So, I’m going to tell you about my meditation retreat.
I know. That sentence is usually the bugle call to sound the beginning of a self-indulgent, far too long, almost certainly pretentious and probably quite boring screed of naval-gazing. But don’t worry, it’ll only be some of those things.
The itch to go on retreat had been building up for a while, the way fungal infections slowly become too uncomfortable to ignore. And it took some fair commitment, starting with getting up as many as twenty minutes earlier than normal on a midweek April morning and riding fifteen hours inside ten or so different vehicles, including crossing a land border, to be able to arrive ready for retreat the following day.
The centre was a set of white buildings rented by the organisation running the ten days, some with Christianity set in stained glass, laid out on a gentle slope a few hundred yards from the main road leading from Guatemala City to the Mexican border.
The structure of this type of retreat is exactly the same all over the world (commonly referred to as a ‘Vipassana’ retreat, though that term is in fact broader and is used for variety of different meditation techniques). The first bell goes at four in the morning for the first two hour sitting. Then you have breakfast and perhaps an hour off before three more hours of meditation, lunch, and another break before four straight hours in the afternoon. After a pause for dinner there is another hour sitting followed by the evening discourse, and the day ends with thirty more minutes of meditation, and questions to the teacher for those enthusiasts who want to stay behind.
The ‘evening discourses’ are grainy videos, filmed in the early nineties, of S. N. Goenka, the Burmese-born Indian teacher who started this particular tradition. It’s his voice we also hear in the meditation hall, either giving us meditation instructions or chanting in pali (the language of the Buddha) which sounds like the gutteral muttering of a drunk drifting off to sleep. Because our centre was rented it didn’t contain video facilities (read: a TV), so we just had the audio version. I have to admit I found them terrifically boring. The torpor would only be broken when his slow, homely stories repetitively demonstrating one point or another were interrupted by a deafening hacking as he cleared his throat directly into the microphone.
From the first evening men and women were separated and a temporary partition was erected right down the middle of the property, made from a curtain material in aqua green and yellow with a pattern that bought to mind a lava lamp. After the Tie-Dyed Curtain descended we were separated from them in all things save for the meditation hall, where those of us with partners would stare longingly across at them and those of us without would stare longingly across at them as well.
The women had their own half of the sleeping quarters, their own dining room and their own path that led between these two locations to their own entrance to the meditation hall. Their half was objectively nicer: a flat lawn with squat fruit trees and a family of ducks that I watched on that first afternoon of arrival as they rustled around in the leaves searching for bugs and splashed about in a bath made of an old tire.
The men, by contrast, had a disused swimming pool with small quantities of stray trash accumulated in the corners and, up on the steeper slope behind the buildings, a white plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. A couple of times I would go up there in the time between dinner and the evening sitting to do a walking meditation. You could see farms on the hills over on the other side of the road that sat there on the slope in the yellow of the last of the days’ light, trying not to think. The centre was a nice spot, generally, with lots of trees and only a faint sound from the highway.
We had to submit to a Code of Discipline. To ensure our moral conduct, the basis for the development of our concentration, we had to abstain from killing any being (all the food we were served was vegan), from stealing, from all sexual misconduct (the best kind), from intoxicants and from telling lies. Additionally, as a returning student, I wasn’t allowed to eat after midday, was not to engage in ‘sensual entertainment and bodily decorations’ and had ‘to abstain from using high or luxurious beds’. I wasn’t sure exactly how to observe this last one, as all of our beds were identical, old students and new, and what counts as luxurious is surely a matter of perspective, but I felt I fulfilled the spirit of the previous vow by restricting my bathing to only what was necessary.
Indeed, this was an ancillary benefit that, judging by my conversations on the last day, very few of my fellow meditators were cognizant of taking advantage of. I only had to shower three times over the ten day course and went through just four pairs of underwear. Impressively efficient, huh? My roommate had the same number of showers a day. Luderally. Which meant added together and divided by the two of us we still had about twenty nine showers too many.
And, of course, there was the Vow of Noble Silence.
This is the most notorious aspect of meditation retreats. Apparently it affects some people terribly and, judging by the bursting way people returned to communication when we broke the silence on the last afternoon, just about everyone had a pent up need to talk. Me, not so much. On the last day, after forty minutes of frenzied swapping of stories, I went to hide in my room.
Generally speaking, the first days are the hardest. The most difficult part, I think, is the share crushingness of seeing how much longer you have to go.
To put ten days in perspective, say you are reading this on a Thursday, imagine doing nothing but meditate, which is to say collide with the inane repetitiveness of your own thoughts, between now and Sunday of next week. No reading, no listening to podcasts, ideally no day dreaming, nowhere to park your attention. Now, I don’t mean to teach you basic maths (many of you have already finished primary school) but that is a long time.
It’s not uncommon in this period to go through a process called ‘Life Review’. I certainly did. Things and people emerged into my attention that I hadn’t thought of, no exaggeration, in probably a decade. For some reason I found myself thinking of Eric Cartman singing ‘Come Sail Away’ off a South Park album I listened to on repeat with my brother when I was twelve years old.
