In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Preparing for Silent Retreat

Tomorrow R and I are headed to the Bay Area for a weekend unguided silent retreat. There are 58 retreaters signed up!
As you might expect, to prepare for it, we have been trying to improve our concentration, trying to prevent distraction. What I have been surprised at is how much I have been focusing on trying to avoid noise in the meditation room. This is a truly silent retreat - like the kind they do at Tharpaland Retreat Center in Scotland, where Geshe-la did a 3-year retreat and I had the very good fortune to do two week-long guided silent retreats with Ven Tharchin.
KMC San Francisco (!), formerly known as Saraha Center (the first NKT Center in the U.S.), has been great about helping us prepare. As you may know, silence at Tharpaland means no whispering but also no eye contact or gestures. The solitary retreaters there typically pull up their hoods (which makes sense given the weather in Scotland) and wear sunglasses (in a climate that's usually quite free of sun) when they go for walks. You have to turn in your cell phone. The only person you can communicate with if absolutely necessary is the Retreat Coordinator, who you contact in a note.

As part of the excellent introduction to the retreat that Gen Choma gave a couple of months ago,  and that they kindly recorded so that we would be able to benefit from it, she explained how to prevent any distracting sounds in the gompa. As as Tharpaland, you are taught how damaging it can be if someone is deep in meditation and there is a sudden loud sound. I heard a story of an advanced meditator whose inner winds were messed up when someone dropped a pot; he had great difficulty meditating for months. If you have to sneeze or cough, you teach yourself to make a small preliminary throat-clearing kind of sound as a warning to others. At this retreat, water bottles in the gompa are discouraged unless medically necessary. You are supposed to have memorized your sadhana so that there is no sound of ruffling pages. Newer meditators were directed to create a one-page version of their prayers. We were encouraged to notice any habits we have that might bother others, including cracking your joints (which I never used to be able to do but a few months ago, I started cracking my neck in the gompa), wearing noisy nylon clothes, foot tapping, etc. Gen Choma read a funny list of annoying things that meditators do that came from a student. One of the other things I notice I sometimes do is sighing. I have stopped whispering my prayers.

This Summer at our annual Lamrim retreat, I started working with being more physically still and have been continuing to try to train in it during other retreats. (I bought my zabuton, the bigger meditation cushion that goes underneath the cushion you put your butt directly on, from a local company called Still Sitting - a good name I think.) I was noticing that I'd scratch my face or rub my hand through my hair (another new habit, probably from the delight of having hair) -completely unnecessary distractions for me and others.

Another retreat tip I hadn't heard before is to stop listening to music a few days before starting, because you are likely to hear those sounds in your head when you're trying to focus on something more virtuous. It's more pronounced now because, in solidarity with my brother's family, whose house was inundated with water from the big storm, and as a former Joisey Girl who is a long-time fan, ("Born to Run" in the migratory sense), I have been listening to Bruce Springsteen's "My City in Ruins," which has the rousing chorus, "Come on, rise up!" My sister sent our family a video she found that had post-storm photos of my brother's beloved shore town with that as its soundtrack, and it made me cry.

As you may have noticed, there are a lot of tangents here. It gives you an idea of how my mind's working these days, because the other twist in all of this is that I am taking a drug that really helps me feel better but that revs up my mind. The last two weeks we were dogsitting my sister-in-law's terrier, so I've named it my terrier mind - like a monkey mind but worse, darting here and there, refusing to settle down and rest. This drug also affects my memory.

In addition to summarizing some of the key information about concentration and training in tranquil abiding from Joyful Path, Gen Choma's introduction also included valuable advice from someone who's obviously a dedicated meditator. She was just here in Seattle giving us the highlights from the International Fall Festival in Spain and mentioned meditation tips there too, such as noticing her hand position in meditation as an indicator of her mental state: She said when her thumbs are pressed together too tightly, her mind is pushing too hard but that when the oval of her hands starts to collapse, her concentration is flagging. I also starred her advice about how to reset yourself when your meditation isn't going well, by backing up and requesting blessings, and if you need to, going back through the prayers, all the way to refuge if needed.

Big thanks to Gen Choma, Admin Cate, EPC Michelle and Retreat Coordinator Eva, who are making it very easy for us to attend. Eva was one of my roommates at Summer Festival and first told me about the retreat. The power of Sangha again! She thought training in tranquil abiding would be a wonderful offering to our Guru in Portugal next Fall.

I am very much looking forward to the retreat, even with these handicaps. I am not planning on doing every session, expecting that I may need to rest, being content to take walks and read Dharma, just trying to create good causes for the future. There's no reason I can't continue this training on my own, and we may even request a Tranquil Abiding Retreat in Seattle.

For fun, I tell myself The Dudette Abides ... or tries to. (That's a reference to the quotable cult movie The Big Lebowski, which stars Jeff Bridges as a pothead bowler. There's a car in our neighborhood that has "The Dude Abides" bumper sticker.)

2 comments:

  1. Thank you so much to share ,hope you have a wonderfull retreat,send you a bunches of abiding smiles ! : )

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  2. I find myself hearing music during meditation that I haven't listened to in a very long time. Usually it is music that I listened a lot during my teens. I have wondered about this quite a bit. Have you heard advice as to how to handle this?

    Watch a movie saturday night and it replays during sunday morning meditation.

    Thanks for writing this blog.

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