Most people have this idea that doing a meditation retreat is relaxing, giving you time to unplug from life and slowly pondering your options. It’s quite the opposite! Yes, you are indeed unplugging from life but it’s hard-going for lots of it and you really don’t ponder much. Instead, it’s all about getting your mind clear ( which takes a few days at least and with lots of effort) before things emerge for you to work on. You don’t get to choose your agenda, it just happens.
FIRST TIME:
The first time I did a 10 day silent meditation retreat I was escaping from Christmas. It was one of those years when I just didn’t want to go there ( a bit traumatic for someone who had always loved it!). So one of my pals suggested that I do a 10-day Vipassana retreat with the Irish Vipassana Trust. They were running a 10 day course in Ennis, and there were spaces. Having never heard of this before, that same week Roisin Ingle of the Irish Times wrote about a Vipassana retreat that she had done once and I also heard someone else talking about it so I thought: yep, it’s a sign, I’ll do it. My friend had done a Vipassana retreat when she was backpacking in Asia, it’s a sort of rite of passage for backpackers, so I felt it couldn’t be too bad. I was worried about the lack of coffee ( caffeine, a stimulant, wasn’t allowed) but she told me that this would be the least of my worries…..a salutary warning. So off I went.
I had done meditation for about a year with Rigpa, the Irish branch of an international Tibetan Buddhist organization. I wasn’t Buddhist, but because these techniques come from an Eastern background, it was the most accessible way to learn meditation at that time. As a result, I was familiar enough with some of the jargon. However, it was another thing entirely to go for 10 days SILENT retreat and I was terrified but my options were slim and it was my GREAT ESCAPE.
So after joining the group on the afternoon of Dec 26th with 100 others( 50 men and 50 women), we had soup and a chat, gave up our mobile phones ( contact only in emergencies) met the teachers, got a few instructions and then the silence began. Everyone had a room they shared with one other person and there was a meditation hall, where we were assigned our places for the duration. In this tradition, men are separated from women for the full 10 days. This venue allowed a full separation, but in other venues you share the hall and eating spaces with the men. ( You have to wonder what will happen now with non-binary peeps but that’s another story).
DAILY REGIME:
The daily regime was like this, with a few variations. Each was sounded by a bell so you didn’t have to watch time if you didn’t want to:
- Morning wake-up bell at 4, to start meditation in the hall at 4.30 to 6.30
- Breakfast at 6.30
- Group mediation 8-9
- Meditation in your room or hall 9-11.30
- Dinner 11.30 ( yummy vegetarian food)
- Group meditation in hall 1-3pm
- Own meditation 3-5pm
- Tea (fruit or lemon tea) at 5pm
- Group meditation 6-7
- Evening recorded talk from 7pm by Goenke, the (now deceased) teacher who brought this technique to the West
- Short evening meditation in group
- 9pm or so fall into bed
It was hard. In this tradition there is minimal instruction, although you can make appointments to see the teachers once/day if you had questions/wanted to LEAVE PLEASE/other. In effect, you live the life of a Buddhist monk for 10 days, no eating after 12 noon, noble silence ( functional talking only – pass the salt please) and other such precepts.
You were asked not to read and not to keep a diary. Hard core!
EARLY DAYS:
Day 1-3: the instructions were: concentrate on the sensation of breath going in and out of your nostrils and the body sensations in this part of your upper-lip-to-nose area. THAT WAS IT. Oh God, how I struggled with boredom, thoughts about everything and anything, the constant effort of trying to concentrate, right hip pain ( I had osteomyelitis as a child, so my hip was stiff in the lotus position, although some lucky people sat on chairs). I couldn’t feel ANY body sensations on my lip, I imagined them, tried to manufacture them. It was awful. Also the evening talks scared me. Because it was in the Buddhist tradition, there was mumbo jumbo talk and I honestly thought I had joined a cult. Only for my friend, who had done a course and was still normal (!) I’d have ran out of the place on day 3: lots of people do and I don’t blame them. But I kept going.
