he wears, including that of writer, punk-rocker, and school-bus driver.) True, what we have to struggle for most, we tend to value correspondingly; and what is of particular worth does often, as a simple matter of fact, require particular effort and determination, even devotion. For my part, more a cat than a tiger these days (no. 124), I don’t think I would mind a bit of “reaching Nibbana the quick and easy way,” as they apparently wish each other in Burma. I just don’t think it’s very realistic, especially in apparently tough cases such as mine and my buddy’s.

     Think of it this way: what are our struggles on the mat, after all, but reflections of the difficulties in our lives at large? And do they not, for all their troubles, offer this promise and consolation, at least: that the conscious miseries of the practice are meant to be therapeutic (or so we like to think), while those of life are at best educational in the sense of Greek tragedy (nos. 32 and 109)? Thus the melancholy passage in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (1.176-) that Bobby Kennedy liked to quote for effect, as I’ve mentioned before):

Man by suffering shall learn

So the heart of him

Aching with remembered pain

Bleeds and sleepeth not

Until wisdom comes against his will

     It is helpful to recognize—certainly salutary and perhaps consoling to a point—that in an important sense, it does not matter much what exactly passes through your mind during the assigned time you set aside for your daily sittings (no. 176), provided only that you stay in the ring and do not deliberately go against your method of meditation. Your mind may be muddy and distracted, bored or agitated, even angry or resentful: so long as you do not deliberately stoke the fires, but do what you can to watch what is unfolding with whatever dispassion you can muster (very little, it may be), you are doing your job.

     You may get punched and pummeled in the Vipassana ring, even knocked to the ground; but last the prescribed number of rounds, and you will emerge a champion, however beaten and bruised, or even defeated, you may feel when you get up. Or if that sounds too violent for your taste, the challenge is to complete your daily runs, not to earn points for style and elegance. If you need to trot more than running, or walk, or even crawl on all fours, you are doing your part. The sensed quality of your experience may seem very low, granted; but the quality of your meditation depends only on your persistence and the equanimity you develop with whatever happens to arise in your mind and body, be it beautiful or ugly, intriguing or utterly uninteresting, sharp or dull, refined or ragged.

     That said, such is the strain and pain, at times, of putting your sore spots under the magnifying glass of intense Vipassana meditation, that it can feel like being lost at sea, inestimably far from land, with waves ten or twenty meters high all around—while one is holding on to the breath as a kind of emergency anchor and steering by whatever scraps of equanimity may still come within reach in such heavy seas. Despite all that is hard to endure about these howling tempests, it is possible to ride them out, even as they seem to threaten you with shipwreck at every turn—and the discovery that such a thing can be done, in the roughest waters by an ordinary human being, is not only a great relief but a potentially liberating discovery. (To switch from watery to fiery metaphors, you can learn to burn the weeds that so proliferate on our minds with the pure blaze of your detached attention, and the ashes thus left behind make for a most potent and wholesome fertilizer. As a mere thought or promise, it may not be much; but as an experience it is a revelation.)

     Then again, when amidst the heaving waters one’s powers of concentration and equanimity themselves go ragged and give way, even hardened meditators can get disheartened. The Pali Canon tells of accomplished monks in the Buddha’s day who were “not bearing up” under severe illness and got quite troubled, despite their many years of practice, over how sickness had ravaged their mental powers. If you cannot focus or be equanimous, the Buddha consoled them, then observe your scattered mind and its terrible agitation, and the frustration arising over it. Watch whatever arises with any detachment at all, reminding yourself that this collection of aggregates is not in fact the self it purports to be (even if the feeling of self may remain unshakable until the very end of the Path), and you are meditating properly, however unsatisfactory it may all feel to you. (The cases of Phagguna and Khemaka—Anguttara Nikaya 6.56 and Samyutta Nikaya 22:89, respectively—are not of the despairing kind, but they capture very well the spirit of the Buddha’s consoling advice.)

     A decade ago, I brought back from the center of the Incan universe (bought at a stall only a few hundred meters from the central temple complex in Cusco) a white-and-gold alpaca blanket so soft and shimmering that it might almost be woven from the rays of the sun itself. So beautiful, almost otherworldly, does it look to me that it would, before, have struck me as well-nigh sacrilegious to even consider sitting on it.

     After my latest retreat, however, the matter appeared suddenly in a different light. If the blanket’s beauty strikes me as almost sacramental (though in sober fact merely a particularly nice product of the Sacred Valley countryside, with no evident connection to any priestly class or activity, past or present), then what better place for it than my meditation seat, which, on account of the sometimes trying raggedness that I describe above, has all-too often appeared a seat of misery to me rather than a seat of enlightenment? Should not the very softness to the touch and pleasingness to the eye remind me that the suffering is endemic to sentient existence, and that the cushion, freely sat upon, is meant to be a place not of continued bondage but of potential liberation, and reverence too, even if it be by way of the seat of one’s pants? (Devotees of the Diamond Sutra might appreciate the detail of a diamond weave in the fabric.)

