punk to monk

I got into meditation in my early twenties, just after I finished university. I’m not sure when, actually, but I’d say about twenty-one. University was a busy time for me. I studied architecture at the University of Sydney for three years, which was a full time job in itself, whilst working a graveyard shift on the side at a famous pie shop in Woolloomooloo wharf called ‘Harry’s Café de Wheels’, to support myself.

After three years of study, and doing very well in my studies, I deliberately failed my final submission. Instead of presenting to my tutors the recommended and predictable avenue of design plans and sections with the fashionable renderings of the day, I submitted a large, creamy, watercolour page, with a bare bones design stencilled in blue pencil. Onto this tabula rasa I projected various images from the artist Hieronymus Bosch, mixed in with loving social scenes – children chasing butterflies and women laughing over their lunch salads, sipping pinot gris.

It was a finger to the establishment. I’d had enough of tertiary education. There were many brilliant minds in my course; young kids with expansive, creative imaginations; hard-working kids that worked their asses off with little sleep, fuelled by Red Bull and the occasional dexamphetamine. Yet the education system seemed to be failing them by over-charging them on short content, and conditioning us into more and more banality. I was done.

I hit the streets, literally. It wasn’t just me either. In Sydney at the turn of the millennia, there was a healthy band of disenfranchised youths coming out of the tertiary education system, questioning the dubious hallucination they’d just put themselves through on the flimsy but well-intended advice of their parents. They were done with it too, and they were pissed off. I became part of a small troupe, you might even call it a punk gang. We squatted in disused buildings, using broken solar panels to generate just enough heat to cook the food we’d retrieved from corporate dumpsters. We took drugs and partied on the edge of seaside cliffs, scrunching pink Sydney sandstone beneath our feet to warping binaural beats, and we screamed into the lashing sea winds until dawn. We barked our opinions at each other, and worked for a little money until we had no more, and then we stole and got high until the next score and all because we had no other way. We knew we were better off than where we’d just been… But only just.

A kindly woman took some of us into her dilapidated three storey terrace house in Surry Hills. It was a kind of pied-piper hostel for local disenfranchised youth.

It was through her, an unlikely source, I encountered meditation for the first time.
I’m forever in her debt.

Sitting at her scratched formica table, I stared at her through my weary, alcohol-soaked eyes. She smiled, I remember, and told me of a journey she’d just come back from. It was a journey to the Blue Mountains, where she’d been on a meditation retreat. It didn’t interest me, and I was just using her for digs, but I entertained her requests to come to the Newtown library of a Wednesday and try some meditation with her. “Maybe…” I said, sipping cheap port.

Over the ensuing months, I did some work on her house in exchange for board, and made sure I got the better deal, but she persisted with me, and we talked of my writing, and my rage, and why she wouldn’t put clothes on when drying herself in the hall from her nightly shower, and she encouraged me to write, and all along the way, she planted seeds, seeds in my mind to sit, and be still.

One of the various lunatics that was staying with us for a brief while had just come Dux Litterarum in his philosophy course. He looked like a dangerous Elmer Fudd, this kid. I mentioned the meditation thing to him, and he rattled off a list of ‘Eastern trope’ he’d read, but apparently didn’t think much of at the time by the way he focussed on rolling the perfect tulip-pointed joint.

The next day, I found myself sprinting down Town Hall mall with a fat, red-faced security guard, all guts and rage, running behind me in full tilt and swing. He was only a few steps behind, this fast, fat man, and the copy of the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ I’d stolen from Angus and Robertson book store almost fell from my hand as my lithe frame faked out the giant, now left, now right, now you see-me-not. He crashed into a display case of cheap ladies make-up outside a chemist.

That night, in the dusty attic in which I was nesting between missing floorboards, I shone a torch onto the book. They seemed familiar, these stanzas, like I’d read them before. There’s something here, I remember thinking.

The next day, I approached the semi-naked maitre d’ in the hall and announced that we would be going to meditation. “Oh really,” she chuckled, “What’s brought this on?”
“…Nothing,” I lied.
“Well, there’s one on tonight… but you already knew that didn’t you?” she said with a wink. And with this she undid her slip and walked into her room. Elmer Fudd looked on at the base of the stairs, eyebrow raised.