Another of the rules common to most meditation retreats is the prohibition on writing. This makes sense to me (you really have to be willing to surrender to the flow of mental objects to allow your concentration to stabilise, and being able to write things down encourages you to hold onto things), yet I broke the rule. I didn’t have a pen but I had some scraps of paper in my bag and by the third day I was desperate enough to write down what I thought were some flashes of brilliant insight, and had sufficiently little confidence in my capacity to remember them a week later, that during the evening discourse I slipped out, ostensibly to use the bathroom, and instead climbed up behind the buildings to where I had come across the dry remnants of a fire and snapped some charcoal off one of the burnt sticks.
I used these black shards to scribble down a couple of thoughts a day, totalling perhaps three pages over the next week. It probably harmed my mindfulness, and it’s true that not everything I scribbled down would have been a tragedy for our species had it been lost, but I can’t in truth say I regret doing that. Some genuinely good ideas bubbled up from the depths during those hours of sitting. Though I would like to one day do a retreat where I do actually follow all the rules.
Some memories from this period stand out: The way the huddled group of slender pines outside the hall would move in the wind, the sharp flash of the water in the sunlight overhead while washing our lunchtime dishes, the Kurdish-Swiss dude face planting from dizziness after getting up too fast after one of our ‘Sittings of Strong Determination’ (where you aren’t allowed to move for an hour straight) and everyone else, helplessly Nobly Silent, not knowing what to do. There was the ‘Wild Turkey Bourbon’ stamped on the bottom of my assigned drinking glass and the circle on the table that would still be there at the next meal from the remaining washing up dampness that was trapped underneath the face-down glass.
There was the afternoon on day six when it rained for the first time in months and right afterwards there was a break from our sitting and when we left the hall the smell of wood smoke was in the air. And as so often happens when I have a paucity of things to occupy myself with I so regularly ensured my nostrils were free of boogers that my nose bled and I had to stop myself picking it for a couple of days.
Routine dissolves the differences between days in my memory. For the entire period all you do is move between your sleeping quarters, the hall and the dining room, perhaps with occasional forays up to the area behind the buildings to surreptitiously smuggle writing materials to your room. You are so used to people moving very slowly that when you see someone hurrying, as I did only once, you assume there must be an emergency, like a fire.
It’s amazing how clinging the mind is. In the absence of all other stimulus, aside from picking my nose, I began to look forward to the ring of the prayer bowl before each sitting, waiting until the last moment to enter the hall so that I could hear the sound clearly and sweetly when the helper ringing it rounded the corner. I would hold out for the sight of the richest coloured roses in the garden next to the hall, and anticipate lying on the grass in the sun in between sittings.
Writing notes wasn’t my only indiscretion. I had also bought a ‘cheat sheet’ harvested from various meditations I had done over the months preceding the retreat. I had written down phrases like:
Rest as the condition in which everything is appearing.
Recognise any feeling of struggle is already an appearance in consciousness. Consciousness is already relaxed.
You are the space in which it all appears
You know, deep shit.
By day six it had started to work. The phrase, ‘What is happening right now’ had gotten lodged in my head and was beginning to have an effect. My attention had stabilised somewhat and the habit of snapping back to notice what was presently happening had been sufficiently installed for me to have some periods of genuine mindfulness. There were stretches where I felt I could actually witness thoughts come and go, along with everything else, before I would collapse back into the more familiar and mundane experience of being hooked and riding them for a while without realising it.
Still, by day eight or nine it was becoming clear that my attention wasn’t going to stabilise quite as much as I would have liked. Maybe it was because I wasn’t following all the rules. But, I mean, if smuggling in a paper containing the phrase Notice how the sensations of the breath appear… Spontaneously arising, effortlessly known is the worst thing I do in a week, I’d probably consider that one of my better ones. I’ve been at family barbeques where I’ve done worse things.
Still, I think my scepticism, not to say cynicism, worked against me in this context. The technique of this particular retreat is not one that I was entirely bought into. While the basic practice, one in which you scan your body and try and notice sensations, is a fairly straightforward concentration practice, it does come bundled with some silliness: Apparently by perceiving the pleasant and unpleasant sensations of your body with total equanimity you will uproot the defilements buried deep in your sub-consciousness. Physical pain literally is a mental impurity coming out. Its ideas like this that caused my Kurdish-Swiss friend to knock himself unconscious after sitting for too long.
I’m on board with uprooting my defilements, and as a metaphor it undoubtedly has some value, but Goenka gives no indication that it is to be interpreted symbolically. There is too large a part of me that winces when I hear this sort of thing. There’s also what I see as an issue with the technique affirming a subject-object divide that points away from the non-dualism I think is the ultimate goal which I wasn’t totally a fan of, but that is getting a little to Inside Baseball for right here.
Still, for reasons of affordability and availability I might well end up doing another of these types of retreats and I think on that one I would be well placed to follow all the damn rules and commit entirely to the technique.
So, after nine and a half days of silence and an afternoon of excited sharing of accounts the retreat ended with a two o’clock morning wake-up bell (the teacher had to get to the airport and it is tradition to do a final sitting together), a final discourse, a final sitting, the cleaning of the quarters and the swapping of social media accounts and email addresses. From the road outside the centre I hitched a chicken bus back in the direction of Mexico.
All this was a long way of saying now I can bend spoons with my mind.
Namastay Y’all.
