Good For Practice

A story about the sounds of a silent meditation retreat

Anyone who has spent time meditating knows there is no such thing as true, complete silence in the shrine room. The shuffling of feet as we enter, the rustle of clothing as people take a seat in a chair or on a cushion. The creaking of old floorboards loosened with time. The gong that brings us to stillness. The occasional cough. The gentle breathing of a few dozen people. The single pane windows never quite close, so when the wind picks up, as it so often does, it whistles into the room, an eery sound.

Forty minutes in and the Umdze rings the gong to signify the start of walking meditation. Chairs and cushions are moved towards the centre of the room to make a space all around the outer edge. Weeks of walking in a circle on the hardwood floors, I know where boards will creak, sharp and high, or where they will groan deeply. Up on my toes, balanced lightly, I place my feet deliberately, to see if the sound would be softer or not come at all.

In walking mediation, my mind easily follows the breath until the moment when the Umdze takes their place at the front of the room. They pick up the wooden block and striking stick.

The clack is abrupt.

For a measurement of time so small I could not have perceived it if not for the hours of meditation I have done, there is a gap.

The circle is broken as everyone moves without speaking in a considerable susurrus of clothing and feet and hands to move cushions and chairs back to where they had been. People criss-cross the space to get to their seats as swiftly as possible, and then we all stand, eyes front, watching the Umdze, who stands watching us. In this moment again, there is another nearly imperceptible gap, a nanosecond of stillness and silence.

…

And that’s when someone farts.

It’s a perfect fart too. Like a sound effect. Like a fart a child would make by pressing their palms to their mouths and blowing. It’s rounded and amplified by the high ceiling of the shrine room and the quiet. A result of eating beans and cabbage at almost every meal.

In my chest is a tension I do everything I can to fight. Thinking, I label it. Thinking, thinking, thinkingthinkingthinkingthinking.

The Umdze sits and we follow. The room is full of the shuffle and shift of bodies moving, butts finding benches and cushions and chairs.

Next to me, in maroon robes, sits a nun. I glance at her from the corner of my eye, her scalp grey beneath the stubble growing in on her head. Her mouth is pursed, cheeks round with suppressed mirth.

Another gap.

The nun snort-laughs through her nose. I can longer suppress the pressure in my chest. It releases into the shuffling sound of people finding stillness. We giggle maniacally and then try to suck in the laughter, a losing battle as we look each other in the eye, setting one another off again. The nun shakes her head. Around us, everyone is still and quiet, somehow not effected by such a perfectly comedically timed fart.

The Umdze rings the gong, the sound reverberating, spiralling around the bowl. The nun and I suck in air, suck down the hilarity, squash the laughter.

Thinking thinking thinking thinking.

I resume my meditation, focusing on the breath. But the laughter is in my lungs, in my belly, beneath my diaphragm. It rises and as the ring of the bell fades I try to fight it. Squeezing my eyes, clamping lips shut, I pull on all the willpower I can possibly find while my mind is bombarded again and again and again with that fart punctuating the silence.

It’s no good.

I pop up from my seat and open the shrine room door, exiting as swiftly and silently as I can. My eyes bulge and I bite my cheeks, keeping my head down so the monk seated outside the door, acting as guardian, will not see how incapable I am of containing my laughter. I dash up the spiral staircase that leads to an annex library on the uppermost floor of the Abbey.

Here is a seat, a chair of Scandinavian design with sloping wooden arms that curve down into legs allowing for the occupant to rock. Rock I do, seated there, letting the laughter rise up and out of me. It seems to start in the soles of my feet, the muscles arched with glee. My belly is bubbles and and my chest full of merriment.

I feel as though my body is remembering every single hilarious moment of my entire life. I cry with laughter. I think I will never be able to meditate again. As long as I have the memory of that fart in my brain, it will always set off this reaction. I know it is not that hilarious, and yet I cannot convince my brain of this.

While there is no door between me and the monk I passed on my way up, the distance caused by the stairs muffles what he hears. He listens, brows furrowed, to my catching breath, the way I am gulping in air. In the library I am laughing so hard it is nearly silent. I am letting it happen, letting this joyous outburst run it’s course.

I laugh for a whole hour, the entire duration of the final session of meditation that afternoon. I laugh without pause and it is as fresh at the end of the hour as it was at the start. When I stop it is out of exhaustion. The muscles in my neck and arms ache, and there is a gentle throbbing behind my eyes, but I also feel relaxed and at ease.

---

A few days later, we get a break from the silence we had been maintaining. The monk comes to me, an earnest expression on his face. He tells me that he is not going to pry, but that he is thinking of me. He tells me how he listened to me crying, and did Tonglen for me when I rushed from the shrine room to the annex library.

My face breaks wide with a grin. I laugh—although not as hard as that day. The tenderness in his face is so sweet, as he tells me he perceived my mirth as sorrow.

“No, no, no, I wasn’t crying,” I say.

He looks confused.

“I was laughing.”

The confusion remains.

“Because someone farted.”

He, of course, was outside the shrine room, and missed that perfect moment, so I tell him about it. The whole thing: How it was just as the shuffling stopped that this amazing, cartoon-worthy fart came forth. How it wrecked me, completely. He laughs as I tell him how I legitimately worried I would never be able to stop laughing, but how I also simply embraced it. Not good or bad. Just, farts are funny, and that’s what was happening right then. I shared it with him, this gift of humour and delight and silliness.

My uncle once told me he found meditation hard because, “What if I fart?”

To my uncle, and anyone concerned about such things, I say: So what if you do?

We have this idea that there is something solemn about spiritual practice. That it looks and sounds a particular way. That is transcends the reality of our body rather than including it.

But trust me when I say, everything is good for practice.

Even a fart in a shrine room.

~

This piece was inspired after sharing the story of someone farting during Yarne with one of my long-time patrons and fabulous Dharma Sister, Skipper Jenn. You can check out her blog, which is abundant with entertaining content good for a solid belly laugh.

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