It’s difficult to talk about what happens on a silent meditation retreat because, really, so little actually happens. You sit, you walk, you eat meals and attend to a few chores. It’s what you don’t do that matters. I’ll do my best to explain.
Last winter, I convinced my editor to send me to Woodacre, California, without cell phone or email access for a week to pursue an interest in the word silence. Think about that. For 358 days a year, your calendar runs from morning to night with meetings, dinners, birthday parties, families. These are the things that fill your estimated 35 to 48 thoughts per minute, because dropping a ball in the real world can seem nothing short of disastrous. But for one week at West Marin’s Spirit Rock Meditation Center, you get the chance to put your life on mute amid golden rolling hills and redwood-strewn mountains. This is the remote, optimistic landscape that drew John Muir to “play and pray,” Jack London to go after inspiration with a club, Jack Kerouac to quietly contemplate ways to “. . . appreciate perhaps a whole new way of living.” And this is where, after checking myself in, a man in black robes tells me the only thing I’ll really need to remember over the next week: “There’s no hurry.” Though there is a rigorous schedule of activities planned, all I have to do is show up.
Of the 45 different retreats offered at Spirit Rock throughout the year, I chose one focused on metta, a Pali word that means “loving kindness,” which I picked solely based on the understanding that if I am going to be alone with my thoughts, I might as well be nice to myself. My first exercise in self-care is to unpack my things. I locate my room in an all-women’s house called Mudita, which means “joy.” It is small and clean—monastic. There’s a single bed with a heavy navy cotton blanket, a side table, and a chair. The light switch controls only the light over my bed, leaving another nook with a closet, sink, and mirror rather dim. A small night-light is all I can find to illuminate that part of the room, where I stow a stack of warm sweaters and leggings and a bag of fragrance-free products. According to the guidelines I was e-mailed, even shampoo and conditioner should be silent. Otherwise, the rules of the seven-day retreat are straightforward and simple. There will be no talking, no reading, no Internet, no phones, no writing notes to other yogis, absolutely no sexual contact—even eye contact is discouraged.
What ultimately brings people to a retreat, and keeps them coming back, is a mixed bag. My own desire for quiet could have been easily explained as a side effect of balancing friendships, dating, and family obligations with a deadline-oriented job in the city that audibly never sleeps. But the reality is that on top of these millennial trials, both of my parents died within two years of each other. And they were sick for a collective six. All of which translates to spending the better part of a decade in a state of panic, trying to outrun my family’s fate and out-schedule the possibility of finding myself alone in the world. Neither worked.
In spite of my best intentions to relax into the present moment, my first full day of meditation requires swallowing many grains of salt. Phrases like “the jewel of the lotus” and “magnificent butterfly” are tossed around daily. Even the teachers’ names are Tempel, Dori, Teja, and Spring. There’s also the practice of walking meditation, which, if you’ve never done it, looks something like a zombie apocalypse. (People walk back and forth very slowly with a blank, out-of-focus gaze for up to an hour.) One young member of my retreat is so intent on being present that he does everything at a comically glacial pace that makes the rest of us look like we are living in fast-forward. When I’m not holding back an eye roll, my mind rattles off to-do lists when it’s supposed to visualize my breath, my body decides to gripe about aches and beg for a nap in place of sitting in halcyon stillness. I realize, terrifyingly, that I still have six and a half days left.
But I do settle into a schedule. Each morning when the gong rings at 5:00 a.m., I start my day in the dark. We return to the octagonal meditation room and Teja leads us in qigong exercises, which he reminds us more than once to “under do.” Movements are fluid and loose. When our spines have been stacked and unstacked, warmed up for the day, we sit for our first meditation while the sun is rising. That morning we are asked to think of a person we unconditionally love—someone who warms our heart just by thinking of them. “Visualize this person sitting in front of you,” says Spring. We’re instructed to share with them the metta phrases in a variation that feels comfortable to us. They are:
May you be happy.
May you be peaceful.
May you be safe.
May you be protected.
May you be healthy.
May you be strong.
May your life unfold with ease.
I think of my mother. These are things I so sincerely hope for her, that merely by expressing them, I feel what I would describe as a knot in my heart loosen. In the quiet, away from the frantic pace of my life, I’m able to separate her from the experience of losing her for the first time since she died. Calmed down, I so clearly remember my mother, it’s as if she’s actually there. I can see her hands, I can hear the exaggerated way she says “brr” when she’s cold. She makes me laugh. I ask her to join me for meals and she does. We walk together, very slowly, and I wish her well.
At an afternoon seated meditation, our teachers ask us to turn the phrases inward, suggesting we might find it beneficial to mentally sit with ourselves as children. I see myself at 8, full of possibility, curious, confident, wild. I repeat the incantations again and again. It’s nightfall by the time I realize that more than wanting these things for myself for my own sake, I want to be peaceful and happy and safe because that’s what my parents would want for me—that my peace and happiness is inextricably tied to theirs. By the time I wash my face and lie down in bed, I am deliriously blissful—a feeling that was accomplished by nothing more than wanting to be.
Over the next four days, we continue to slow our pace. We chant at night until our chests vibrate. We watch the sunrise and the stars. We turn the phrases toward our friends, then to someone we have difficulty with, to a neutral person in our lives, and eventually to the whole world—the snakes, the whales, the soil, the mailman, people on the subway car, you. The interactions I have in my life fall into clear categories of relationships that are supportive and productive, and those that aren’t. The noise clears.
On the last morning, I wake up feeling fully relaxed, confident that I can handle the slim half-day schedule ahead of me. My head is clear. I feel safe, I feel protected, I am at ease. I walk to the sink to wash my face and reach for the night-light. That’s when I see it. There, next to the tiny lamp I’ve been using, on the very same beige plastic panel, is a light switch. It’s been there the whole time. I was just too distracted to notice. I turn on the light and I can see everything.
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