January 25
“Nothing is constant. Everything changes. Change is eternal. We are changing all the time. It’s a fact.
Suffering comes when we do not accept this basic fact.
We are attached to something or someone, we long for them, and then they change.
We define ourselves as x or y, and we change – and are no longer x or y.
The certain outcome is suffering. Our souls are trapped in the past, but the only time that exists is now, the present. ”
The monk droned on every evening. And each time, I thought of what Amit had said – it seemed like a hundred years ago – “It’s something I’ve noticed with my clients. People hate feeling stuck in one situation when they’ve changed. Their external and internal realities aren’t in sync.”
And that’s what I’d experienced over the past few days.
Memories. Endless memories. Painful, agonizing memories that were killing me on the inside.
Memories I was sure I had left behind surfaced over and over.
I tried to accept them, like the monk told us to, but it was too much.
If it wasn’t memories, it was thoughts. What could I have done differently?
What comes next? And after the thoughts came the hallucinations – as if my mind had to feed me something so I didn’t get bored.
The experience ate at me. I suffered every minute of it.
The image of Amit came to my mind so often.
His whiskers, dimples, brown eyes, glasses, charming smile, smooth skin and small, slender body that looked like it could be knocked down with a feather.
It hurt to know I was the one who’d landed a heavy blow.
I screamed in pain that seemed physical.
I woke terrified by nightmares. But no one spoke to me.
No one looked at me. And, outside, I couldn’t relate to anything – the silence and calm, nature and sea were all alien to me, not connected to the awful world inside my head.
I tried my best to practice meditation, but my mind wandered constantly – memories and hallucinations.
I promised myself that if I stuck it out it would get better every day.
Maybe after such concentrated suffering I would feel purified, cleansed of all the poison in my soul, the poison that made me hate myself every day for what I had done, and what I had not done.
Upon waking on the fifth morning of silence I tried to be optimistic.
I hoped I’d processed all the bad memories and that it would be easier from then on.
I was proud of my positive attitude. I knew that at the end of the day I could say I’d made it halfway through.
But I wasn’t a child. Bad memories I had forgotten had not disappeared, they were just hiding behind more recent ones.
I scanned my body during mediation, examining every inch, trying to sense my skin.
I discovered, sadly, that even the skin remembers, and has bad memories that have never gone away.
I remembered the night Amit and I danced naked in his apartment.
It was a wonderful memory. But there was a moment when my body pulled back from his touch.
I knew it wasn’t because of him, and I hoped he wouldn’t think it was.
Some wounds are buried deep within us. We try not to recall those memories.
We tell ourselves it’s not important; ask: what’s the point?
The truth is we usually suppress memories that are so profoundly painful.
Sometimes, for a fleeting moment, we realize they’re there, we’re not surprised, and then we go about our business as if nothing happened.
But I was meditating and there was no way to escape that memory from when I was thirteen.
I remember being excited about my first visit to the mikveh after my bar mitzvah.
I always loved new experiences and going to the ritual baths – forbidden to children – was like a dream come true.
The rabbi greeted me at the entrance to the building.
I headed for the water, but he said he had to undress me before I went in.
Of course I agreed and then we both got into the cool water.
It felt wonderful, but then I noticed that the rabbi was close to my body.
I thought it was part of the ceremony, that he was guiding me, that it was supposed to be like that.
But then I saw him touching himself and touching me down there and I didn’t know what to think.
He went into a weird trance and didn’t answer my questions.
I don’t remember how long we were there, or exactly what happened.
Part of the memory just vanished, but before we left he told me to keep what had happened between him, me, and God.
That it was an important mitzvah . I believed it was normal – no one had told me about it so it must be a secret that everyone kept.
I never went back to the mikveh again. That first experience was more than enough.
But a year or two later the rumors started.
Nobody dared admit it had happened to them personally – it was always to someone else.
I started to understand that what had happened to me in the mikveh was not meant to happen.
That was when I lost my respect for religion.
I did what I was supposed to, of course, but I didn’t feel the actions had any meaning.
When I was 16, my parents invited that same rabbi for a Shabbat meal.
I was repulsed by him and didn’t want him in our house, so I told my parents about what had happened at the mikveh three years earlier.
They didn’t believe me – to put it mildly.
They told me I was insulting a decent, important man in the community; that I had been a child back then and had either imagined or misunderstood the events.
A chasm opened in me as they spoke; I felt like the loneliest person in the world.
No one would ever understand me, believe me. Maybe rightly so.
The awful thing was, I wanted to believe them.
The memory got shoved aside and overshadowed by other memories.
But it wasn’t really. It was always there – burned into my skin.
It was there when I avoided talking to my parents about my problems and just ran away.
It was there when I didn’t want to come out to them or hear what they had to say about it, even from thousands of miles away.
It was there that night with Amit, and it was there when I couldn’t say yes when he asked me to go to New York with him.
Amit once asked me what my story was. I told him I didn’t have one, but maybe he knew before I did.
Gong! Break time.
Shit, I’d forgotten to even try and meditate.