Inside
Inside, there’s a knocking at the walls of my body that feels like a reminder. When I struggled to sit comfortably through long periods of meditation at a retreat last weekend, I tried to remember the other body with me who, at the same moment that my back and neck were pulsing fire, was lying in the most comfortable bed anyone can know in this world. The reality of the comfort inside me was in direct contrast to the pain outside, and it seemed odd that I could hold both at once.
Stay inside, warned Shoan to herself when she went into a period of hermitage at the monastery. She wrote it on a piece of paper that she kept propped up where she could see it at all times. Shoan, a fierce and warm monastic in her early forties, is something of a role model to me. Everything she says seems to penetrate deeply through whatever rambling muddle sits at the top of my mind and get straight to the heart of what I have to do. Stay inside is a good direction for meditation. Staying inside means you’re not trying to get out. Instead of letting your mind wander to where else you could be and what else you could be doing, you try to be comfortable with where you are.
Many people describe childbirth as a process of going deep inside, to a place where they lose all sense of time and maybe even the concept of pain itself. We practice a kind of meditation in our childbirth course, which involves relaxing every muscle and sinking down to the space beneath thought. Close your eyes, the teacher said, and imagine you’re in an enchanted forest. (The forest of the pain of birth?) You spot a little fawn who wants to play. You try to pet the fawn but she scampers away from you, taking you deeper through the trees. You run together on hidden paths. Eventually, though, the trees thin out. (A cervix, also, thins out.) The fawn dashes to the edge of the forest and then pauses. She looks back at you for reassurance and you nod. Slowly she steps out into the full sunlight.
The name of the course is “Liminal Birthing,” which is a nice word. Transition, boundaries, in-betweens. The boundary of my body right now feels immense. Two people and then three people. Quiet and then loud. Comfort and then distress, safety and then danger. Staying inside seems superior to being out.
But what we’ve learned about fetal development suggests that the boundary of the body is far more permeable than we used to believe. In utero, babies learn the sound of their mother’s voice and later on cry in a way that reflects her accent. They develop a taste for the foods she eats a lot of, and seem to prefer those to unfamiliar tastes. They develop a sense of the world through her stress levels, with traumatic events during pregnancy reflected in their bodies as biological markers for a predisposition for PTSD. It’s very hard to imagine the thing inside as anything more separate from me than an oddly restless organ, but everything that makes up my world is forming the preconscious experience of another person.
Everyone at the weekend retreat (or “sesshin”) was delighted to learn that there was an extra pre-sentient being among us during the services. I told them that he could certainly hear our chanting. He got called “auspicious” like twenty times. Sesshin is a difficult period, because it adheres to a strict schedule, involves lots of ceremonies with precise rules, and has you sitting completely still on a cushion for 7-9 hours a day. All of these details together, however, form a structure that makes it relatively easy to practice staying inside your mind. The real challenge, as they never tire of reminding us, is to stay inside when we are outside of the cloister. Zen is meant to be a practical practice above all else. There is no Heaven or spirit world separate from this one. As we listen to the liturgy, we’re reminded that the truth is not to be found in words, and as we sit deep inside our ourselves, we’re reminded that there’s nothing to be uncovered in there. The material for study is only ever the reality of where we are right now and the practice is to deny nothing from that reality.
Birth is sudden, but I expect that in some ways it will be gradual. For the first few months, especially, this being will be more like an externalized part of me than something separate. I’m sure it will be terrifying to have a big chunk of me outside and vulnerable. And maybe a lot of the fear of parenthood has to do with gradually reconciling yourself to a part of you growing steadily further away from your protection and control. I wonder if I’ll learn something about how the clear and definable “me” is more porous of a concept.
“In the San Francisco Bay, there is a place called Goat Rock Beach where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean. On their way to each other, it appears as though it is a river meeting an ocean. But it is simply water meeting water.” Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, in The Shamanic Bones of Zen. What is inside and outside is a matter of perspective. The closer you zoom in to what everything is made of, the less clear boundaries become.
What I’m cooking
Crispy oat biscuits
Whether you’re seven months pregnant or have any other reason for wanting a snack, these biscuits (cookies? crackers?) hit the spot of sweet, salty, and fiber-rich to make you full. They started out as a recipe for digestive biscuits that then made a turn toward Scottish oatcakes, but I’d recommend rolling them out thinner than either for a crispy texture.
Recipe for paid subscribers: