Only within burns the
Fire I kindle
My heart the alter
My heart the alter
A 5-day Buddhist meditation retreat is not supposed to be fun. At least it’s not advertised as such and most people have trouble being silent that long. Not me. For me the retreat was relaxing and, dare I say, fun. I discovered I really liked not having to talk to anyone and no one talking to me. I mean really liked it, maybe too much. There’s a tremendous freedom in silence I think. Maybe it’s because I don’t have to care what other people think as much, simply because I don’t have to interpret every word that comes out of their mouths.
The expectation on these retreats is that you will be tortured by your issues coming up in the silence, but without the usual ways to combat them or feed them. I didn’t feel that. Issues came up but they floated away, no deep vein tapped, just a time for general self contemplation and relaxation. Then at the very last sitting before I left one of the teachers offered this chant:
Only within burns the
Fire I kindle
My heart the alter
My heart the alter
By the time she chanted it the third time I finally understood the words, when she chanted it the forth time I chanted it with her and the fifth time she chanted it I couldn’t sing because my voice was cracking, my heart breaking. Then tears were streaming down my face, and I was barely able to stop myself from wailing, managing a quiet sobbing.
I still don’t understand why that chant struck such a rich vein of emotion. But I couldn’t get it out of my head for hours and if I thought about it too much I would tear up again. In the cab, on the plane, once I got home. It stayed with me.
Loving yourself is the first principle of the self help addict and often the most difficult to achieve. The theme of the retreat was metta, lovingkindness. I don’t know if that theme was official, but we had a sitting every afternoon with metta instruction and we ended every day with a metta chant. There was a focus not just on metta in general but metta toward oneself specifically. I listened to the metta meditation talks the whole week, knowing in the back of my mind that I don’t love myself, not really. Yet I let it go easily like it was any other issue that came up, not feeling deeply affected by this knowledge.
But this chant. This simple chant somehow opened me up when nothing else did. Even now thinking about it I’m starting to cry. I can’t deconstruct it or make any intellectual sense of it. All I know is that this chant affects me deeply, it stops me in my tracks, so I have to listen to it, pay attention. It’s like a accumulation of everything I’ve ever felt about myself. And that doesn’t make sense I know. Logically, linguistically those words put together should not emcompass the whole world, the whole universe, but somehow they do.
Somehow they explain everthing.