During this time, I got to notice how interesting it is sharing silence with people: you can’t give your tuppence worth or comment with your views on anything, they can’t comment on you either therefore you don’t have to explain yourself so after a while I started to not be bothered about explaining my actions ( a nice one for me). It also meant I didn’t have to try and solve their problems, coz I’m a fixer which is one of the reasons I guess that I went into healthcare. I was starting to LIKE the silence. I also noticed my anxiety about being early for meditation practice, queueing early for the food and, in fact, being early for everything ( a family trait). I found that it didn’t really matter, things would happen anyway so I stopped doing this. Nice!
Day 4: they introduced a new body scanning technique ( hurrah!, my upper lip and nose can take a break). This is where you concentrate on each part of your body, slowly, methodically working at feeling sensations from your head, down your body to your toes and back up again. Slowly, thoughtfully. At least it was more interesting! But for that first introduction session, they also gave the instructions to NOT MOVE AT ALL. Now, there wasn’t a man with a whip making you NOT move, but there was guided instruction on this for a full hour. During this first session, I had a pretty profound realization about pain, one that I had only read about in the scientific theories about pain. My right hip was in severe pain, agonizing really, but I didn’t move it…and somehow I managed to get the better of it. I learned to feel the pain, be fully aware of it, but not actually be bothered by this. It was a different state of mind, like being the observer. They called this being ‘equanimous’ with the pain and I felt it. After that session, I was speechless inside. Even if we WERE allowed to talk, I wouldn’t have been able to! WOW! My mind had just controlled my response to the pain. I had read literature about chronic pain, and about teaching patients live with it and not react with it but I really had never had first-hand experience. It was wild and also exciting and I felt powerful. This didn’t last of course, but it was great and I’d had my first experience of mind control.
MIDDLE:
Day 4 to 8:
WE continued using this technique the whole time, although only 2 sessions a day where we were requested not to move. During these days, a lot of anxiety came up for me…about nothing in particular ( remember, my mind was clear). I just had lots of anxiety, which had been my constant companion since as long as I can remember. I worked it out that anxiety was a physical feeling and if I could do the same thing with anxiety that I did with pain (let it be and don’t interact) then maybe I could be ok with the FEELING of being anxious. So I worked on that.
Meanwhile, I continued to enjoy silence. At this stage I was pretty miserable at times with the wretched anxiety, and guess what, I didn’t have to hide it. Since no one could ask me if I was okay and then I’d have to explain, I just felt and looked miserable on my own terms and with great freedom. It was fabulous. Lots of other people looked miserable too, and you knew that they were dealing with something , just like you, you could feel affinity with them but you didn’t have to help them. It felt like a big silent family of STUFF.
Also, during this time, I started to feel the sensations of my body more ( no surprise there, considering I was spending 9 hours a day on it!) and could feel subtle waves of sensation moving through it.
I worked on other emotions which emerged and which I was discovering are also body sensations, all the while trying to be equanimous with them. My breathing went mad for a day too: I had constant juddery breaths, the kind you have after a really big cry. I just went along with it.
On the 8th night, I remember looking out a window at some distant traffic and I had absolutely no thoughts, no stories to go with the cars or traffic lights or people walking, as though I was just an observer and not interacting. A real spacey pleasant feeling and I savoured it, because I really wanted to remember it.
END OF RETREAT:
Day 9: After mid-day we could talk again to each other. My voice was really wispy and hoarse: I realised that ever since I had been born (when I couldn’t talk but could cry) it had never got 8 days complete rest…ever. I didn’t even want to go back talking at first ( most people felt the same, as the silence was so lovely), but then ,of course, the conversations start. This is where it gets interesting.
Relief, pride at having done it, asking everyone how things went for them and realizing that the people you had been watching and noticing for 10 days were not what you thought they were like.
