What can I tell you about my nine-day vipassana retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts? That it feels like it was a lot longer, as retreats always do. Especially when they involve busy schedules starting with a bell at 5 in the morning and not really letting you tumble into bed until 9:30 in the evening. Particularly when those hours are not busy, exactly, but to be spent in a relentless alternation of sitting perfectly still and walking in slow motion. (Our schedule.) And most especially when these are nine days of silence, only recently and uneasily broken. If there's any point to silence, to vipassana practice seeking preconceptual experience, and to the idea of retreat from the world into a structured alternate rhythm of life, you wouldn't expect me to be able to describe what happened, or anything of the essence.
But I can say a few things, like that IMS is charming and well run (a woman from Montréal told me it's the "Cadillac of meditation centers"). We were there for the irises and the peonies and, in the forest, lady's slippers. We apparently also hit the window between the blue flies and the mosquitoes...
Yes, I can feel your impatience, but what about insight? meditation? society?
I can also say that I didn't find what I was looking for, but found other things. (Story of my life!) My blog post's title - It's not like that - is a phrase often used by our main teacher, Michele McDonald, gently reminding us that life isn't the way we wish or expect it to be. (Other possible titles of this post, which I jotted down over the course of the retreat, capture some of its many moods: (Re)Treat, Thank you for your practice, Sitting bull, Short of breath, That's huge, Metta-physics, The silent treatment, Shallow breathing, Binge Buddhism, and two more, one of which I'll use for a further post, Analog and Fern sutras.)
• I didn't find what everyone predicted, that I'd be overwhelmed by the "chatter." I was, rather, surprised and disconcerted by the absence of it, and concluded that, for better or for worse, I'm already pretty nonattached to my life (the weeks after the end of an academic year are particularly quiescent, of course). I came out of the retreat convinced I need more attachment! - though, of course, wholesome, skilful attachment. (More on that anon.) And at the last sit yesterday I gleefully generated chatter, in anticipation of the noisy overstimulating endlessly distracting and disappointing world I would soon be returning to. I needn't have bothered: once we broke the silence for a time, the tranquility I'd slowly built up was shattered. The muscles of my face were tensed and jangly. Even my walk, which I'd managed to craft into a quite elegant and amazingly slo-mo gliding, was suddenly wobbly like the first day.
• I didn't find my breath easy to follow, indeed at first I kept losing it. But once I found an "anchor" (hand on stomach helped), I found it was like a bucking bronco. I didn't come anywhere close to awareness of its beginning, middle and end, let alone of the parallel of breath and awareness of breath. But I did learn that the breath varies all the time, swinging, swaying, bouncing, bobbing, fading, loop-the-looping. Which is freaky, since I've come 42 years without noticing that, my own breath! I managed to get out of my head at last.
• I didn't come to understand from the inside all the Buddhist teachings about impermanence, dukkha, anatta and equanimity - my purpose in going to the retreat in the first place. I described this intention to one of our teachers, and he said it was like wanting to taste a mango after only ever having read about mangoes, which seems a suitable analogy. I haven't yet tasted the mango or even broken the skin. But I have felt its cool smooth skin in my hand, and have caught a whiff of its smell. I know that there's a there there (well, actually, that there's not a there there), and that, as our teachers perhaps too often said, is huge.
• I didn't find my preconceptions about American Buddhism confirmed, or entirely disconfirmed. Although the dharma talks sometimes seemed fluffy (everything's OK) and more therapeutic than Buddhist (no mention of karma the whole time, and none of nibbana as non-rebirth), I heard enough of them from different teachers to get a sense of the genre of the dharma talk and to appreciate the skill of the teachers in delivering them to a widely varied audience. (I forget too quickly that most people are lay people. Including me.) I also came to understand that this plurality of voices is part of the genius or challenge of Buddhism in the West. Many different Buddhist traditions, which ignore or scorn each other in Asia, are here in conversation; the process of cultural translation is ongoing, and exciting, an exciting chapter not only in the history of religion in America, but of Buddhism. But translation's never easy (it's adaptation, elaboration, reinterpretation), and I sensed there's a long way to go before a clear translation of Asian monastic traditions to American lay people is achieved. But how fascinating to feel these issues are open, how exciting to be living in times where they are being sounded out...
• I didn't find the silence hard, but this I knew to expect from past experience. What I didn't expect was that the moment when the silence ended and we could finally speak to each other (there were about 70 of us there) would be a downer. One gets very comfortable with people in such a setting, and I'd of course imagined life stories for many, voices and even names, and was looking forward to being proved wrong - the pleasure of finding that of course she would be from Spain, not Provincetown; naturally he'd be a philosophical Chris from the Hudson Valley, not a Martin in mourning from New Haven; entirely appropriately she was a farmer from Ontario, not a left over hippie from Northern California (these are all actual people). I'd even convinced myself that was one of the lessons the place was set up to teach. But when the time came for a provisional lifting of the silence I was quickly bored by who others seemed to be, and by how hollow what we were saying sounded (me and what I was saying, too). How sweet to return to silence with them, though it felt now like aversion to them rather than peaceful metta-ful coexistence, a fantasy of being able to continue as a recluse.
