One of the things I'm asked most often about the retreat is how you can do "nothing" all day and whether or not it drove me - a rather driven person at the best of times - crazy. Bear in mind, when you register, you surrender all electronic equipment, all books, all paper, all pens. And of course your voice. Surrendering books (in my case a fully loaded kindle) was the hardest for me. I use books to escape, to travel to sooth myself to put myself to sleep.
There was a fairly rigid daily program which started with the gong at 4am and ended with lights out (literally no electricity) at 9.30pm. Naturally, on debriefing there were people complaining about too little sleep, too rigid a program, too little freedom etc. etc. Personally I'd known what I was signing myself up for (the website is pretty explicit) and had also read that rather brilliant chapter on "will power" in "Never Let Go" so I'm pretty well prepared psychologically because I know if you want to exercise will power in one area of your life - in this instance to seriously meditate, you have to eliminate as much choice as possible in all other areas of your life - as in what and when to eat / sleep / shower / walk / sit / listen / do yoga etc. And still, the mind and the body is a pretty wilful, stubborn and dwars (now what would the English be for that - at cross purposes?) thing.
Honestly, that first chapter of that book is one of the best things I've read for a long time. I'm using it in so many areas of my life. Including parenting. I just take choice out of the equation for stuff that has to be done. I can't tell you how much my son's handwriting has improved in the last few months. Why? Because most days during the week, we sit down with "Writing with Ease" and he copies a few sentences from the work book, I read a paragraph to him, he answers questions in full sentences and writes a sentence on the main idea of the paragraph. There is no discussion, no maybe, perhaps, if, but, later. Yesterday he came home beaming. "Mum, mum, the teacher is going to say something to you about something you bought and we've done and it's great." I probed and probed. Finally it came out, I'd bought the book "Writing with Ease" we'd done it and his handwriting had improved so much that the teacher refused to believe a piece of writing without a name on it was his. Nothing succeeds like success they say.
Back to meditation. I am not a great meditator. I am a baby. I am a neonate. The best I can say is that at moments, whole 10 minutes at a time, I managed to really really try to empty my mind and only concentrate on my breath and nothing else. It was really useful that they were teaching Anapanasati, which is a methodology of attaining concentration, and you could see more or less where you were on the continuum and what you needed to get yourself further. I recon I spent most of the time hovering around the beginning of the First Tetrad - contemplation of the body.
So in all those hours and half hours and three quarter hours that we were spending in sitting or walking meditation what happened? Well, I'd start with a determination to concentrate only on breathing, but of course the monkey mind would start up it's movies and off we'd go. I'd say I spent the most of the first 3 or 4 days doing some mental housekeeping, filing, observation, reminiscing, pondering, examining. Fresh from the sights, sounds and sensations of BKK and the demand on arrival that we abstain from any thoughts words or deeds concerning sex, unsurprisingly the first things to be mentally put out in the sun were all the relationships I'd ever had. The serious, the casual, the fun and the heart-breaking. Time and distance is an incredible healer, as I truly could go through everything pretty dispassionately with very little emotional involvement. It was more a kind of sorting and ordering and making sense of how it all fitted in my life and made my life and me who I am.
Next up was childhood and teen years, and early working days and our early expat lives. Family and families, studying time, leaving South Africa, leaving, leaving leaving and moving moving moving. A lot of shit has flowed through the sewer in the last few years, and I was surprised at how, with the aid of many dharma talks, a lot of verbal guidance from the monks and nuns it was able to enter and leave my mind and be examined with the same interest I would look at the busy ants with, or see a leaf that was falling, had fallen, was being swept up. There were but two occasions when I truly felt myself choking up momentarily. I left the memory, focused on the breath, the impermanence, the attachment and it was OK. Really OK. It didn't matter quite so much anymore. For those of you who are regular readers of my blog you will know what those moments were - everything around my son trying and failing to learn Chinese, and the incident and incidences surrounding the suicide attempts of someone close to me. The rest - all the other experiences and ups and downs were mere chaff of life.
I did occasionally beat myself up - as in "darn you're supposed to be meditating and seeing images and bright lights and feeling this flood of joy and blah blah." And I'd earnestly start with the long breath and the short breath and the following of the breath, and the guarding of the breath at the gate, only for the gate guard to be not so much battered down, but fooled by the ghosts of Christmas's pasts slipping by in the shadows and quietly pleading for a little attention and loving kindness.
At the end of the day, I think I made peace with myself, with my past, my history, my present and emerged much calmer and with more equanimity than I started out. I am encouraged by the stories of the English monk of his long 6 year journey before he got anywhere near to where one is truly meditating, and took the boasts of fellow meditators who were "shooting love bullets" in my stride. Luckily the boasting evening was our last evening and not somewhere in the middle where we'd all have found the necessity to compete in being "good" meditators.
The mind of course craves stimulation. So the highlights of my days were the Dharma talks - basically readings or teachings on meditation and how to meditate and Buddhism, the Yoga - nearly 2 hours of wonderful yoga taught by a marvellous nun, the Chanting - (which took me back to my catholic school days).
The insights into the monastic life from the monks and the nuns was fascinating. How do they stop thinking about sex and desire for example? They meditate on death and decay. And sometimes they go and watch corpses and bodies rotting. Really. Apparently you get to think about orifices in a whole new way after that. I'm sure - I'll leave that to them and just take the shortened 5 precepts (vows) which include no adultery, rather than the more complete 8 precepts which include chastity in thought, word and deed. One day a monk was called away towards the end of a meditation session and when he got back later he told us about an open burning cremation he'd attended. And then we chanted about how death would come and none of us could escape it's great armies. Public burning of the dead is probably not a bad thing. He explained seeing this as a young child for the first time and what an impression it had made on him.
A lot of time and talk and thought is put into death and impermanence in Buddhism. Not a bad thing in my opinion. We shy away from it a lot in normal life. We ignore it and deny it and avoid it.
Monks and nuns are also marvellously blunt creatures. About the 2nd day, one of the nuns declared apropos of nothing to the group "So you've abused in the past. I tell you now to stop continuing to abuse yourselves. Every time you think about it, talk about it, discuss it, you are abusing yourself again and again and again" and then she went on with the rest of her talk on something quite unrelated. At another point we were discussing the image of the Buddhist cycle of life (sorry I need to find my cord to download my other pictures and I'm just not in the mood to search through the cord box right now) and we were told "you get angry, you go straight to hell" - the Buddhist concept of hell being a state of mind or being or existence during life rather than a physical place to go after death. Which of course makes absolute sense. Much more sense than a hell in the ever-after. Much more effective as well as a general and absolute threat to people in general and kids in particular. And then of course this whole Asian thing of people not getting angry in order not to lose face hahaha (that's them laughing instead) suddenly makes absolute sense. Losing face, my eye - more like if they get angry they're in hell, and no-one wants to be in hell obviously! Go tell that to the generals. At other times we were told we were greedy and gluttonous - bah - two whole meals a day and we could help ourselves unlimited to the food during those meals. Normally to meditate well one would get 6 spoons of brown rice a day - if that. High days, holidays, birthdays and feast days were spent in fasting.
It's now 9.30pm and I'm going to bed. I quite liked the early to bed early to rise habit. Despite everyone's moans I think a lot of people got more sleep on the retreat (albeit on cement slabs with wooden pillows) than they usually get in the normal course of life. I sure did.