The Body is in Pain; The Mind is Okay

Ramadan Guest Post #01

Ramadan Mubarak, to those observing.

This month, I will be sharing with you a series of guests posts from readers and writers around the world. It’s a way for me to take a break during this holy, introspective month, while also using this platform to uplift the voices of others. Today, we kick off with a lovely piece by Amani Saeed on an unexpected stay at a Buddhist monastery… enjoy!

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When I left the UK to begin an indefinite trip around the world, spending 9 days in a Buddhist monastery was not on my bingo card.

Let’s start with the facts: I had never meditated before in my life. The closest I’d gotten to it was a two minute guided breathing session on the Calm app. But when my hostel bunkmate in Bangkok spoke about her time at Wat Pa Tam Wua, a forest monastery in the North of Thailand, I remembered what I had said to a friend before leaving London— “I just want to go somewhere and be quiet.”

screengrab from a youtube video at the monastery

I had a lot on my mind when I left the city. After almost a decade working a full time job and performing and hosting on the poetry circuit, I worried I was losing my own voice. When navigating so many spaces, I often felt the need to be the counterbalance to whatever was happening around me. To be quiet and attentive when others were chatty and wanting to be heard; talkative and charming when others were shy and needed drawing out. It was becoming hard to distinguish between my own thoughts and those of my friends, people I respected, community leaders, other artists, Instagram infographics, teachers, billboards, facilitators, memes, colleagues… I was keen to go somewhere where I didn’t have to be a reactive personality, didn’t have to fulfill the expectations I imagined other people had of me. Somewhere I could instead pause, listen, and in the silence, hear my own voice again.

With Ramadan approaching this year, I also thought it might be a chance to ease into the month. There’s a similar discipline in the schedules of a monastery dweller and a fasting Muslim. Think 4:30am wake ups to sleepwalk to the kitchen and cook an early meal. Hours of fasting (though you can drink water, so it’s definitely less difficult!). Sitting in a hall listening to the monks give talks on the dhamma, or Buddhist doctrine. Three rounds of meditation a day, studying the dhamma, cleaning the temple grounds, evening chanting… you see what I mean.

I hopped on a 5 hour bus through the mountains of Mae Hong Son. As we wound up the steep roads, I realised that I had no expectations of what my time at the monastery would be like. I made a silent promise that I wouldn’t push myself harder than I should - something I am often guilty of during Ramadan. I tend to beat myself up for the peccadillos, the nail polish I forget to take off my toes, every errant thought. This time, I didn’t want to add the burden of my own expectations into the mix. I wanted to go, learn, try. I didn’t know it then, but I know now that this is the only way forward - that to be filled with new wisdom, we need an open mind, an open heart.

The Body is in Pain; The Mind is Okay

I was surprised by the relative ease with which I acclimated to the schedule and practice of vipassana meditation. The monks’ advice was simple: your body is separate from your mind. If you sit cross-legged for half an hour, it’s inevitable that your legs will sting from the loss of blood flow. But if you persevere, keep still long enough, your mind will calm down. Eventually, you’ll realise that the mind and body are separate entities. You will genuinely recognise, ‘my body is in pain, but my mind is ok.’

I kept my promise to myself and truly had no initial expectations for what meditation would feel like. It wasn’t possible to know whether I would love it, hate it, be bored by it, or feel something different entirely, so I gave up on trying to imagine what it would be like. The first time I sat on the cushion, back straight, legs crossed, I felt a wave of calm murmuring over me. Though my eyes were shut, I felt my gaze settle downward beneath closed lids. My entire being became still. Focus flowed solely on the cool air rising through my nostrils, then the heat of the warmed breath diffusing across my upper lip. I stayed that way for 30 minutes, until the monk told us we could release our positions. I went to bed dazed, a little surprised, but happy.

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Over the next few days, I chased that feeling of complete contentment. Sometimes it came, and sometimes it didn’t. I realised quickly that expectation would kill the experience, that all I could do was surrender to the present moment. It was important to meditate and feel the different states my body moved through, whether those were sadness, restlessness, or all-consuming rage. Because yes, as I found out the hard way, you can indeed sit still for 30 minutes, feel your legs burning, your mind screaming, and accept it. As the monks told us, eventually, your mind does calm down.