So much yet to learn!
But I can say a few things, like that IMS is charming and well run (a woman from Montréal told me it's the "Cadillac of meditation centers"). We were there for the irises and the peonies and, in the forest, lady's slippers. We apparently also hit the window between the blue flies and the mosquitoes...
Yes, I can feel your impatience, but what about insight? meditation? society?
I can also say that I didn't find what I was looking for, but found other things. (Story of my life!) My blog post's title - It's not like that - is a phrase often used by our main teacher, Michele McDonald, gently reminding us that life isn't the way we wish or expect it to be. (Other possible titles of this post, which I jotted down over the course of the retreat, capture some of its many moods: (Re)Treat, Thank you for your practice, Sitting bull, Short of breath, That's huge, Metta-physics, The silent treatment, Shallow breathing, Binge Buddhism, and two more, one of which I'll use for a further post, Analog and Fern sutras.)
• I didn't find what everyone predicted, that I'd be overwhelmed by the "chatter." I was, rather, surprised and disconcerted by the absence of it, and concluded that, for better or for worse, I'm already pretty nonattached to my life (the weeks after the end of an academic year are particularly quiescent, of course). I came out of the retreat convinced I need more attachment! - though, of course, wholesome, skilful attachment. (More on that anon.) And at the last sit yesterday I gleefully generated chatter, in anticipation of the noisy overstimulating endlessly distracting and disappointing world I would soon be returning to. I needn't have bothered: once we broke the silence for a time, the tranquility I'd slowly built up was shattered. The muscles of my face were tensed and jangly. Even my walk, which I'd managed to craft into a quite elegant and amazingly slo-mo gliding, was suddenly wobbly like the first day.
• I didn't find my breath easy to follow, indeed at first I kept losing it. But once I found an "anchor" (hand on stomach helped), I found it was like a bucking bronco. I didn't come anywhere close to awareness of its beginning, middle and end, let alone of the parallel of breath and awareness of breath. But I did learn that the breath varies all the time, swinging, swaying, bouncing, bobbing, fading, loop-the-looping. Which is freaky, since I've come 42 years without noticing that, my own breath! I managed to get out of my head at last.
• I didn't come to understand from the inside all the Buddhist teachings about impermanence, dukkha, anatta and equanimity - my purpose in going to the retreat in the first place. I described this intention to one of our teachers, and he said it was like wanting to taste a mango after only ever having read about mangoes, which seems a suitable analogy. I haven't yet tasted the mango or even broken the skin. But I have felt its cool smooth skin in my hand, and have caught a whiff of its smell. I know that there's a there there (well, actually, that there's not a there there), and that, as our teachers perhaps too often said, is huge.
• I didn't find my preconceptions about American Buddhism confirmed, or entirely disconfirmed. Although the dharma talks sometimes seemed fluffy (everything's OK) and more therapeutic than Buddhist (no mention of karma the whole time, and none of nibbana as non-rebirth), I heard enough of them from different teachers to get a sense of the genre of the dharma talk and to appreciate the skill of the teachers in delivering them to a widely varied audience. (I forget too quickly that most people are lay people. Including me.) I also came to understand that this plurality of voices is part of the genius or challenge of Buddhism in the West. Many different Buddhist traditions, which ignore or scorn each other in Asia, are here in conversation; the process of cultural translation is ongoing, and exciting, an exciting chapter not only in the history of religion in America, but of Buddhism. But translation's never easy (it's adaptation, elaboration, reinterpretation), and I sensed there's a long way to go before a clear translation of Asian monastic traditions to American lay people is achieved. But how fascinating to feel these issues are open, how exciting to be living in times where they are being sounded out...
• I didn't find the silence hard, but this I knew to expect from past experience. What I didn't expect was that the moment when the silence ended and we could finally speak to each other (there were about 70 of us there) would be a downer. One gets very comfortable with people in such a setting, and I'd of course imagined life stories for many, voices and even names, and was looking forward to being proved wrong - the pleasure of finding that of course she would be from Spain, not Provincetown; naturally he'd be a philosophical Chris from the Hudson Valley, not a Martin in mourning from New Haven; entirely appropriately she was a farmer from Ontario, not a left over hippie from Northern California (these are all actual people). I'd even convinced myself that was one of the lessons the place was set up to teach. But when the time came for a provisional lifting of the silence I was quickly bored by who others seemed to be, and by how hollow what we were saying sounded (me and what I was saying, too). How sweet to return to silence with them, though it felt now like aversion to them rather than peaceful metta-ful coexistence, a fantasy of being able to continue as a recluse.
So much yet to learn!
