Ten months ago, I went out to the Insight Meditation Society for their 9-day New Years retreat. It was my first time doing a retreat of that length, and I found it vastly more dramatic and emotionally challenging than any retreat I’d ever experienced.
When I came home, I hoped to share my experiences in two separate blog posts: one public, the other friends-locked. Although I completed the first draft of the public post, I never shared it, because I was unable to adequately express the more personal stuff in the private post. And external events interfered, as well.
Nearly a year has passed now, and so much has changed since then. I guess I probably won’t ever complete the private half of my account, but I thought it appropriate to clean up and share the bit I’d planned to post publicly, for those of my friends who are interested.
So here’s my report on last year’s New Years retreat, albeit belated and edited for privacy.
Back in December, three women and I shared a car ride out to the Insight Meditation Society in Barre for their 9-day New Years retreat with guiding teachers Yanai Postelnik, Catherine McGee, and Pascal Auclair.
This was only my second time at IMS, the prior visit being a 5-day retreat two years before. After reviewing my blog entry from that first visit, I made damned sure to bring more than a single pair of socks!
As you might imagine, the weather in the Worcester hills at the end of December provided a spectacle of its own. The first three days were fairly mild (35-42°), and the ground was bare, so I took the opportunity to familiarize myself with the miles of walking trails through the woods behind the center.
That was followed by five straight days where it didn’t get above 22°, and dipped below zero for several nights. Thankfully, our rooms were kept comfortably warm, although I noticed one space heater being used to thaw some frozen pipes in the basement of one of the dorms.
We had two snowfalls of about 3 and 6 inches, neither of which stopped me from regular trudges through the wooded paths out back, as you can see from the photos at right.
While walking outside on New Years Eve (before the snows), I realized that the long hedge in front of IMS was made up of large holly trees. Having grown up in Maine, I have a deep affinity for holly, which thrives in similarly cold and desolate places. So I gathered a handful of holly leaves and berries from the ground and placed them along the windowsill in my room (see photo).
The cold weather peaked on day eight of the retreat, when I took what could be conservatively called a brisk 3-mile trek around Gaston Pond. The sunrise above the snowed-over pond was lovely, but I nearly lost my fingers taking the accompanying photograph in air that was seven degrees below zero! Ironically, that was during perihelion, the time of year when the distance between the Earth and the Sun is actually the shortest!
Then the temperatures miraculously shot back up to nearly 50° on a misty morning on the last day of the retreat. The fog only thickened as the week’s snows rapidly sublimated and completely disappeared.
I definitely didn’t sleep well, and heard similar reports from several others. My theory is that the amount of time spent each day with eyes closed, observing the mind, builds up so much momentum that it’s difficult to shut it down to go to sleep at night. But that’s just one theory.
On New Years Eve, the teachers led us through a ceremony that included writing something we’d like to give up or leave behind on a piece of paper, then depositing them into a container to later be burned. I was sitting next to the container, and it was interesting to observe how most people emphatically threw their unwanted attributes into it, often ritually ripping the paper into bits beforehand. And then a very few folks (including myself) were much more reluctant to drop theirs in, as if they were letting go of a safety blanket.
The second Saturday—day eight of the retreat—was the day that all hell broke loose.
After returning from that long, frigid sunrise walk I mentioned above, I noticed that my throat was really sore. I had come down with a cold. I had taken lots of careful precautions, knowing that retreats are ideal breeding grounds for disease, but it had still caught up with me. Thankfully, there were only two days left before we headed home!
But that was nothing compared to what followed. At the start of the midday sitting, the teachers asked us to immediately go and check our rooms and secure our valuables, because someone had gone into several meditators’ rooms (there were no locks on any of the doors) and taken all their cash! Eventually we learned that eight to ten people in one particular dorm had been robbed, and some prescription painkillers had been taken, as well.
Having spent an entire week opening their hearts and allowing themselves to work with their emotional vulnerabilities, it would be difficult to describe the sense of violation that my fellow retreatants felt. However, with the wisdom of the teachers, the group found some ways to respond to the invasion that helped people heal.
First, the entire retreat—more than a hundred people—took up the “om mani padme hum” chant and walked in a procession from the main building’s meditation hall, through my dorm, then across a passage to the affected dorm, and back again. The chant was moving and powerful, and the combined strength and goodwill of so many people helped the meditators in that building feel that we had “taken back” the space.
Then arrangements were made for small groups of people to voluntarily take shifts doing walking meditation in that building all night long, so that the residents would know that someone was awake and present at all hours to protect them in case the thief returned. I would have volunteered, but I knew that getting a good night’s sleep was imperative for fighting my oncoming cold.
I wasn’t particularly concerned about my own safety. My room was near the main building, and no one in my dorm had been robbed. I was mostly concerned for the others. But as we went to bed that night, everyone was on edge and emotionally primed to respond to the potential return of the trespasser.
