Anicca…anicca…anicca…

The ancient Pali word from the time of the Buddha, which loosely translates to “impermanence,” is an earworm in my head, carried by the recording of a deceased Burmese meditation master whose deliberate enunciation of the word sounds both hypnotic and comical as I sit in isolation.

It’s a balmy February morning in Yangon, Myanmar, and day three of a ten-day Vipassana course­–a strict and challenging retreat to learn the meditation techniques passed down from the Buddha. I’m alone in a windowless pagoda cell enclosed by bare, white walls, a space just large enough to accommodate a single person. Cross-legged on a faded cushion, I concentrate hard to feel any minute sensations of tingling, burning, or itching in the small triangular area between my nostrils and upper lip as I’ve been instructed to do. I’ve been looking forward to this allotted time in the pagoda, hoping this special environment would somehow induce quality in my practice. But it’s been over an hour of futile concentration, and I can’t feel a damn thing above my lips!

A quiet exasperation builds up as I let out a long sigh. I’ve traveled far to this hermetic nation just waking up to the outside world after decades under a dictatorship-induced coma. Here, on the other side of the world in Southeast Asia, far from a home I had finally found in Germany that no longer belongs to me, I’m trying hard not to think, not to remember. But pestering memories bombard me. My closed eyelids serve as the perfect projector screen upon which they flash like old, scratched filmstrips cut up and sliced out of sequence.

I want to reconstruct this broken story. Salvage only the good bits. Instead, the parts I’ve been running from come at me in unpredictable intervals and intensities: violent and vivid, worn-out and distorted…rehashing the last twelve months of my life. The twelve months since Rome.

Finally, no longer able to contain my frustration, I break the course rule of no movement during meditation and let out a muted howl, careful not to disturb my fellow meditators in the adjacent cells. I pound my head with my fists like a madwoman in hopes of releasing all the pent-up self-pity and rage.

Why am I still unable to escape this heartache after a year of struggle?

Why did I have to quit everything familiar and safe to roam through foreign lands?

Why do my sincere efforts feel in vain?

In this moment of heightened irritation, a sudden calmness washes over me, and a knowing that this scene, in this windowless cell, will serve as the opening to my memoir. The words come flooding in. The prologue starts to write itself.

This is crazy! my mind protests. I was sure it would be years before I’d be ready to put my story into words. To have enough strength to relive the pain in the retelling of my heartbreak. And wait! I’m not allowed to write for another seven days… If I need to remember these words, can’t you at least wait until the course is over? I try to bargain with the universe.

My pleas fall on deaf ears. The words keep coming. I guess when the universe deems us ready for a task, we’d better surrender and receive whatever comes through. My mind reluctantly quiets as I submit to the knowing this book has to be born, trusting the words will still be there in a week’s time, with an intrinsic understanding that my life exists in two parts: before and after Rome.

Mia Deng
February, 2016 (Month 12)
Dhamma Joti Vipassana Centre
Yangon, Myanmar