Retreat

Vajraloka, May 2022

All retreats are different - different locations, duration, teams, teachers and subjects. I went on one in north Wales, deep in the countryside at a small retreat centre, for ten days. There were only nine retreatants and four on the team - the main teacher, two support teachers and the cook. The theme was 'Simply Being': trying to increase awareness of the body and mind in the present moment through meditation. Lots of meditation.

This isn't a new topic for me, and one of my friends teaches the same subject. On this retreat the teacher drew heavily on the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with its chakras and five wisdoms of the enlightened mind and formless space and the Deep Heart. My friend comes at the topic in a way that is much more accessible to me, focussing on simple mindfulness while observing the senses.

Being a meditation retreat, there was a lot of sitting. Not all of it was compulsory, but if I'm on a retreat I try to turn up for everything, at least to start with. There's the usual sit before breakfast, then we had taught sessions in the morning and the afternoon and a ritual in the evening. It generally added up to between 4 and 5 hours sitting down each day.

So I had a few problems, especially in the first two days, when it became clear that a) I couldn't continue sitting on the chair I had, no matter how I arranged cushions and blankets to support my lower back and feet, and b) I barely understood any of the teaching. I arranged a mat to lie down on instead of sitting, which was much more comfortable but came with the risk of falling asleep, and then found a different chair which worked better. I still didn't understand much of the teaching, but I became less cross about it as the days passed.

After the first day, we were in silence for a week. I don't experience much hardship in this, as I'm in silence for most of my time at home. It wasn't even complete silence - the teacher still spoke and we could ask questions, we each had a fifteen minute review every day with one of the team, and we could join in the rituals in the evening. It did mean that despite spending ten days in close contact with twelve other people, I ended the retreat without knowing very much about them at all.

In our free time there wasn't much to do, but as the theme was 'Simply Being' we were generally encouraged to do nothing at all. The suggestion to avoid reading really only applied to novels; books about Buddhism were allowed, and luckily I'd brought one just in case. I had been finding it hard going at home, but compared to the inaccessibility of the teaching it suddenly seemed very straightforward. When I finished it, not having brought a second book, I read it again.

I also went for walks. Other retreat centres I've been to have put some effort into describing local routes for walks, but here they only had the standard OS map, which was falling to pieces through age and use. Nevertheless, on most days I managed to piece together walks in different directions, and on the last day I put them all together for a lovely long ramble. It did occur to me that in geography at school we were taught a lot of not very useful things about glaciation and rocks and oxbow lakes, but reading an OS map has definitely been a skill I've continued to use.