Short Reflections 6 - Meeting my Teacher, and digging trenches
After nearly two years of sitting in the holy heart of India, I knew I needed a teacher. I had become completely obsessed with enlightenment, and simultaneously had absolutely no idea what it was. I thought I knew something, had read practically everything I could get my hands on, and half wished half hoped that self-realization would crash through, but clearly this wasn't happening. So finding an enlightened teacher became my imperative. Maybe they could push me over!
In April 2010 I flew to Adelaide, Australia to sit with a meditation teacher named Linda Clair. I'd come across her after looking into Adyashanti, an enlightened guy in the States whom I'd sat with before, but whom was way to popular to actually sit with regularly. I'd read good things about her, and I'd watched an interview or two of hers and she said a few things that connected with me: namely that love and suffering keep a person going in this journey. That was pretty much me.
By this time, I was mostly broke, and arrived to Oz with a small backpack with a couple shirts and a couple pairs of jeans. I ended up WOOFing out on a farm, where one of the owners also went to meditation with Linda. I stayed in a mouse-populated caravan, and dug trenches and shoveled gravel in an orchard most days in exchange for room and board.
The first time I met Linda we were late to meditation, so I just sat down at the back and closed my eyes. It was an evening session, very quiet. I'd read so much about people meeting Teachers and tumbling through the universe and whatnot that I wasn't sure what to expect; it wasn't like that.
Instead, I simply felt a gentle, subtle confirmation, and I smiled with my eyes closed, and that was all. After the meditation I said hello, made a ridiculous bow, and went back to my rodent infested caravan.
No fireworks. No profundity-concussion. No glowing, levitation or specialness to speak of. Just simplicity, a self-evident knowing, and then more trench digging.
It was hard to believe actually, how normal and ordinary those first few weeks were. I met other meditators, I got sick of digging and shoveling, and I wondered who this woman Linda really was. I went to her home for tea one day, and told her about all my very spiritual endeavors and desperation. She politely listened, and told me if I wanted enlightenment that badly then I was probably ready. I thought ready for enlightenment - six weeks or so should probably do it right? Oh to be young and foolish....she meant ready to begin.
This is my teacher Linda:
