Eyes Open

For the last year and half, I’ve been part an online meditation group called the Open Heart Project. The project, created and run by Susan Piver, consists of a twice-a-week newsletter that brings thousands of people to sit together in a ten-minute meditation. I’ve learned a lot through participating: it’s helped me feel calmer, detach from past- and future-oriented obsessions, and, when I’m lucky, connect with something outside of myself.

When I first began meditating, I struggled with the usual challenges: a perpetually sleeping foot, an inability to sit still… But the hardest part was learning to practice with my eyes open.

In the opening moments of every session, Susan asks everyone to look down, to place their attention on their breath, and to fix their gaze on a spot about six in front of them… Practicing with open eyes, she says, is a way of training ourselves to carry the meditative experience – to be mindful – in our day-to-day lives.

Before I joined the project, I’d associated spiritual practice with a bowed head and closed eyes, so keeping them open felt counter-intuitive, unnecesary even. Whenever I tried to follow Susan’s instruction, my eyes would betray me and jump all over the room, taking inventory of papers to sort and corners to sweep. They would pull me out of the moment and into the busyness of the rest of my life.

So I tried to cheat. I waited until late at night, turned off the lights, and pulled the blinds down, immersing myself in a sightless black that promised to eliminate environmental distractions. For a while, it worked. Sometimes, I felt the edge of something: a tingle on my skin, a phasing, a dissolution of my surroundings. Whenever the tingle came, I felt an appreciation for and acceptance of that moment.

Still, even in the darkness, the world found its way in: light from a streetlamp backlit my bamboo blinds, tracing the outline of the desk with its files, the shadowed corner collecting dust bunnies… I could have hung heavier blinds, but I knew my eyes would adjust no matter how deep a darkness I created. So I stopped trying to cheat, left the lights on, and forced myself to practice with my eyes open.

My gaze roamed the room with renewed curiosity, gloating in having overcome my attempt to stifle it. My mind went with it, too, scanning, searching, planning, seeking. That tingle I’d sometimes edged up against seemed out of reach, lost. I felt like I was just sitting there, wasting time, making no progress, while an infinite to-do list weighed down on me.

But after a while, I noticed a change. Not when I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, but when I was outside, immersed in the frenetic whirr of the machine city. I noticed it on a packed subway, with its bright lights, glitchy station announcments, and simmering hostility. I noticed it in a long line at the grocery store, surrounded by pre-made meals and gnarled, tattered lists. I noticed it between emails, meeting requests, friend requests, mentions, and faves. The tingle had come back.

The most incredible thing wasn’t that it had found me again, but that it was there when I needed it most. When the sensory and psychic overload of day-to-day life felt like too much. When the present moment seemed dull or frustrating. When my mind would ordinarily dwell on the past or worry about the future.

Susan was right: keeping my eyes open had brought meditation into my daily life in a way that my shrouded approach never had. So I learned not to blank out the world, to immerse myself in it, and to let my heart open along with my eyes.

The Open Heart Project is a fantastic investment of time and energy for anyone looking to get a start with meditation. You can sign up here.

Rock Tree

We stumbled upon the tree halfway between Hampi Bazaar and the Vittala Temple. After a slow and shade-less smear across the rock desert, a trail of spilled sweat and water evaporating in our footsteps, we were ready for a pause. Shuffling beneath its shadow, we made a wordless commitment to stay and regain.

The tree was enormous. Epiphites hung all around us, like the hardened strands of a half-torn web. A seam in its trunk looked wide enough to enter, opening into a womb of cool. There were steps poured around the tree's base, forming a misshapen alter that cracked where the roots refused to be encased. But strangest of all were the ribbons and string that dangled from every limb, weighed down by small, swinging bundles.

I stepped towards one, reaching out.

"They're for the dead," one my friends said. "People hang rocks here to remember their dead."

My fingers stopped, frozen by the hundreds of hearts twisting in the shade. Hung in satchels, torn cloth, and scraps of plastic bags, the rocks danced whenever the heat wriggled beneath the canopy. The ground was littered with fragments that had dropped, leaving a landscape of fallen, broken prayers.

Losses had brought me to Hampi: losses from death, from life. And so I found myself picking up a rock and a piece of plastic and making my way to the far side of the tree. I worked the stone into its nest and twisted it tight, as if wrapping a piece of candy. I thought of words never shared, of futures never lived, and said something, anything, trying to transfer the weight. I tied the stone to the tree.

With my back to the heat and my face to the seam, I closed my eyes and inhaled the cool from its dark inside.

When I came around, my friends were drifting away, back towards the fire of the road. My body resisted: it had grown accustomed to comfort of the floating shrine and its monument to loss.

But it was time. Time to leave the words and ghosts. Time to walk out of the soothing shadow of memory and push on, heart first, along the hot, open road.

Bridge

Within minutes of arriving in the village of falling foothills, I stumbled across its most impressive infrastructure: a giant footbridge swinging over emerald glacial runoff. The bridge looked like a defiance, as if someone found a loophole in the laws of physics and hung it there, in the sighs of the mountain breeze, as a monument to the impossible dream of connection.

To cross the bridge is to endure a sensory and psychic assault. A crush of people riffles across its asphalt-encased path, low-boil aggression simmering like a fever through their contagious claustrophia. Sometimes, all movement stops. Then, the mob bunches against the blockage – usually moment-stealing photographers – pushing until bodies squirt free like seeds squeezed from a lemon.

Above, on the bridge’s cables, red-faced monkeys scan for snatchable snacks. Bagged, balled dough crosses in bobbing human hands, intended for fish but stolen in whooping raids that leave shocks shivering up metal veins. A half dozen cows sleepwander about, too, part curious, part lost, lolling like medians indifferent to the steady, roaring thrum. Motorcycles plow through the morass unchallenged, their snarling lurches and stacatto horns commanding space as only brute force can.

I hated the bridge, gritting teeth against the shoving honk, shrieking crash of its tortuous crawl. My feet wanted a silky sway like a caress from a cradling palm, and instead met a stiff muscle stretched to the bone, a splint reinforced with metal, plates, and screws.

But then one day, in the middle of a lumber across, I saw a hand reach out to touch a cow, soft, between its eyes. Then another, and another: whispers brushed like white paint over the starburst spectrum of noise. It was reverence, acceptance of the gauntlet, appreciation of the floating, fleeting moment between opposing sides. The bridge was not a worn out muscle, but one in a deep, satisfying stretch. A dream realized, love despite distance, strength out of strain.

Swayed, I remained in the village of falling foothills longer than planned. I crossed every day, touching nerves that splayed like a fan, through the sky, into hardened, anchoring earth. And my feet learned, eventually, to move at its pace, to listen to the music of a heart wrapped in a chain, a pulsing rhythm singing over grinding, metal weight.