The Neighbor’s Peach Tree

The trash bag rustled as Deepak plopped it on the table. “These peaches were given to us by a neighbor. Would you please cut off the mushy parts so we can make a cobbler for dessert tonight?” Peeling back a side of the wet, sticky bag revealed a slippery mass of leaves, peach fuzz, and a small portion of usable peaches. I grabbed a large bowl for the good peaches, and started carving away.

Though I had been searching for what seemed like lifetimes, my meditation practice was about six months old. I was seeking a path that I felt connected to, and stumbled upon it by accident after years of leafing through Buddhist books, attending Dharma lectures and introductory meditation classes. One Sunday night, around 9pm, I was working at my office. I had reached a breaking point with stress… I awoke every day with fear in my chest and a gasp in my throat. When I realized that it was 9pm on a Sunday and I was at the office, I experienced a moment of clarity and knew I had to make an active move toward change. I don’t know if it was Karma or Google, but that night I found Konalani Yoga Ashram and signed up for their yoga teacher training the following spring.

Four months later, I was sitting on a pillow in a tiny shrine on the mountainside of Kona, Hawaii. I did become a certified instructor from this program, but the meditation practices that I learned whilst there brought a potential for growth I had not expected. In this little room in the coming weeks, months, and year, I would sit, dance, chant, cry, daydream, focus… and learn how to play the drum. That first night, fresh from the beach and the shower, I had no idea all of that was in store for me. The teacher, Satyam, talked about a place in the heart that is about the size of a thumbnail. This place has the potential to contain all of the bliss of the entire universe. As I sat on the pillow, carving away at my ego, I yearned to understand, and tried to be content in the fact that I didn’t.

It wasn’t long after that first class with Satyam that I noticed a subtle sensation in my heart while meditating. I could physically feel a lightness, an openness, an unending happiness at the center of my chest. And the next moment it was gone. But the experience was sublime, however small a glimpse of bliss it was, and I knew it was real… more real than anything I had ever experienced.

As I chopped away at the peaches that day, a kind woman called Yogini joined me at the task. “You know what I always think of when I am doing work like this? That I am trying to scrape off all of the rotten, moldy parts of myself, and truly discard them, let them go.” As I took a breath into my heart and smiled, I knew this was a concept I could get my head around. The potential for growth is everywhere, even in an anonymous neighbor’s peach orchard.