There’s a Buddhist ritual that shocks my Women and Religion students: charnel-ground meditations. Early Buddhist hagiographies describe the Buddha inviting his male disciples to charnel grounds to meditate on decomposing bodies. Awareness of the foul (aśubha), the Buddha taught.1
This ritual began as a gender-neutral one, but the decaying bodies soon morphed into female ones. Buddhist literature—from early Buddhism through the rise of Mahāyāna Buddhism—is full of references to decaying female corpses, the monks watching, astonished, as round breasts deflate and unblemished creamy skin fades to yellow-green. In his training guide for bodhisattvas on how to cultivate bodhicitta (the awakened mind), the 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk Śāntideva reminds monks that the women they lust over will soon become a heap of bones and flesh, a feast for vultures.2 (Yes, really.)
Liz Wilson likens the charnel-ground meditation ritual to a form of shock therapy, a practice that facilitates not just awakening but also a new way of being through putrid force. To be sure, these are gendered, horrific images of objectification, and she even prefaces her book: It may shock you, and if it does, it will have its intended effect.3 The primary focus of this ritual for love-smitten monks is aversion. But Wilson’s book Charming Cadavers, as well as my course textbook Religion, the Body, and Sexuality, also urges us to view this ritual—as well as monastic celibacy in general—through the eyes of the renunciant.
Is it shocking to see the world this way? I always ask my students, 98 percent of whom are young women. What is the renunciant forced to give up?
My college students struggle with the latter question, but they don’t struggle with the question of celibacy. Gen Z gave us the term boy sober, after all. They propose that celibacy is a way to strengthen yourself mentally and emotionally—an act of self-care and self-love in a distrustful world. However, the idea of renouncing the social world, as Liz Wilson puts it, to create a whole new order confuses my students. I ask them to consider what large-scale changes must be made so the new order can adapt. Just because you renounce the earthly world and its material and relational attachments doesn’t mean you take yourself out of the earthly world entirely—at least, not yet.
During the pandemic, my close friend, a Buddhist nun, disrobed. We were living together at the time. I came home and found her sitting in the kitchen wearing brand-new blue jeans. It was, yes, a shock.
People constantly ask me about my friend’s disrobing. What led her to do that? But renunciation is an intensely personal decision, and the story changes all the time. At first, my friend was giddy and curious. She wanted to learn how to relate to the world, her friends, and maybe even a man. In hindsight, it was others who had a tougher time relating to my friend in her new role.
After a few months as a returned layperson, my friend became overwhelmed with anxiety. What if there’s no man? What if there’s no baby? What if renouncing didn’t fix everything? As if to say—what if renouncing amounted to nothing?
I reminded her to meditate. I told her it’s okay if a decision doesn’t turn out as you thought.
But what if it’s a bad decision? She asked.
You’ll just make another one, I said. Welcome back to samsara.
***
There’s a scene in The Outrun (the film) where Rona, a young alcoholic, reconnects with her ex-boyfriend after experiencing a physical assault. They share a cigarette on the hospital loading dock. Still in her paper gown, her face swollen and bruised, Rona gazes at the pub across the way. Shall we get a drink? Her ex-boyfriend looks at her like normal viewers would.
I wanted to be shocked like those normal folks, but I understand Rona. I hate to admit that I have done the same.
It’s been a while since I watched an addiction movie or read an addiction memoir, but The Outrun has got me thinking about the shock of early sobriety and the ones that led me there. The Buddha framed his life around awakenings, the realization that we are trapped in suffering (dukkha) if we are never made aware of this entrapment or understand its full dimensions. Two millennia later, the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous followed suit in its own Protestant Christianity-tinged way, proposing that only a spiritual awakening could liberate the alcoholic, but only if the alcoholic surrendered to the unmanageability.4
Alcoholics and addicts can live a long time in unmanageability, but I don’t think we’re entirely unaware of the pain. I’d spent the last two years of my drinking seeking connection and stability, trying to be understood only to be misunderstood by the one I loved. Addiction isolates through this patterning of hopelessness. Craig Ferguson said it best in his 2007 monologue describing his addiction and recovery: sometimes, the thing killing you is the same thing keeping you alive. Like Craig Ferguson and Rona, I had numerous incidents that would make anyone stop. I shocked myself—but like all addicts, I resisted the comedown. Eventually, you’re shocked enough that there’s no turning back. Eventually, you can’t come down.
