To serve a mania is detestable and undignified – Carl Jung
How did I get through a difficult Vipassana retreat? I had gone to the retreat (December 2022) more on a hunch than anything else. I was a completely inexperienced meditator and didn’t know what to expect. But when things got hard, I didn’t cry or give up or scheme. I unconsciously reacted in the way that is most comfortable to me. I put my head down and tried harder. And it worked.
But when I recently completed the same retreat, and found myself applying the same kind of pressure on myself, it made things worse. As the days dragged on, I became more and more agitated. More unhappy and stuck in my head.
Some relief finally came to me about halfway through the retreat, while I was asleep in a recess period. I’d spent the morning failing to relax and focus. When the meditation bell woke me, the words “If you keep setting fires, you’ll go insane” were ringing in my head. I felt a little better, and I mused on this interesting warning over the rest of the day. Unlike most dreams, this was fairly clear advice. I was the person setting fires; worrying about dirty socks or my meditation posture or some other trivial thing that caused me distress. I was the problem. It was also a command to stop doing something. The typical conscious approach to any sort of obstacle is to do something about it. Try something new. Try something different. Even if you’re not a control freak like me, it rarely crosses our mind to stop doing.
I mostly enjoyed then rest of the retreat, but had been badly shook up. On the last day when the noble silence was lifted, I explained my challenges to a more experienced meditator sitting in the ‘first row’. Unlike me he never seemed rushed, tense or tired. What was his secret? “Don’t take it too seriously”, he said. Huh. Why hadn’t I thought of that one?
The following night, my unconscious had additional words of wisdom for me, in the form of a cinematic dream set in New York City. The central character was a high ranking bureaucrat in charge of the subway system. He was well educated, efficient and knew exactly which trains needed to arrive where. An anonymous hacker his own age, who admired his work, called him milquetoast. Then all the train stations exploded.
Milquetoast. It’s not a word I’m consciously familiar with, but it accurately described the pale faced government offical. Although he’s careful, productive and good at his job, he’s fearful and “meek”1 when faced with real difficulties.
It wasn’t hard to draw a connection to how I’d acted on the retreat. Rather than spontaneously work hard like I had the first time, I tried to control and manage everything because I thought it would ‘work’. Not only does this attitude spoil most of life’s surprises and opportunities for growth, it can create unnecessary worry too.
Outside of a meditation retreat, what does a milquetoast approach look like to something like a game of tennis? Thinking through a checklist every-time you hit a ball. Making sure everything is ‘right’ before you start each point. Worrying about the score. Worrying about how you behave. Judging yourself if you make an easy mistake.
There’s nothing wrong with improving and optimising what you’re doing. But in most cases, we are better off just doing the thing (or stopping doing what we don’t need to do). Life tends to take care of itself, with a lot less conscious control than we think is needed (or that we even have).
This attitude can “get the job done”, but do we really want to live a life where we have solved every problem in a milquetoast way?
Buddha Bike 