Unintentionally Going Down the Rabbit Hole

After the worst downswing I've had playing poker during late May/early June I took myself back off to Blackheath's Dhamma Bhumi Vipassana center to have a break and hopefully increase my mental fitness by way of increased daily meditation.

 This time there was an excess of servers at the start of the course. From the center's perspective, if more servers turn up than are needed for kitchen duty, then there are always tasks ready to go outside the kitchen. My preference would be the kitchen over gardening or building work and luckily I found myself in the group assigned to the kitchen.

One of the other servers in the initial kitchen team was an elderly farmer, I would guess around 67 - 70 years of age, who had lost his son unexpectedly to a heart condition about a year ago, and he had decided to come and serve at Vipassana to help himself deal with the anniversary. As I was talking to him he also revealed that he had two children and that his daughter had pre-deceased his son approximately 8 years ago from a brain aneurysm. This fellow lasted less than a day in the kitchen as, after the teacher became aware of his story decided that he needed to sit and meditate rather than serve.

The kitchen co-ordinator, Chelsea, (with kitchen co-ordinator being a PC term chosen by the Vipassana center as kitchen manager carries connotations of power) proved to be the best person I've seen in this role in my (pretty limited) experience.  Her partner, Nick (or Nicholas?) was the male manager. This was an added bonus as Nick spent a fair amount of time in the kitchen helping out. Both seemed to be the sort of people who would be extremely competent in their outside jobs and great people to work with.

The rest of the crew were ok people

• Tash - a beauty consultant. About 37 years old from Sydney
• Josh - an aspiring  rock star from Melbourne who had his 28th birthday on the Satti course that followed
• Duke - an outdoors education guy, in his late 20's who had been living in his Toyota Hiace van for the past couple of years in and around the Blue Mountains locality
• Sugata - a Japanese lady with minimal English skills. To my horror she made Porridge pudding twice with leftover porridge. The first day she made porridge pudding is the day I stopped eating porridge at the center.  To save $2 worth of porridge she spent about $20 of the center's supplies of coconut milk, sugar and other ingredients. 
• Nadine - a Canadian from the French speaking part of Canada.
• Andy - another Canadian. Became unwell during the course and switched to sitting the last part of the course
• Jesse - 30 ish Aussie guy who worked in the shipping industry. Has his skipper's ticket and has strong views on the hollowing out of Aussie jobs in the shipping industry.
• Tamara - hard worker based out of Sydney. Never had a conversation with her so didn't get to know anything of her back story
• Morgan - part time server who served the first 5 days or so. Mainly worked painting in pagoda. But when he gave a hand at breakfast wash-up, man was he fast and productive
• Paul - German marketing guy on a working visa (I think). Another part-time server who served in the kitchen for the first 5 days. 
• Stirling - the 67 -70 year old Farmer with the tale of woe mentioned above. Lovely guy.
• Jaimie - stayed for about a day and a half. Wanted to sit the following Satipatthana course but revealed information in his serving application that disqualified him from both serving and sitting the Satipatthana. He had been involved with teaching Yoga in India (or a teaching yoga course - not sure of the exact details. But from the managements  view he was now only able to sit a 10 day course. One of the stranger things. He was a great guy. Very productive in the kitchen. But when he was informed he couldn't serve or sit the following course he chose to leave.

 So why document all these guy's names? Mainly as an aide memoir to myself.

And of course, there was Ken, the long-time server who has been spending a lot of time mentoring new teams in the kitchen this year.  During a discussion with Ken about what my plans were, Ken chose to push me into applying for the SatiPatthana that followed the June 14th course.  After some hesitation I chose to apply to sit. 

"Going Down the Rabbit Hole" is a term I use to describe what I feel can happen when I am sitting a course. When I am serving the three 1 hour meditation sessions are usually pretty focused and I feel I get a lot out of my meditation sittings during the time I serve.  When I sit a course I find I day-dream a lot as, instead of three 1 hour sessions, I have approximately 10 - 12 hours during which I can meditate....And it is the day-dreaming that leads me down the rabbit-hole into examining nooks and crannies of my memory from years past. Each sit is different with different nooks and crannies. Plus there are new ones that have been developed during the interval between sits. For example, a whole new tunnel has been excavated over the past six months or so with my experiences AirBnBing around the suburbs of Melbourne. And my dismal play at poker.