So it was in that state of mind that I woke up at 2am when the door to my room was opened. In the dim light from the “Exit” signs I could see the silhouette of someone slipping into my room from the corridor. By the time I was conscious enough to respond, they’d begun backing up, but that was when it hit me that this could well be the guy!
My heart racing and barely aware of what I was doing in my panic, I threw off my bedding, grabbed the door, and screamed “HEY!!!” The interloper was backing off hurriedly, then cowered on the opposite side of the corridor from me, saying “Imsorry Imsorry Imsorry, I got confuuused!”
That wasn’t the response I would expect from a thief, so I froze in mid-leap. That gave me enough time to scan what I could see of the person’s features in the darkness. Out of a hundred complete strangers at the retreat, I thought I recognized one of the women I had shared a ride with… “Claudia, is it?”
Apparently it was. She apologized again, and I think I just said “Okay” and closed the door on her. I would have flopped right back to sleep, except my heart was pounding and I was chock full of adrenalin. No matter how still I laid or how much I tried to calm my mind, there was no more sleep that night.
The next day—the last full day of the retreat—the teachers held a a small session for people who still felt they needed to work through some of their reaction to the burglary. I decided I would go and just ask how to deal with my body’s response, because no matter how much my mind had settled, my heart was still racing along in fight mode.
Claudia also appeared at that meeting, and we talked through the event. Apparently she had been one of the people doing walking meditation during the night, and in returning hadn’t realized that the passage from the second floor of one dorm led to the first floor of the other. She had walked into what would have been her room if she had been on the second floor, but because she was mistakenly on the first floor, she’d walked in on me instead.
People going into the wrong room by accident isn’t unheard-of there, since the doors all look the same, and there weren’t any locks on them (there are now). Of course, having that happen to me at 2am the night after a burglary was pretty much the worst timing imaginable. Since it was conceivable that something like that could still happen again, the following night I slept with my bed frame blocking my door from opening at all. I didn’t want to go through that a second time!
The final day brought the closing feedback session, where I spoke a brief piece about how the retreat had affected me emotionally much more than any previous retreat. And Claudia and I and the other two women in our car were the last ones out of the center after the retreat ended.
So, that’s a good bit about the body of the retreat. Now I’ll talk a bit about some of the ideas that came to me while spending all that time in silence.
Everything we experience, which feels so personal and unique to us, isn’t; it’s actually just one instance of sensations that virtually all humans experience at some point in their lives. Viewing them as universal phenomena makes it easier to hold one’s own pain lightly and feel a lot more compassion for others.
I thought up two interesting metaphors for how we relate to time. One can only see what’s happening clearly by being fully engaged and aware in the temporal present. Our past experiences can be like the film on a dirty window, making it more difficult to accurately view what’s going on in the present; our histories leave a residue that obscures or filters one’s view of the present. One need to try to see through or beyond the obscuration, or somehow clean the obstructions away. Similarly, focusing on the future can cast a shadow that darkens and obscures one’s view of the present; you can either spend all your time planning for and living in the shadow of an as-yet unrealized future, or step out of the shadow and experience the present moment in its full, vivid brilliance.
There’s an old instruction that goes something like this: never miss an opportunity to make someone else happy. I had some opportunities to play with this during the retreat, and the results were rewarding. I’d like to remember to do this more often.
When dealing with strong emotions (positive or negative), the best way to relate to it is with curiosity. Trying to suppress it isn’t healthy, and conversely one can easily lose perspective by self-indulgently wallowing in those emotions. The correct prescription is to explore one’s emotions with a sense of curiosity, because then one can understand, see the value of, and learn from those feelings.
In meditation, we cultivate a separation between the observer and the observed. In that way, the part of the persona that is observed can experience an emotion like anger, while another a part of the mind is at a slight distance from the experience, observing it, and learning from it. This separation of the observer from the observed isn’t just useful to help us see ourselves more clearly. Conversely, for those of us who have difficulty with our emotions, or are afraid of giving them free rein, it’s also a good way to free part of one’s persona to be fully absorbed in our emotions without the fear of losing control or being overwhelmed by them.
The common conceptual framework we inherited tell us that the heart is the place where we feel emotion. But saying that the heart is the seat of emotion is no more accurate than saying you hear sound through your kneecaps. If the heart was truly where emotions were located, people with man-made artificial hearts would never feel emotion, and doctors would perform cardiac surgery to cure depression, rather than prescribe drugs that impact brain chemistry! It’s time to stop referring to the heart as the seat of emotion, which is merely fossilized lore from a distant time of human ignorance.
There’s a huge amount more to say about that retreat, but I’m afraid the rest of the story will have to wait.
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Overall, the book didn’t really blow me away, but there was one story about the author’s childhood that struck a resonant chord, so I thought I’d record that here, since I think it directly addresses the anxiety that people feel about not knowing the “meaning” of their lives.