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Last Monday night I ended a seven day retreat that started each day before 4:30 am and lasted until close to 10 PM. I had decided to do 1,000 prostrations daily…. in addition to ten hours of formal sitting broken up by work practice, juice (I was fasting for the first three days) and a twenty minute nap at 1 PM.
It did not start out well. Over the last eighteen years I have learned not to listen to music for twenty four hours before a retreat because it saves me from hearing that music over and over and over for the next five or so days. This time, while I had a quiet Monday, I did see the movie, Phantom of the Opera, on Sunday evening. So minutes into my first sitting, there it was…..the entire soundtrack, starting with the overture.
I waited it out and was in the meditation groove by the second morning. The groove lasted, and deepened, except for falling soundly asleep on my cushion, in full sitting position, at exactly 8 PM each night as a result of the combination of juicing and prostrations. By day three I traded in juicing for protein and homemade french fries. And finally settled in to a wonderful retreat.
The big surprise was how hard it was to keep going. I was by myself and a room away from the internet, a television and a VCR. A seven minute walk from Borders; ten minutes from Starbucks. Every sitting needed a Bodhisattva vow to remind myself that I wasn't doing this for me, I was doing it for the world. The other thing that helped was that I was sitting next to, of all things, a refrigerator. And I noticed early on that whenever I was waffling and needing to remind myself to keep sitting that refrigerator just kept going…..without whining, or walking away, or sneaking onto the net. Its unerring energy became "the refrigerator sutra".
There is something quite wonderful about personal retreats. They force us to see ourselves, exactly as we are. I got to see how happy I am and where I still whine and how much I love my friends in this lifetime, and the sangha, and how I still worry about certain people. Flashes of insights ranged from, "Wow, there really is no permanent self so why do I try to defend what doesn't even exist….ever?" to "We all move really fast!" (The latter insight hit me every time I went out to do walking meditation. It was typically when people were leaving the little apartment complex I was in for work. Or coming home. Even the mail woman moved at the speed of a race car, though. It was wild. )
I realized that all those Zen masters were such teddy bears, the ones who developed koans anyway, because they just couldn't leave well enough alone but had to drive us nuts with hints and shouts and hits and unpredictable behavior. It hit me hard to understand clearly, for the first time, that we are born with tendencies and that these are the jewels we have to work with, both for figuring out what we each can most effectively do to be of service to the world through our livelihood and, for the tendencies related to greed, anger, and delusion, what we'll spend the rest of our lives shovelling out of our system once we take on a sincere spiritual path. I realized the power of gratitude…..every time I'd feel myself getting stuck on one of my many problem causing habits, simply considering a handful of things I'm grateful for pulled me back into practice.
It was a great retreat. It ended quietly, with tea and a deepened resolve to live this path fearlessly. At the same time it took so much effort that I swore I'd never do one again but here I am a little over a week later thinking about where I could go next year. Costa Rica maybe. Or Grand Rapids. I'll be happy for company if you just happen to have a week free at the end of January.