My room-mate told me that she had a story made up in her mind for every one of the 50 women we had shared the experience with ( this was obviously a pattern for her in her everyday life), the ones she thought looked kind, the ones that seemed angry/boring/interesting but when she started talking to them she realized that it was all her own perceptions and that she was totally wrong about ALL of them. She decided not to bother wasting time judging people again as she was probably wrong anyways. How’s that for a lesson! She also told me that she had had an ectopic pregnancy 17 years previously, and during the retreat she had felt the physical pain of that all over again and also all the emotions that went with it at the time. Unprocessed emotions lying in the body – maybe those hippies were right all along!
Day 10: release from jail. First thing I did was went to Mc Donald’s and had a sausage patty and coffee, it was great. But the interesting stuff started afterwards: Let’s face it, you would never do this to yourself ( even if you WERE using it as an excuse to avoid Christmas) if there were not some effects afterwards. In the real world, for a number of weeks I became completely aware of how much anxiety I felt in daily situations , how many stories were lying in my head and somehow, in time, I got better at dealing with anxiety and, as a result, becoming less anxious overall. Things I had not even THOUGHT about during the retreat were somehow easier: things I had always found difficult to do were somehow done and dusted before I realized: hey, I’d have had a problem with this before! So somehow, the mind training I had done had real benefits afterwards for things not even on my radar. The results are individual to everyone.
AFTERWARDS:
Afterwards, I dabbled for a few years with 3-day retreats in this tradition, each time extremely difficult, each time coming away with being able to do random things that I hadn’t been able to do before without a lot of over-thinking and anxiety. And then I discovered a slightly easier version of the same training at Sunyata , a Buddhist Retreat Centre in SixMileBridge, Co Clare. This is meditation done in the Theravada, Thai Forest Buddhist tradition. I’m still not a Buddhist, but I just love this tradition. It’s a gentler 10-day programme with more rest time, amidst beautiful surroundings and also it includes walking and standing meditations, so my fecking right hip can give me a break! Speaking of which, with very little effort, I can now make myself equanimous with the hip pain. You still give up your mobile phone, but these days I hand it over with tremendous enthusiasm!
I’ve decided to do one every year from now on.
THE LITTLE LESSONS:
Being on retreat is like an intense microcosm of life, a laboratory for watching your reactions to things and learning to respond in a more helpful way. This then gets transferred to everyday life in ways you could not imagine. In the Theravada tradition, you get daily chores, which are an opportunity to do things mindfully and these are a surprising learning point. For example, on my most recent retreat, I was the bell-ringer so didn’t have the luxury of switching off from time. I had to ring the bell first thing in the morning, and before every meditation session, in total about 5 or 6 times a day. On my first night, I didn’t SLEEP with the anxiety of responsibility for waking up the entire house with the morning bell. After one sleepless night, I got over myself and just DID it, switching off any night-time anxiety and trusting my alarm clock! During the day, I still had all these thoughts about whether I was doing it right, what people thought of my bell-ringing, being self-conscious ,stupid stuff, but I learned to let that go too. Since then, I have become much more decisive about responsible decisions, learning to just follow my best option at the time and not think about the outcome so much. What others think is probably not what I think they think anyway. Nice result! Even if the process is a little bit crazy….!
NOW:
I’m still a normal person, but 10 days every year I enter an abnormal ( maybe supernormal?) environment and train my mind to keep me going for the next year. I join lots of other ‘normal’ people too. All ages, all backgrounds, some wanting a spiritual perspective on life, some not, some escaping life, all willing to suspend ‘reality’ for a while to gain a different perspective on our daily reality. And…I’ve started a daily meditation practice , which is now my ‘me’ time. I think it's really interesting that deliberately putting yourself in the way of hard things, can bring you many good results. We are so programmed to think that we always have to pick things that feel good to become happy. Maybe there is virtue on both. Worth pondering, I think.
P.S I Like Christmas again!
Sinead X
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