Calling it a retreat is somewhat misleading. The word retreat makes me think of rest. Perhaps a peaceful little cabin, long walks, cups of tea, and several books I have been meaning to read. This was not that.
In 2012, I attended a ten-day Vipassana meditation course in New Zealand. We sat in meditation for up to fourteen hours a day, ate twice, and observed complete silence. No casual conversation. No whispering. No communicating with the person beside you through increasingly expressive facial movements. Nothing.
There was a set time when you could spend a few minutes speaking with one of the senior staff if you had an emergency or a serious question about the practice. I did not think personal discomfort qualified. Perhaps I was wrong.
On the first day, after moving into my room, I discovered that a wasp nest had been built just outside my window. The mosquito screen was torn, which meant the wasps had easy access to the room. They made full use of it.
There were usually a few dozen flying around at any given time. They came through the damaged screen, explored the room, circled above my bed, landed on my belongings, and generally behaved as though I had moved into their retreat. I suppose, technically, I had.
I could not fix the screen. I could not block the opening without disturbing the nest, and I had already agreed to observe the principle of nonviolence. Killing them was not an option.
Communicating the problem to anyone was also, according to my interpretation of the rules, not an option. The wasps were uncomfortable, certainly, but they were not an emergency. Not yet, anyway.
I also wondered whether there were no accidents. Perhaps this was exactly the situation I had been given to solve. On my own. In silence. With several dozen wasps.
I left them alone. They flew around me while I dressed. They flew around me while I tried to rest. They greeted me when I returned from meditation and continued conducting their affairs as though we had entered into a perfectly normal shared accommodation agreement.
I wished them no harm. I also wanted them to understand that my commitment to nonviolence depended heavily upon their behavior.
We reached an arrangement. I would not swat them, trap them, attack their nest, or complain about their presence. They would not sting me. There was no formal discussion of these terms, obviously, but I believe they understood. At least, I hoped they did.
The wasps turned out to be one of the more straightforward parts of the course.
Vipassana involves observing physical sensations without reacting to them. Pleasant or unpleasant, everything changes. Everything passes. This sounds beautifully simple until your back is burning, your legs have gone numb, and your mind has decided to replay an event from fifteen years ago that you were quite certain you had already dealt with. Apparently not.
I had been meditating since childhood and first heard about Vipassana in the 1990s while studying traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda in Toronto. A fellow student had described the course to us, although I would like to point out that he said there were ten hours of meditation a day. Not fourteen. Whoever told me it was ten hours a day, I remember. It was fourteen.
For years, I knew the practice would be good for me. I also knew I was not physically or mentally ready to sit for that long. Eventually, I decided I was. That decision became increasingly questionable as the days passed.
You spend an astonishing amount of time with yourself during ten days of silence. There are no ordinary distractions, no conversations, no work, and no convenient person nearby whom you can blame for your emotional state. It is just you. For fourteen hours a day. Good luck.
Memories began surfacing. Some were important. Others seemed completely random. Names, conversations, grievances, old frustrations, and details I would not have thought I could recall all appeared with remarkable clarity. At times I found myself thinking, Really? This one again? I had believed I was over several things. My mind had apparently not received the memo.
There was also physical pain. Sitting for that many hours does interesting things to the back, knees, hips, neck, and temperament. You learn a great deal about nonattachment when both legs have gone numb and there are still forty-five minutes left in the session.
The meals became significant events. We ate breakfast at 6:30 in the morning after our shortest meditation period, which was only two hours, and then again at 11:30. That was it. The gap between the final meal and breakfast the next morning was around seventeen hours. Strangely, I was not especially hungry until I saw the food. Then my eyes became much larger than my stomach. Moderation has never been my middle name. I try. I really do.
The deeper difficulty was not the food, the silence, the physical pain, or even the wasps. It was the sense that there was something I was supposed to reach, and I was not reaching it.
As the course progressed, I saw other people struggling openly. Some cried. Some looked as though they were barely holding themselves together. Later, when we were allowed to speak, I learned that people had packed their bags and considered leaving. Some had scrubbed their rooms with religious enthusiasm simply to keep themselves occupied. One person had taken a long shower in the middle of the night so no one would hear the crying. Others wrung out their clothes with such force that the laundry had apparently become a stand-in for whatever they were trying not to do to the people in their memories.
People were having enormous emotional releases. I was mostly frustrated. That, apparently, was my emotional release. Frustration about the past. Frustration that I was still frustrated about the past. Frustration that I was spending precious meditation time thinking about how frustrated I was. Very productive.
There were moments of clarity. I understood certain events differently. I saw patterns I had not seen before, and several things about my life made more sense. Still, I did not have the great emotional breakthrough I had heard others describe. I did not collapse into tears. I did not suddenly feel overwhelmed with love for every person I had ever met. I did not emerge from the meditation hall radiant, liberated, and ready to embrace humanity.
The wasps and I were getting along rather well, though.
On the final evening, noble silence ended. Noble silence was immediately replaced by noble chatter. It was as though someone had removed a cork from the entire retreat center. After ten days without speaking, everyone had ten days' worth of words that now required immediate release.
People shared what they had experienced. They talked about the memories, the pain, the insights, the moments when they had nearly left, and the extraordinary sense of lightness they now felt. Many described the course as life-changing. I listened with genuine fascination. I also secretly wondered what I had missed. Had I not worked hard enough? Had I spent too much time thinking instead of meditating? Had I done something incorrectly? Everyone else seemed to have worked through their grievances and arrived somewhere lighter. I was still with the grievances.
Once talking was permitted again, I told the staff about the wasp nest, the torn screen, and the dozens of wasps that had shared my room throughout the course. Perhaps I should have mentioned it sooner. In my defense, none of them had stung me. The arrangement had worked.
The course ended, and I left expecting the experience to settle into place. Instead, I felt as though I had been forced awake in the middle of a dream. Things had begun moving inside me, but they had not finished. Memories and emotions had surfaced without reaching any sort of conclusion.
Then the retreat was over, and normal life was waiting. Noise. People. Responsibilities. Hundreds of emails.
A heaviness arrived afterward. I did not want to speak to anyone. I did not want to deal with anything. I felt as though I had reached an important point in the process, only for someone to ring a bell and tell me time was up.
Ten days had not been enough. I went online and looked for a twenty- or thirty-day course on New Zealand's South Island, where I would be staying for another five weeks. There was nothing available. Sigh.
I did what I could. I walked. I sat quietly beside the water. I reminded myself of the central teaching of the course. Everything passes. Pleasant sensations pass. Unpleasant sensations pass. Clarity passes. Confusion passes. Even the feeling that something will never pass eventually passes.
The retreat did not give me the dramatic transformation I thought I was supposed to have. It gave me something less tidy and showed me how much was still there. That was not the result I had hoped for, but it was a starting point to the next level of clearing, recalibrating, and releasing that needed to happen.
The wasps and I completed ten days together without harming one another. My relationship with my own mind, however, remained under negotiation.