Side of Sauce

A year ago, I set off into the woods to attend a 4 day meditation retreat. During my journey across the Golden Gate Bridge and all along the way to Fairfax where the retreat was situated, I couldn’t help but imagine what lay in store for me. I suppose I conjured images of myself sitting under a tree in a sort of blissfully serene state, solving all the world’s problems (or maybe just one or two of my own). I didn’t really have a clear expectation of what I would gain from the experience, but I figured I didn’t have much to lose either. I certainly didn’t imagine that meditating would be very hard, after all when you think about it you are doing…well, nothing.

The course I took is a silent form of meditation known as Vipassana and it was conducted entirely out-of-doors. My first clue that I had perhaps come to the wrong place was when the instructor gently reminded us that all life is sacred, so the killing of insects (namely mosquitoes and ticks of which there was an abundance) would not be tolerated. Not only could we not kill these irksome pests, but we were also supposed to ‘send them love’. You have got to be kidding me!

The first day was magical – the surrounds were incredible and for the first time in a year I felt almost mellow. Half way into the second day however, I began plotting my escape. I would sit under a tree, pretending to concentrate on my breath or the aggregation of ambient sounds, but in actuality I was formulating a detailed escape plan (accompanied by its very own soundtrack). “Who are you kidding”, I chided myself, “you can’t even sit still on vacation, much less for 10 hours a day under a tree in a very cold (and did I mention bug-infested) forest”.

The funny thing about it was that intellectually I didn’t understand why I was so fixated on escape – meditating really wasn’t so bad. I mean, for 10 hours a day, yeah, it was kind of boring, but it wasn’t exactly torture. What else did I have to do? I suppose I could go back to work and admit I wasn’t really the meditating type (which smacked a little of failure to me), I could go to a hotel and watch chick flicks on cable for three days straight or I could sit under a tree and think about my life. I clearly had a lot to think about and a little introspection never hurt anyone.

When I tell people about the experience they always imagine that the hardest part was maintaining silence for four days straight. For me, that was actually the easiest part – I didn’t really want to talk. I had been doing nothing but talking for the past year – trying to make sense of my life, when what I wanted to do most was to remain completely and utterly silent. It felt almost as if a social weight had been lifted.

The most difficult part of the experience was the meditating. When you are freezing cold, sitting under a tree at 5 a.m. there is little else to think about (when you are not supposed to be thinking) other than the fact that you are freezing cold and its 5 a.m. You almost wish you were anywhere else. You are convinced that you simply cannot take it for a second longer. You perversely start to wonder what everyone would do if you just jumped up, ripped off your clothes, and started screaming like a deranged lunatic. Just as you make a move to do so (because you have truly reached the end of your rope) the sun rises, the birds begin to sing and the morning session is over. Dismissed. Off to the kitchen for ‘work meditation’.

At the end of each day, as the moon rose, we gathered on the hill, under our tree to listen to a lecture. This was by far the most meaningful part of the retreat. Our instructor read us passages from various poems or books – some of which I had never heard and others I hadn’t read in years. Thoreau and Frost were natural picks for meditations on nature, but there were also some Adrienne Rich and Buddhist writings. The instructor spoke a lot about Buddhist philosophy – impermanence and the concept of non-attachment. I struggled to understand how one could not help but become attached to something – or rather, someone. In Buddhist philosophy it seems safer not to love at all, since love leads only to attachment and then inevitably to loss and then finally to pain. The pain accompanying a love lost is almost unbearable. About this, I know.

On the last day of the retreat I found that I was actually sad to be leaving. The experience had been meaningful and moving and incredibly difficult. It would be weird to go home, to drive on the highway, to talk to people again (4 days without saying a word is a long time) and go back to work. It would be hard to explain that I felt a strange connection to the people in my small group, although I had never actually exchanged a word with any of them. It would be impossible to convey why anyone would want to sit in the cold and try not to think about anything for hours at a time.

I am not sure why I decided to go to Vipassana, or what I hoped to learn about myself in the silence of those four days, but I definitely left with something unexpected. I didn’t come close to solving any of the world’s problems, not even one or two of my own, but I did emerge with a strange sense of calm and an alternate viewpoint on how to evaluate events in my life and that was totally worth the price of admission.