Portable Tranquility
In Real Change, Sharon Salzberg’s new book, there is a part about Ekapol Chanthawong. In case you don’t remember, he is the Thai coach who was stuck in the water filled Tham Luang cave with a group of his students in 2018. They spent eighteen days inside the cave before they were finally rescued in a spectacular high-risk rescue effort that eventually involved over 10000 people in different capacities, including about 100 divers, and it sadly claimed the life of the Thai navy seals Saman Kunan and Beirut Pakbara.
During their almost three-week long captivity in the cave, students relied heavily on Chanthawong’s Buddhist monastic background. In order to help the boys stay calm, he taught them to meditate. Salzberg cites Chanthawong;
I like to call it my transportable tranquility because it goes with me wherever I go. I do not need to go outside or down the street or up the block to search for it. It’s already within me, waiting for me to knock and enter. My mother, who quoted philosophers and visionaries, often shared a favorite passage, that ’Tranquility itself is not freedom from the storm but peace within it.’
This passage perfectly and concisely encapsulates one of the main reasons why I meditate.
Recently, during a webinar, I talked about self-compassion and my initial resistance once I started practicing it. I remember spending long hours repeating phrases and not feeling any fantastic transformation. But then, when I was taking my Step 2 CS on a cold and sunny day in Philadelphia, I got to experience first hand what portable tranquility really means.
I was standing in front of the exam room door, waiting for the disinterested and cop-like proctor to give us a go to start our first examination. My heart was racing and my palms were sweating. I felt underprepared because I actually had no time to prepare for it, due to the fact that life didn’t care about my plans. My brain managed to come up with ten thousand different ways in which I could fail by forgetting everything, including why I’m there in the first place. Then, I remembered that I had been practicing the damn self-compassion for so long and decided to see if I can actually rely on it when I need it. So, I took a deep breath, exhaled and told myself quietly and slowly – May you be free from suffering.
The effect of that sentence was my equivalent of a spell. It felt as if those words had awoken a force whose existence somehow eluded me all these years of living inside this body. Immediately I felt my muscles relaxing, my brain slowing down and my heart settling in a far less hysterical rhythm. A second later, I heard the voice: You may begin your examination. And I did, and I passed, mainly due to the fact that free from suffering my mind was able to think clearly and work efficiently.
When this story took place, I had already been practicing mindfulness for years. Before that, I’ve noticed many positive effects of meditation on my life, but this was the first time that I understood what a powerful weapon it was. It wasn’t just gently transforming me over time. It was a protection shield. It was a powerful tool. It had clear, immediate and intense effects. It’s available any time and anywhere and its effect is really like magical, radical and immediate. It’s my portable superpower.