     I recall a moment of peculiar but also particular spiritual exaltation, around the same time in Peru, when I was emptying my desperately loose bowels at an outhouse in the jungle, and the relief expressed itself by a halo appearing briefly above my head. “The sanctification of the shitter,” I concluded with a smile.

     Nothing sacrilegious there, I must insist. Contrary to the familiar calumnies against certain elementary bodily functions, they are not in fact unclean at all—not, that is, if they are handled properly. In a similarly slanderous spirit, it has been alleged by some very ancient traditions of thought and worship (and echoed by certain traditionalists of a Buddhist bent to this day, including Goenka-Vipassana centers) that there are supposedly unwholesome vibrations emanating from the feet and that they must therefore not be pointed at teachers, and the like.

     What one takes as an expression of disrespect may be culturally negotiable to some extent, but as for the maligned feet, I must take their part with some vehemence: they perform acts of heroism every day carrying us through life, as anyone will appreciate who has ever sustained an injury or endured an orthopedic weakness there. If they become unclean, then it is our doing, not theirs. And thus with all life-sustaining bodily functions: where they operate as they should, and we employ them skillfully to the right ends, there is nothing disgusting even about the most maligned among them. It is our bad intentions or neglectfulness that make them otherwise and give just cause for censure, nothing else.

     Thus, in keeping with my profession of bodily faith (in full view of all the torments our embodied existence nonetheless exposes us to), I replaced the “saddle blanket” in which I have been wrapping my meditation cushion for twenty years, and initiated it with a first, suitably ragged sitting (the peremptory urge to urinate is all for the best, but not a meditator’s friend). May I thus be reminded, whenever I feel any lingering pangs of scruple about placing my posterior on something so fine, to honor my meditation-seat despite the countless discomforts and distresses I have endured there! I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha…

     By the Buddhist books, a human birth is so very precious and enviable (even to the gods, we are told) not because it confers any immunity to suffering (as we all know only too well), but because of how precariously we are balanced just above the abyss, and yet able to rise above it. In the higher realms, it is said, where more rarified beings enjoy their perfect games of beach volleyball in the meridian splendor of near-eternal youth and beauty (or so we may picture their days, for want of closer familiarity with their ways), the element of Dukkha (though  still present, even there, as a subtle undercurrent) is not apparent enough to propel the denizens towards liberating effort, while in the animal realm proper, the suffering is plainly too gross and all-consuming to leave room for much else. Unlike the wretched beasts and the complacent gods, then, we are, at least potentially, just comfortable enough to make a sustained push for liberation possible, while miserable enough to be spurred on towards finding a way out of the swirling maze of Samsara (no. 23).

     Just after the retreat, something quite unexpected began happening: I found myself—for the first time in twenty years on the Path—compelled to sit for three, four, five hours a day on my own, not from a sense of obligation or as a chore, but because I needed it so much. This unprecedented turn in my daily practice did go, I noticed with astonishment, a long way towards taming the usual raggedness. For a little while…

     And then, without any warning or provocation beyond a change of routine and locale (vacations are perilous in this respect, see no. 61), the spell broke again, as it always does, sooner or later. The ever-changing winds of life and its vicissitudes (no. 16) came sweeping back, scattering the briefly well-aligned pieces, and bringing the raggedness back in full force. So it goes. Thus last night’s sitting, in particular, which turned out to be one of the most grueling hours I can remember on the mat, despite there being no very intrusive or swirling thoughts to contend with, no overly distracting pains tormenting me, not much tiredness, and no great difficulty with focusing and concentrating even—simply a raw endurance test fought out with a mind that was resisting every minute of the hour.

     One might be tempted, at such junctures, to turn peevish and ask why it should be so: what is wrong with me that while some get to soar across the inward seas or into the skies even, I should keep getting shipwrecked in this manner, tossed about in a miserable little nutshell or leaky life-raft, or washed brutally ashore to break my mental rocks there? The answer is not very remarkable: such if life at this moment, that’s all. The sound and fury, and all the irritating difficulty that goes with it, comes not from the practice itself, but reflects the state of your own ever-agitated mind, nothing else. The sittings merely show you what is really going on, and how, at bottom, the inner mess can be pacified only by observing with as little flinching and as much equanimity as possible whatever arises and passes away before the mind’s eye. (If such recognitions taste bitter to you, as well they might, then there you have one more thing to observe with dispassion.)

     And so we tread on, we ragged pilgrims: a little wearily at times, but sustained on the rocky road by a quiet, flickering, but let us hope inextinguishable faith that there is a better way, and that we are heading towards it, snail-like perhaps, but every day a little more, even if it does not always feel like it. We should count our blessings: the tradition recognizes even tougher cases than our ragged lot: those with particularly strong propensities to lust or anger, for example, who may come around to leading a perfectly pure and holy life, yet continue to be racked by “pains and griefs, weeping with a fearful face” (Majjhima Nikaya 45.6). Sometimes even the most wholesome spiritual practice, the Buddha observed, can be like drinking “fermented urine mixed with various medicines” (Majjhima Nikaya 46.19). Enjoy!

(To Robin)