Tomorrow I’ll be starting week five of self-isolation. It occurred to me last weekend that I can approach this time as a period of “self” isolation: stepping back from all the “selves” I’d gotten used to identifying with before this pandemic hit.
I began thinking about this question of “self” on Sunday because I’d just started rereading In Love with the World, a memoir of sorts by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher. I first read the book in January, on the recommendation of a friend, and I found it so compelling that I’ve come back to it now.
A revered meditation master who teaches throughout the world and serves as the abbot of several monasteries in India, Rinpoche decided, in 2011, to embark on a solitary wandering retreat. His goal? To remove himself from his familiar, comfortable life and work setting, and enter into new circumstances which he anticipated would challenge him in unimaginable ways. This would, in turn, give him the chance to test – and improve – his spiritual skills. “Adding wood to the fire” of his practice is how he put it.
Rinpoche laid out plans for how the monasteries and his international teaching organization would function in his four-year absence, but he didn’t tell anyone exactly when he would set off. Then, one night, he left his monastery in secret, literally under cover of darkness. Although all the arrangements were in place for how the monasteries would continue to run, no one expected to simply wake up one morning to find their abbot gone from his room. Thus, when he vanished in the night, his community experienced the sudden loss of Rinpoche.
His departure also meant a loss of “Rinpoche” for Rinpoche himself: Although he was still wearing his traditional monk’s robes when he walked out of the monastery gates, he left behind the people who always traveled with him, who bought his train tickets and arranged for his meals, who made sure he had comfortable, quiet lodgings. He was now also without those comfortable hotel rooms and first class train tickets themselves. He’d taken only a small amount of money with him, enough to cover basic meals and third-class train tickets for the first couple of weeks. After that, he would sleep out in the open, or in caves, and beg for his food. As well, since he was traveling anonymously, he no longer experienced the respectful treatment from others that his position in life had brought him for decades. To those around him now, he was simply a monk in robes sitting on the floor of the train station like so many other travelers. In Love with the World tells the story of the initial weeks of his retreat, when Rinpoche comes face to face with this loss of all the interactions with disciples and attendants and family members, whose respect and deferential treatment had defined who he was and validated his existence over the previous thirty-six years of his life.
Rinpoche writes with great poignancy of how unprepared he feels for this loss, despite three decades of Buddhist training and practice. He describes for the reader the disturbing thoughts and emotions that rise up and destabilize his mind in these first days, and how he manages to cope with them by turning to all the practice tools he has acquired over the years. We read how difficult it is for him to just be at these times, when no one is aware that he is a famous lama, when no one offers him a seat on the train, or luxurious sleeping quarters, simply because of who he is. “Who is it who is feeling overwhelmed and scared?” Rinpoche asks himself repeatedly, now that he has suddenly relinquished the roles that defined him in the past, now that those who continually affirmed his status and spiritual attainments are all far away. He inquires, “Who is Mingyur Rinpoche?”
As part of his inquiry, he reminds himself, over and over again, that, according to Buddhist teachings, none of us has any fixed, stable identity. The “self” we cling to never remains the same from one moment to the next. It is his oft-repeated act of reaching back to this and other core Buddhist teachings that enables Rinpoche to get through hour after hour of mental disturbance. Some days, though, he is not sure he will be able to keep it up. In a middle of a days-long bout with food poisoning, he wonders whether he should go back to the support and familiarity of the monastery. But he stays where he is, and perseveres.
It’s so comforting for me, a lay practitioner of Buddhism, to read about how Rinpoche meets the challenges that confront him. Here’s someone who grew up with the teachings and received instruction from his father (also an esteemed teacher) from his early childhood, before heading to the monastery at age eleven to begin his own formal studies. Even this accomplished monk, who consciously chooses to make this change in his life and begin a retreat, even he – bolstered by three decades of Buddhist practice – finds it difficult to cope with this sudden shift in who he is in the world. Sitting on the floor of third class train compartments, sleeping out in the open, eating leftover (and spoiled) food that a restaurant owner scrapes from the plates of patrons and gives him for free once his money runs out: This is his life on wandering retreat.
