As a child my favorite books were by the celebrated children's author Roald Dahl. James and The Giant Peach was the first book that hooked me on Roald (which until recently I believed was simply a misspelled Ronald) but it was Charlie and The Chocolate Factory that cemented Mr. Dahl as my favorite author in those early years.
Roald Dahl’s language is so zany and wonderful that it is a joy to read. Could anyone but love a man who coined the terms biffsquiggled, gobblefunk, whizzpopper, and most importantly Oompa Loompa?
For the uninitiated, the Oompa Loompas of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame are a diminutive pygmy people from Africa who are historically shown with orange skin, green hair and white eyebrows. Not one of them is over four feet tall.
But it was not so much what the Oompa Loompas looked like or did in the factory that fascinated me, it was what they had been forced to eat before being rescued by Willie Wonka that had me enthralled and held me in a state of nauseated shock. Sadly, In Loompaland where all Oompa Loompas lived, they were being mercilessly hunted down by terrible beasts like hornsnozzlers, snozzwangers and vermicious knids. Forced to run to the trees and hide from the bloodthirsty creatures, the Oompa Loompas all nearly starved to death. They were forced to eat nothing but what they could find in the jungle. And all that they could find there were foul tasting, slimy, raw green caterpillars.
Even writing those words makes me gag. I don’t know why. For some people it’s seeing blood or smelling a noxious aroma that makes their gag reflex march into overdrive. For me it’s the idea of being forced to eat raw green caterpillars. I imagine them squirming and writhing in my mouth before I bite one in two, the viscous foul caterpillar innards goo sliding down my gullet in a vomitous wave, as the still alive half of the caterpillar tries to wiggle its way out of my mouth. It horrified me when I first read about it in elementary school and today, decades later, the thought still makes me retch. Thankfully, the Oompa Loompas were rescued from this horrible fate by Mr. Wonka himself. He scooped them all up and transported them to England, where they lived and worked, happily and in harmony at his eponymous chocolate factory.
But why all this talk of Oompa Loompas? Because sometimes when I am trying to meditate, they (or more correctly their food) come to my mind. I have a daily meditation practice and when I sit down at the end of the day I have all sorts of tricks and visual shortcuts that I use to lull myself into a meditative state. What I am trying to do with these mini-movies I show myself at the beginning of all meditations is to clear my mind, unhook my attention from my mind's ceaseless chatter, so that I can more closely achieve the state of the watcher. The witness. I can, when successful in meditation, be a witness to my own thoughts. Mildly removed, curious but generally disinterested in any dramatic feelings that these thoughts might bring on. I can just watch them float on by like so many clouds in the sky on a sweet summer day. I am, with my meditation practice, trying to train myself to be less influenced by (and less reactive to) my own thoughts. They are just thoughts after all, not facts. But those thoughts and my reactions to them certainly do hold sway over me and my moods sometimes.
One of my favorite pre-meditation visualizations is to imagine that I am in front of a gigantic table. It’s bigger than a football field and goes on forever. As I start my meditative practice I see myself standing in front of that table in a state of calm detachment. Then I imagine that I open up the top of my head, the way one would a soft-boiled egg, and start taking every single thing out of it and laying it on that table in front of me. It’s like a frantic clearance sale. Everything must go. And so it does. The joys and the losses, the fears and the dreams. The righteous and the petty. The work and family and health and future worries. Every single thing that I might choose to think about goes on that table. It’s like the most diverse spread ever assembled for a banquet, but instead of delicacies, everything on the table is a subject that I think about or have thought about during the day.
So everything is out of there as I sit down to meditate. I am empty inside, calm, relaxed. I am aware not so much of my endless pesky thoughts but more of the energy of that inner space that is simple awareness. Until, that is, I hear it. It’s my mind calling to me. “Hey…you…over here…hey, come here. Yes you! You forgot to do something that is very very very important. You forgot to fix this situation. If you come over here and just give me a tiny bit of your attention we can fix this together. I promise. And then you can go right back to your meditation. It’s urgent!” Who could resist that? And so my attention is immediately sucked away from just sitting down and enjoying some blessed silence and thrust back onto whatever the hell it is that my mind wants me to deal with…NOW!!!
And what I notice, consistently, is that what my mind will choose to pick up, what my mind will choose to focus on and gnaw on like a dog with a bone, are all the worst things I could possibly focus on. The resentments. The fears. The arguments. Do I pick up the good thoughts? The successes and triumphs and joys of my life? The metaphorical and delicious fresh bread and fruits and veggies and cool water of thoughts that are also laying on the table? Of course not. With all those wonderful things laid out, any of which I could choose to focus on, I consistently and habitually and chronically pick up the most disgusting and upsetting thing on the table. The thought equivalent of the revolting, raw green caterpillars that the Oompa Loompas had to eat in the jungle. I tend to focus on the thoughts that are the most repulsive to me. The most unsavory. The most distracting and upsetting. That's what I’m drawn to. That's where I put my attention. And I don’t want to do that anymore.
I am currently, and have been for several months now, “in conflict” with four different situations. I don’t even think these situations know we are having “issues” but I certainly do and that is more than enough. In fact I can spend several minutes if not hours each day lost in reverie about how any of these mental conundrums can be figured out, of course with a solution favorable to me. Work, family, friends, my physical state, it doesn't matter who or what is running me around, if it is on my mind it will force itself front and center during my meditation periods, stomping its feet like a terrible little baby and demanding to be taken seriously. So my meditations can be quite frustrating at times but they have made it clear to me that given the choice, the thoughts that I will habitually pick up to chew and choke on are those that upset me and that cause some sort of violent emotional reaction in my heart.
Those poor Oompa Loompas, living in the forests of Loompaland, hiding from ferocious Oompa Loompa eating beasts did not have a choice. They had to eat those caterpillars to survive. But I do have a choice. And I know that eventually through a daily meditation practice I will have some control up there, some choice about which thoughts I concentrate on and which thoughts I discard as not helpful. And if I’m really lucky I am hoping to learn how to not think at all. Because the peace that I have found in that silent space of “no thought” is a magical and tranquil place where I can simply rest my poor over-thinking mind for at least a few minutes every single day.
I suppose this is just the beginning of another journey. I have learned that the first part of solving any problem is admitting that you have one in the first place and then figuring out ways to remedy that. So I am aware that habitually I focus on my most upsetting thoughts. I want to ruminate and catastrophize over all situations that I need to fix right now! If I am going to chew on something I will always go straight for the green caterpillars. But thinking about something obsessively is not going to fix that situation or make it easier to bear. This sort of thinking is a waste of time, energy and brain space.
Now when I meditate I still try to lay everything out on the table. And then just as I catch myself leaning in to pick up the bowl of revolting green caterpillars I gently tap my hand and say “that can wait for now” and I retreat. I sit in silence, trying not to pick up a thought and repeating to myself one of my favorite Roald Dahl quotes:
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.
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