The need to escape

Sometimes we want to run away from where we are in our life. It is too stressful, or depressing, or tiring. It can be work, school, relationships, anything. The need to get away and escape is so human. Some people take an hour out of their days and go to the gym, some others binge watch Netflix (guilty), others leave town and travel, while some others focus on whatever their hobbies are. Point is, we do things that make us feel good, and happy on the inside, to distract ourselves from whatever it is that is bogging us down in that day/week/phase of our life. I meditate. In order to escape my stresses, I do Vipassana meditation, which teaches us to observe reality for what it is. Ironically enough, I use that very meditation practice to escape my reality. Yes, it just dawned on me today. The practice of Vipassna teaches us to observe the physical sensations on our body, from the very obvious ones to very subtle ones that we normally don't notice. By merely observing these sensations on our body, we come to understand the saying 'nothing is permanent except change'. Any sensation that we feel, the good, bad and the ugly, passes. Vipassna teaches us to merely observe these sensations come and go, rather than react to them. This can help in keeping you calm and prevent you from reacting to situations in real life. I was supposed to go to a day-long sitting in Vipassna today. A block before we reached, our car stalled in the middle of the road. I couldn't leave my husband in the middle of the road to take care of this mess, while I hopped away to meditate and find inner peace. And so I stayed back on the road with him until help arrived. Until an hour later. While we waited in the middle of the road. On a main road. During peak hour. We managed to pull the car over on to literally a gap in the median of the road, so we are not blocking traffic. We got many passerbys looking at us, wondering why are we parked in the middle of the road. Yes, the skill to not react to this would have been very useful right about now. Instead, we both reacted, and got angry and irritated. Help didn't arrive until over an hour later. My day to 'escape' didn't work out as I wanted it to. And when it didn't, I got angry about it. I got annoyed about why I couldn't go off and meditate on accepting reality as it is, while I was actively grumbling about being in the situation I was in. Perhaps this was the universe reminding me that it is easy to meditate in the comfort of my own home, and find inner peace while am already pretty peaceful. The real practice is when even in such otherwise non-emergency, but mildly annoying situations, we actually keep our cool, and not react. It will pass.