That evening we, the maitre d’ and me, walked together through Surry Hills, over the cracked concrete paving smelling faintly of sweetly fermented urine, and into Newtown. Ducking through the back streets, we made our way to the Hospital district, and eventually, to Newtown library. It was cold, Sydney’s special kind of brittle cold, and I shuddered as we went upstairs to find the top door locked, only to descend and realise that the session was being held in the garage, and were we to slide the garage door up? not sure, but we did, and there we were, some twenty people huddled together around the flame of a woman which held the centre, waving us to come closer, and the people’s faces turned towards me. I was cold, and red, my eyes darting around the room like a caged animal.

We sat, and after brief words of welcome to all, she began guiding us through meditation on the breath. Having not done it before, I simply listened to what she said, and did it. There’s an advantage to being new to meditation. You come in without any expectations. She told me to keep my attention on the breath, and despite my mind wandering all over the map, it stayed more and more with the breath, more and more with the sensation of breathing, and then it was more there more often than not, and I felt, I felt for the first time, this stillness, and sensation flowing over me like wind over a wintery desert tundra, simply flowing, and me watching. When I opened my eyes, and went outside, the pied-piper was there, and I looked around town, but not at her. I didn’t speak. We walked home in silence, and she was wise not to say words. She just watched me, walking, smiling a little as she did so.

In architecture school, I learnt of aesthetic beauty. Studying form opened up something – the symmetry of spaces, shadow and form, the way diffuse light bathed the nape of the neck of the girl lying in my bed that night, and the scale of things, like seeing the world through the eyes of an ant, the textures, and colours. Architecture was the invisible art that we were all a part of in almost every waking moment. We were part of a living canvas, and we moved from space to space in an endless self-created tapestry, many of us unaware of being shaped by these spaces at all.

Now, I’d found a new kind of architecture, an architecture of the mind. The mind was the true hidden artist, shaping us always. Despite the monkey mind, beneath it, in that space of the mind, was a peace very different to this frenetic, wavering world. I didn’t know what to do with this information, but I knew it meant something.

This experience began to unravel my life over the next five years. After a stint in India, on my return to Sydney I began studying acting, on the advice of an older friend who remarked I’d be well advised to, since I seemed to have a “knack for capturing people’s attention, and telling stories.” I was “bold, intelligent, intuitive and emotional – killer combos for an actor,” he said. At the time I was writing a lot, which really fully began when I was in India, as that country drew words out of me almost constantly, and I was in the habit of writing all the time, filling large, leather-bound journals I’d buy at a haggled bargain from rickety shop-keeps. I’d journal, doing character sketches of the various street urchins I found captivating. I’d write poems, short stories, small plays, and scripts. I’d dream of being the next Patrick White.

Acting seemed like an option. In Sydney, I was writing small plays and film scripts and filming them with friends, and so acting seemed like a sympathetic way to access my characters from the inside out, to inhabit them in a different way than typing above the page. Maybe it would provide me with new insights, so I could write better.

Well, acting took me by surprise.

I became obsessed with it, and with my new friends in the acting world. Both were a lot of fun. I began to pour energy into the Meisner–based acting method I’d been learning, practising ‘repetition’ (a kind of fluid body-language reading exercise that fosters placing your attention on the other actor and reading them, whilst they read you, moment to moment, and react to your readings), going through scenes, learning different types of acting modalities from Stanislavsky and Chekhov. I read plays and went to the theatre. I met people in the scene, I was dreaming, and I was writing, writing, and writing, and I loved it.

I also found myself going on three day benders, being fed MDMA and cocaine with prominent theatre directors, and somehow I found myself backstage with famous actors, and was embarrassed at a party when a friend pointed out that so-and-so famous girl who’d I’d just been talking to was obviously into me because I didn’t know who she was and “How did you not follow that up, man?!” I was having a great time, and I was totally out of my element.

All the while, I was meditating.

My meditation at this point, for obvious reasons, was sporadic. At times it was non-existent. I would find that I’d be able to sustain practice for a few weeks, even a month, rising every morning, and going to a 6am yoga class, before returning and sitting meditation, and starting my day. I felt good. I felt more than good. I felt great. But I was feeling great, largely alone. I didn’t have any community to tap into to keep my practice alive, nor did I realise the importance of that at the time. I wasn’t even aware community was an option, so I was going solo.

