Talking Again

Well, I've been back from my 10 day silent vipassana meditation retreat and talking out loud again for a week now! How quickly the silence and stillness fades. It's long gone actually, but the experience was very deep for me and made some inroads into my consciousness that will not fade so quickly. Where to start?

I actually already wrote a blog post about this experience last week and didn't have a chance to finish it in one sitting and then I accidentally erased it and couldn't recover a saved version. I hate that, but it was kind of a perfect example of one of the main themes of the retreat itself. All things must change and pass away, so don't get too attached to anything. And they mean ANYTHING. Like your sense of self or your thoughts or memories or hopes or dreams or lover or children or sneakers or car or blog post or whatever. It's all going to go someday. And that's not a bad thing, though it's hard, (like impossible pretty much,) for us to wrap our heads around the idea. But for the few brief moments that I could actually let go of some of these attachments it enabled me to do some amazing things. Almost magically amazing to myself. I’ll spare you the details about feeling my body dematerialize and head for a more concrete example. I let go of some old and some newer traumas and emotional pain that has been really hanging in there for a while. One that I was particularly amazed to be able to let go of was the pain over losing the baby last spring, and not knowing when or if we will ever have a chance to have another baby again. The childbearing route has not been an easy one for us and we are nearing the end of our emotional ability to keep trying, and this attachment has been more painful than I could have imagined before that journey began, fueled now by the physical memory of my last pregnancy and powerful hormonal surges now that I am approaching my mid thirties. It's a craving deep down in my body that has been VERY hard to let go of. But over the days upon days of striving to sit still, silent, and cultivate equanimity for every thought and every moment, the attachment and then the pain just faded away. It may come back again at times, but I know that will pass too. As will all pain, all happiness, all anger, all triumph and defeat. It sounds nihilistic but once I relaxed into that thought I could see that it doesn't mean that anything becomes less beautiful or wonderful. In fact quite the opposite. Everything in creation and each moment of passing time can be seen and felt as precious. I'm not saying that I have become an enlightened or liberated being free from attachments in any way. I have DEFINITELY not. But I was lucky enough to take this opportunity to retreat and be supported while I worked very hard to strive toward equanimity and an acceptance of the passing nature of all things. And because of that supported environment and the many hours of hard work in which I sat still and present with my own body and mind, I did find a few moments where I could exist in deep peace and acceptance of everything just as it is. Those moments didn't last long, but they were so powerful! Ah sadly, all moments must change and pass away, even my moments of union with dharma. But I haven’t forgotten them.

In between my many, many hours a day of seated meditation, my brief period of sleeping and my two small meals a day I had no responsibilities. (Vipassana is like Buddhist tough love. Lots of sitting, little sleep, not much food. It hurts sometimes but it's good for you.) When I had an extra 40 minutes I would go outside and zone out by the little waterfalls or the pond or next to the smooth, red skinned madrone trees. At night the stars and moon were so incredibly crystalline and bright in the expansive sky, and by day the silence was broken only by our footsteps and bird calls and wind and the bells ringing at meditation times. I saw every sunset and was up long before dawn every day. I witnessed a herd of deer passing silently and unhurriedly through the grounds, and I saw a male Anna’s hummingbird bathing in a waterfall at dawn one morning. With each passing day my body and mind became more and more still and peaceful. And then it was over! And the 50 women that I had been with for the last 10 days were all allowed to talk to each other finally and chatter and laughter exploded again and stillness was forgotten in the excitement of celebrating our time together and getting ready to leave. Then five hours in the car with my new Quebecois friend who drove me home and back to the world of moving fast and eating and talking and working and endless distractions where I now exist.

I have just one more tale to tell of my retreat into stillness. Whatever gains I was able to make were all made possible not only by my family doing without me at home, but also very much supported by the vipassana center itself, which provided me with instruction and space to be silent as well as with a warm, clean place to sleep, meditate and eat healthy, delicious vegetarian meals, all of which were provided by volunteers and donations from other vipassana practitioners. You must complete a 10 day course before you can give any time or money or anything back to the center, and even then they ask for nothing in particular in return. There are no fees, there is no suggested donation, no pressure to give and certainly no pressure to convert or even to embrace Buddhism. They just recommend that you try and get the most out of these ten days and then you can do with it what you will. They feed you and heat your buildings and provide cleaning products and paper goods not to mention meditation instruction and full time assistant teachers and course managers. I didn’t even realize until after the course that the construction of a new building going on while I was there, including all materials and labor, was donated or paid for by previous meditators. It’s kind of pure to think that every single construction guy on there had sat a ten day course before he could come and work on that building. In fact, it’s very pure, that he would appreciate what the center had to offer so much that he would give in time and labor. It’s hard to find that kind of purity sometimes in our culture and I was very touched by the lengths that they go to to preserve it there, thus creating a veritable fountain of huuman generosity and goodwill.

I left there physically exhausted but emotionally renewed, and feeling very, very happy. As they said to us again and again, “May you all experience true peace, true happiness. May all beings be happy.”