All of this meditation is practice for a greater cause within the Buddhist faith: nirvana. This is commonly known as enlightenment, but can also be said to be the purest form of non-attachment. You don’t suffer anymore because you have no desire, no attachment to the sensory world, no sense of self. And at the most basic level, this starts with realising that your mind is not attached to your body - hence, the importance of practicing meditation.

I’m no monk, and I’m not sure I want to be so removed from the world. The practice reminded me of the Sufi concept of fana, or nothingness. Of being an empty vessel, devoid of ego, so that one might instead be full of God, and attain oneness with Allah. I still struggle with the thought that I need to disappear completely in order for Allah to fully appear. But this felt like a baby step in understanding how to do it without feeling resentful.

On Thinking or Knowing

Over the next few days, the monks spoke about the difference between thinking and knowing. One monk said that the mind could only be in one state at a time – if you were thinking, you couldn't know; if you were knowing, you couldn't think.

He described thinking as getting caught in a story. For example, if in your mind you see an image of your father, you might begin to remember a memory of him, the way he made you feel at that time, and so on. Before you know it, the emotions you were feeling back then creep into your current state. You can’t be in the now, because your mind is thinking about the past.

However, you can choose instead to know. Following the same example, you could instead watch your mind, and observe that you are thinking about your father. Rather than getting sucked into the story or memory, you instead acknowledge that the thought is there, and through that acknowledgement, allow it to pass by. At the same time, you recognise where you are right now: where your hands are positioned, how your breath is rising and falling. This way, you keep your awareness in the present. You’re knowing.

This concept helped me better understand khushoo, or the state of complete concentration in prayer. You’re not distracted by other thoughts, or robotically reciting surahs under your breath without your heart being in it: you’re praying with your whole being. Everything in you knows.

Photo by Juan chavez on Unsplash

Emotional Repression is not a Middle Path

One day after the main sermon, the monk was answering our questions and shared that you could meditate on different things - your thoughts, your breath, your body, even your feelings. In the dhamma, you detach from your feelings by recognising that you aren’t your emotions (you are not angry) because you have no control over what you feel. Feelings arise because of the conditions that cause them.

For example, if someone shoved you over and over, you would begin to experience anger. You can’t stop that anger from arising - the conditions for it are there. But you can observe the anger in the moment, and once you recognise it, it begins to fall away by itself. There’s no repressing it, but there’s no giving into it, either. There’s a balance. The concept of the middle way is spoken of in both Buddhism and Islam: not giving into extremes, being able to hold the tension of complexity in an elegant way.

As an eldest daughter for whom emotional regulation meant ‘bury the tough things in a cardboard box in the back of your brain’ rather than a more healthy means of processing, I found myself startled. When I meditated on feelings, I was surprised by how much I felt in an hour, let alone a day. There was a twist of grief from years ago. Pangs of shame when remembering someone whose love I didn’t see until it was too late. Fury from a previous job. The simple enjoyment of the sun on my face and the wind in my hair. I noticed how, like thoughts, feelings passed like clouds. The monk said that thinking and knowing still applied, and that we don’t need to become mired in emotions: “if you don’t jump to anger, anger cannot jump to you.”

The experience helped me recognise I’d been operating in an extreme: I’d been compartmentalising, swallowing my own feelings. Putting others before myself as a default, and erasing myself and my voice in the process. Ironically, I thought this was what was required of me in order to be a good person, a good Muslim. But being a Muslim is all about intention. I wasn’t emptying myself to become a vessel for Allah. I was making myself a void to please other people, to avoid conflict, to seem like a good person. The nothingness that came from this erasure was not godly. It was self-effacing. In a society where Muslim women are eroded all the time by the expectations of others, I was serving no one by internalising them.

If we refuse to know ourselves, we refuse to know Allah’s blessings. Allah has placed fitrah in each of us, beats closer to us than our jugular veins. When we deny our own thoughts, our own needs, our own natures, we’re denying ourselves of the divine gifts that were given to us. The gifts that we were all inherently born with, and have no need to deny.

Ultimately, I left the monastery with new tools and knowledge that I think - I know - will bring me closer to myself, and therefore, to my faith.

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Amani Saeed is an international writer treading the line between routes and roots. She is the founder of the hen-nah party, designed by and for queer South Asians, and co-writer for the award-winning film Queer Parivaar. You can find her on instagram at @amanithepoet.

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