This time six years ago, I barely existed, my ego long shattered and scattered across Newark, Denver, Italy, Mexico, Virginia, who knows. On the last day of 2018, the ex-boyfriend wrote his final email to me. I’m sorry 2018 was difficult for you, he wrote, as if we hadn’t dated. As if he wasn’t a part of it. I hope 2019 is a better year for you, the ex-boyfriend concluded. Please, let it go. He wished to move on with his new life and partner. I didn’t reset my sober app even though my desire to stop drinking was still there. I’ve already let it go, I told the ex-boyfriend, and it was true; I had let all those shattered ego remnants be. Three weeks later, I broke my leg in a blackout and drove myself—yes, on a broken fibula—to my first A.A. meeting.
I reset my sober app: January 23, 2019. Day 1.
I know the pain from the broken fibula must have shocked me out of the blackout in which the fall occurred. By Day 7, blood pooled at the base of my toes. My ankle and calf turned purple. Even though my roommates convinced me my ankle was just sprained, I drove to the ER, where the nurse jumped backward into the wall after I rolled down my sock. Look at you, she said. Most people come in here with stubbed toes.
Every night, I undid my air cast, propped my pathetic right leg on throw pillows, and meditated on the foulness. The more sober days I accumulated, the more the swelling of my ankle eased, giving way to a blanket of purple-and-black bruises. And yes, eventually, my leg became only skin and bones.
When people hear that I had to go through early sobriety alone, shouldering physical, emotional, and mental trauma without a partner, family, or close friends, they’re usually shocked. Oh, honey, that must have been so hard to do during the most painful part of your life.
It was the most painful part of my life, but I don’t remember the pain of early sobriety. I wasn’t even resentful. I was, strangely, happy. But I realize now that, maybe, I was in shock. I had resisted the comedown. I had abandoned those scattered pieces on the charnel grounds. I couldn’t quite make sense of where that left me.
When I was 50 days sober, my first recovery friend, K., recalled something she heard from her yogi: We numb ourselves when we’re disconnected from God.
Wow, I said, and I meant it. Welcome back to samsara.
Moments like these with K. are the ones I remember most from early sobriety—the oddities of my new life that I was thrust into and didn’t resist. Strangers carried me to their cars and drove me to diners and churches. Uber drivers told me their broken fibula tales. I had weekly movie dates with the ladies and ate matzo ball soup. K. taught me a Kundalini Yoga practice for concentration in her car, parked outside the Nevada Diner. I wrote daily gratitude lists. I learned to always thank the speaker. I started translating my sliver of Bloomfield Avenue into a new language. I repeated, HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. I practiced what I would say to the ex-boyfriend when the time came. I swam in my friend’s pool and chain-smoked on many front stoops. I took a coffee commitment, and I took it very seriously. I spent Friday nights in a church basement in Jersey City with the Jersiest bros to ever Jersey and shared my feelings based on a prompt from a popsicle stick. I repeated, PUSH: Pray Until Something Happens. When I could drive again, I drove alone to the Palisades and stood, in my new sneakers and plastic brace, on one of the many green cliffs overlooking the Hudson and thought about being a container of love and grief.
On day 89, I sat on my couch, my fibula newly fused together with only splotches of yellow bruising, and cried for five hours. I thought of the ex-boyfriend, crying on his couch months earlier and telling me to go away. On day 90, I received my first brass coin. I can’t remember if I texted the ex-boyfriend.