Eventually though, I’d succumb to the calls of my friends who’d wonder whether rigor mortis had set in, since I hadn’t been in contact for so long. I’d return to the hedonism which was always at my door, a short suburb away. The sprawling city streets would swallow me up again, and I would drown, until I managed to break free of the current, swim against the stream, and find air, flailing to the shore to dry out and continue the practice once more.

This went on for years. Five years.

All the while, two parallel worlds were developing within me. One, an artistic endeavour bent on drawing emotion from within, and telling stories with it – the other, a silent retreat into my body and mind.

I was on the verge of breaking through in the arts scene. I’d gotten a scholarship for a short play I’d submitted and was working on a piece in the Chippendale arts sector, and was beginning to make good contacts in the theatre and acting world. I was still in acting school, and without an agent, when all those around me seemed stoked to land the latest beer commercial, but something felt off, something was holding me back from embracing the acting life. What was holding me back, was my internal excursions into spiritual practice.

It was about this time I took an actress friend to a meditation retreat in the Blue Mountains at a centre I’d been visiting more and more as a refuge from my city life. I’d been speaking to her a lot about meditation, and she had decided to come along on a retreat I’d planned. We sat for ten days in silence, occasionally glancing across the room at each other from our segregated areas for men and women. At the end, she bounced across the gardens towards me and embraced me in a hug, thanking me. It was tough, she said, but she felt she had touched something inside her she’d never experienced before. We drove home to Sydney city, taking non-stop about the retreat, and our lives, and what next. After a few days, she called me, and after a staccato silence on the end of her hello, she said…
“I don’t think I can keep meditating.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s… it’s not good for my acting.”

I knew exactly what she meant. She had captured the conflict I’d been feeling between my artistic endeavours, and the spiritual life.

What I’d noticed was that my acting work was becoming more disturbing to me. Working myself into emotional states of deep distress or jubilation in my acting seemed very disturbing to a mind that had known the peace of meditation. It seemed a painful thing to inflict on myself, and almost like I was coarsely manipulating my psyche. My acting work was leaving me exhausted and strange.

I also noticed around this time that my interest not only in acting and the arts, but also life was waning, and starting to change shape. Acting seemed a childish pursuit, and what people were impassioned about, seemed hollow and limited. I wanted more, and started to suspect there was more to be had in this life than these kinds of fleeting pleasures. I found myself spending more and more time in a meditation centre in the Blue Mountains - meditating, giving service to the community there, and enjoying people who had deeper concerns on their mind. People who had their mind on their mind. I started to read books on Buddhism, the ‘Dhamma’, and spent more time alone. I would still be drawn back to the revelry occasionally, but it felt like something in me was shifting. The Dhamma felt right, and true, but I was also worried I was entering into an isolating depression. There was a new steadiness to my gaze, and I was inspired by the material I was reading, yet I felt more an outcast than ever. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, and no-one else seemed to either.

I began reading more widely across different spiritual traditions, scouring through books on Zen, Advaita Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism, and Tantra. Eventually, I came to Theravada Buddhism, namely the Theravadin Buddhist movement known as the ‘Thai Forest Tradition’. I came across a book from a key teacher from that tradition known as Ajahn Chah, and one book in particular called ‘Food for the Heart’.

I remember reading that book, staying up late in my little Glebe apartment, devouring sections of it, and having my mind routinely blown. Here was a collection of teachings that seemed so simple, yet were unforgivingly incisive observations of the follies of human nature; how we cause ourselves problems, and how we might come out of those dilemmas. Chah’s humour was wry and acerbic, yet it contained no malice. His voice was demanding, and there was a steadiness and strength in the way he spoke. I cast my mind into the forests of Thailand, and imagined what it would have been like to receive a sermon from someone with such wisdom. It got me interested in the Buddhist Sangha, the community of monks. I considered moving to Thailand to become a monk, and was on the brink of leaving, when I came across a community living in Perth, called ‘Bodhinyana’, led by a teacher called Ajahn Brahm. I had no idea who Ajahn Brahm was, and was oblivious that Bodhinyana was the most flourishing Theravadin community of Western monks in the southern hemisphere, and so naively I applied to stay there, thinking I might ordain.

That was a good choice.

• Peace.