I cannot begin to compare whatever challenges I have encountered during the four weeks of what I could call my non-wandering retreat, with what Rinpoche faced. If you want to talk about adding wood to the fire of practice, I’ve added maybe the equivalent of a matchstick to mine. Even that is overstating it. What I’m doing is more like adding one blade of dried grass to some barely-lit embers. I’m also so much less prepared than Rinpoche was, for even the effects of that grass: I come to my self-isolation retreat armed with some years of pretty lackadaisical, layperson Buddhist practice. It’s probably precisely because of my own lack of spiritual preparation that the story of how Rinpoche managed to make his way through the early weeks of his retreat suddenly felt very relevant to me last weekend. That’s why I picked his book up once more.
At one point, describing what he would face upon leaving the monastery, Rinpoche writes, “I had never known a day without people and props that mirrored the stitched-together patchwork that became known to me and others as Mingyur Rinpoche.” It struck me when I read this, that I’m facing a somewhat similar situation. In my pre-self-isolation life, I used any of a number of labels to describe myself: mom, grandma, sister, aunt, friend, writer, cat-petter, coffee shop regular, bookstore frequenter, yoga practitioner, Reiki practitioner, Buddhist practitioner, racial justice organizer, knitter, Russian speaker, hiker, bakery patron… In living within these roles, I encountered people who used these same labels to define me. Sometimes they even respected or appreciated me in some way because of them. These mutually-accepted labels provided a stable context for my interactions with the people I knew. They also lent a certain solidity to the image I had of my “self”. “I am a Reiki/yoga/Buddhist practitioner, etc.” Any feeling that folks appreciated me in some way based on one of these labels only bolstered my attachment to this or that aspect of my “self”.
Then, not quite four weeks ago, I, just as Rinpoche did, made a conscious choice to take myself out of the usual flow of my life. I did so out of a desire to safeguard my health and the health of those around me. Unlike Rinpoche, I was not intending to dive into sustained inquiry into the question that Buddhism insistently places before us: What is the true nature of “self”? But, as it turns out, this is what I’m being given the opportunity to do.
When I stepped out of my familiar way of living, I also lost many of the interactions that shore up my identification with the various labels I use to define who I am, and to gain respect and validation. I didn’t entirely lose them, of course. I still speak with my friends and family, and have Zoom meetings and classes with folks. But the in-person interactions which constantly reinforced that I am [fill in label of choice] are no more. It struck me yesterday that, now that I’ve lost the ability to be active out in the world in the roles I’ve painstakingly constructed for myself, I’ve been attempting to create new, quarantine-friendly roles that can supply me with gratifying interactions and validation. One example: I’ve been making face masks for friends and family and neighbors. This would seem, on the surface, to be just an act of neighborliness, or affection. But, I realized yesterday, that’s not all that’s going on here. Sewing face masks is also a way to assert that I am still someone in this world, that I still have some role to play for which I can be recognized and valued. I am a sew-er of masks! As I sew them, I am helping others. At the same time, though, I am also diving into a sewer of attachment to my “self”. I am clinging to the habit of doing whatever I can to distinguish this “self”, to defend and perpetuate it. In the midst of this pandemic, I have been seeking new ways to keep my “self” alive and well.
Now I can see that this period of self-isolation is offering me something very precious: the chance to loosen my grip on this need to defend my “self” and protect it against a slide into anonymity. So, I’ve decided to embrace this sudden loss of so many of the labels I’ve thought of as “me”, and approach it as an opportunity to explore my “self”, and to make friends with the idea that no fixed “Sue Downing” exists. I have the chance to practice a new way of just being in the world, as whoever I end up being at a given moment, without then holding tight to it. A breakfast eater, for example. Or a flower sniffer. A lap for a napping cat. A birdlistener.
I have the great good fortune to be carrying out my exploration within a safe and comfortable home that’s well-stocked in food and virtual interactions with people I love – and who know and love me. That means that I’m not going to be creating the kind of bonfire Rinpoche constructed as he sought to add wood to the fire of his practice. But I feel strongly motivated to make the most of this opportunity. So, for the foreseeable future, I’ll practice isolating from my “self” as best I can in each moment, and continue my non-wandering retreat, one thin blade of dried grass at a time.
Sue Downing 