When I first met the ex-boyfriend, he was only several months separated from his wife. He told me: It’s scary to meet someone and think they’re going to be your life partner and then they’re not. Yes, it is terrifying—even shocking. I understand the ex-boyfriend better now, if only a little too late.
What comes after day 90? Someone asked me outside the anniversary meeting.
I pocketed my brass coin and sighed. Day 91.
***
How does the world look through the eyes of a renunciant?
In my Women and Religion class, we begin with celibacy and those love-smitten Buddhist monks and end on ecstasies, including Saint Teresa of Avila. In her autobiography, Teresa describes her raptures as violent and unpredictable. Rapture is, as a rule, irresistible, Teresa writes.5 Yet these divine shocks produce a spiritual sweetness, even if they often leave her physical body in a corpse-like state. When these raptures end, Teresa is overcome with detachment, disillusioned to once again be tethered to the earthly world. Teresa, it seems, cannot adjust to the shock of the comedown.
I tell my students: I think Saint Teresa is asking: How do you return to the world once you have this life-altering experience?
My Gen Z students, with their language of mental health and trauma, understand this question well. Ohhh, my students nod. She’s trying to process.
It took me one year of sobriety to realize that I had lost the taste of drinking a long time ago. My problem was that I never knew how to live sober.
Days before my one-year sober anniversary, I met a sober nun while on a retreat. Alcohol was once her God. I asked this nun how she turned back to her higher power—how she navigated this samsara. She told me a story about how she once went to confession but had no idea what to confess. So she told the priest: I was judgmental.
The priest responded: Turn it around. Say, thank you for the awareness.
So every new year, every new sober year, every year I can’t turn back, I turn it around.
It’s been awhile. I promise to write more. In the meantime, here are some shameless updates:
2024 was quite the year:
I passed my Ph.D. comprehensive exams and was officially elevated to candidacy! My dissertation is finally in the making.
My short story “The Great Renunciation” won the 2024 Short Fiction Prize from American Literary Review and will be published this spring. This story may involve a Buddhist nun…
My short story “A Home for Adults” was published in the Spring 2024 issue of Cola Literary Review. You can purchase a copy here (select Vol. 3). Yes, it is an early sobriety story.
My short story “The Girls Go to Van Nuys” was published online at Necessary Fiction.
My short story “We Heard You Had Something to Say to Us” was published in the Spring 2024 issue of North American Review. You can purchase a copy here.
My short story “Reputations” was published online at Hayden’s Ferry Review.
My novelette “Pick to Bag”—10,000 words inspired by my experience working as a personal shopper for an unnamed corporation during the pandemic—received an honorable mention from Craft’s inaugural Novelette Print Prize. This story will (hopefully) be published this year in The Common.
My short story “Dhamma Talks,” originally published in Modern Language Studies, was shortlisted for The Masters Review Reprint Prize. You can read the story here.
I have a new (academic) book review in the Journal of Church and State.
Generally, in Buddhist teaching, there are nine states of decay. However, the 5th-century Sri Lankan monk and commentator Buddhaghosa describes 10 different decomposing corpses. I will spare you the graphic details, but Buddhaghosa, like the Buddha, emphasized that these different corpses would help monks renounce their sexual attachments by cultivating disgust toward the female body. Depending on the monk’s proclivity, they can choose a certain decomposing corpse to “treat” the monk’s lustful condition.
See Liz Wilson, Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature, xiii.
The first step of Alcoholics Anonymous: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
See Saint Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Jesus, Chapter 20. In this chapter, Saint Teresa provides a detailed account of her raptures (which she also labels elevation, transport, or flight of the spirit) and how they compare to the union of the soul with God. Her raptures occur during the fifth stage (or the fifth mansion) of her seven stages of prayer, which she outlines more systematically in The Interior Castle. (In Teresa’s autobiography, her prayer framework is broken into four stages.)