RETREAT CONFIDENTIAL

I just spent a week in silent retreat at a well known meditation center in northern California, among approximately seventy other practitioners, most from a different Buddhist tradition. Here, despite their worthlessness, are notes jotted in the privacy of my room.

There are four residence halls, named in Pali: Metta, Mudita, Karuna and Upekkha, and I who have come to wrestle down the blackness overcoming my mind have by amazing cosmic circumstance been assigned to Mudita, which means Joy. How did they know that is my favorite word, and the lost sense I’m desperate to recover?

In the dining hall, we’re asked to scrape our plates as much as possible with a long handled rubber spatula before sinking them in the soapy washing bins. I can’t stop watching a curly headed guy with a pregnant stomach and sweat pants sloppily pleating around his ankles, scrapping his plate reluctantly with palpable disgust. The thought that most guys are typically unwilling to clean up their own mess is quickly overwhelmed by the thought of how metaphoric the image is. All of us have come here to scrape our minds clean of habit barnacles and karmic stains.

The schedule, published and posted everywhere, is a reminder this is no vacation. Wake up is at 5:00 and meditation starts at 5:30. Breakfast is at 6:45 in the dining hall down the hill. The evening program starts at 7:30 and ends with meditation until 9:30 or 10 PM. Lunch is at 12:15, dinner at 5:15, everything vegetarian and soy milk and sugar free. No food in the room please.

Mingyur Rinpoche says fear is actually pain, so we should apply to it the mind remedies recommended for pain.

In the morning, six or seven black tailed deer munch on the wild greenery of the gentle slopes. Many retreatants pause to stare in fascination at what appears to them excitingly exotic wild life. This reminds me how other people, particularly those whose gardens and foundation shrubbery have been noshed to the nibs by deer bereft of wild habitat, see these creatures as a huge annoyance, rats on long legs, and demand their death. That’s how we each create the world we live in, isn’t it?

My teacher Thrangu Rinpoche says deer have good minds: they eat only greens, do not disturb other animals and are not aggressive in any way. Deer adorn many Tibetan monasteries, surrounding the wheel of dharma, because the Buddha’s first sermon fell not on the ears of human beings but of peaceful deer.

Mingyur Rinpoche refers to the brain as the body’s office.

There are only teabags here, none strong. At Tibetan retreats, strong chai is offered or plain milk tea, and sometimes even coffee. Buddha means the one who is awake, so not surprisingly Buddhist meditators for millenniums have appreciated tea, and more recently coffee, for its caffeine. But this is Northern California, center of social correctness, so most tea is decaffeinated and no coffee is provided.

Following instructions, I brought some coffee, but it was ground too fine for the infuser basket in the thermal cup I also brought. Happily, the dining hall had a supply of one cup drip cones, so I stuck a paper towel in one and tried to brew my coffee, without delaying the line for the hot water—an impossible feat. I was so embarrassed. Within minutes, two different women retreatants tapped my shoulder and in pantomime showed me where their coffee filters were, inviting me to help myself any time. The kindness of strangers…

On the third afternoon, Mingyur Rinpoche pointed out the inevitable trope toward happiness. Bliss is our birthright and we are simply trying to make our way home to it. The instinct for happiness defines us. Just moving your leg when you are sitting on the meditation cushion because a new position feels better, bringing relief from some form of pain, shows the drive for happiness.

There is so much gray hair and limping from bad hips, this crowd looks like an elderhostel. But there are quite a few young people too—always a heartening sight. People have come from down the road and down Mexico way. There are probably as many men as women although two or three people make the distinction difficult. I see notes left for Sergio, Gita, Margaret, Alan, Mark. When I wonder what made them come, all I can think is how a dharma sister asked Rinpoche why her children weren’t interested in Buddhism, and he said without hesitation: “They haven’t suffered enough yet.”

For work duty, I have been assigned to evening meal preparation. This turns out to be mostly chopping vegetables for soup or washing lettuce for salad. As I was leaving to attend a teaching, I overheard the cook with eye liner say: “I wish I could go.” I turned back and said in good faith: “I’d be happy to trade places with you, if you’d like. I don’t mind.” Immediately she dismissed me with a loud, cynical cackle of “Ha ha.”

Somebody left a Hershey kiss in my shoe!

Most of the retreatants have been Hinayana practitioners of the Burmese Theravada mindfulness tradition, taught to monitor their thoughts and movements as a way of achieving nowness. Watching them raise a spoon from the soup to their lips or raise their foot to take a step walking up the hill is like watching a movie in the slowest possible motion. The self-absorption is painful to behold. Trungpa Rinpoche once said the problem with Zen people putting all their attention into perfectly washing a plate was that the activity became the entirety, blotting out any chance to glimpse the nature of mind and step closer to enlightenment.

A small troupe of wild turkeys hangs around. The hens seem polite and quiet. But one of the males struts around displaying all his feathers, especially his fan of a tail, like a proud peacock. Trying to keep a grip on this territory and those hens, he spends all his time either squawking gobbledegook at the top of his lungs or pointing his teeny, waddled head at another turkey or one of us with scolding screeches that end up in a high pitched neigh echoing loudly across our enforced silence. I think of Tom Turkey as the comic relief, the perfect reminder of all those cocky politicians, TV personalities and overprivileged CEOs full of the sound and fury of Samsara, signifying nothing. I also think this is going to give new meaning to calling someone a real turkey.

While the others are sitting in silence in the big meditation hall, or doing their housekeeping duties, I am playing hooky in my room praying as hard as I can to the lineage, and to Guru Rinpoche as my teacher has instructed. The traditional teaching is you need the blessings of the Bodhsattvas and gurus to progress along the dharma path. I pray to Mahakala to destroy all obstacles on that path. I pray to White Tara for health, wisdom and life long enough to do as much good as possible. I pray to Chenrezig last thing at night to protect all beings and round them up in his pure land of Dewachen. This is what the Theravada group leader superciliously referred to as "noise."

Somebody asked Mingyur Rinpoche if prayer matters. He asked her for her name and when she gave it, Marian, he called out to her. “Marian!” Then he said: “You answered, didn’t you, when your name was called. That is a programmed response. When you pray to the Buddha or Bodhisattvas, you’re calling out to them. Why wouldn’t they respond?”

A senior citizen with white hair is worried bad knees will keep her from doing prostrations to enter Tibetan Buddhism. She doesn’t want to be left behind. I take her aside where nobody can see us talking and tell her I waited 15 years to do prostrations because I have severe orthopedic problems. I tell her after I started I made those problems worse. I shared the three things I learned: you can do table top prostrations, just lowering your head; you can get on your knees and stretch out from there without having to stand up and fall down each time. But best of all, when in England a 94-year-old woman in a wheelchair asked Ato Rinpoche how she could ever become a Buddhist when obviously she couldn’t prostrate, he said without missing a beat: “Just put the lineage tree in front of you and pray hard for refuge.” How this woman brightened!

Questions, so many questions. Mingyur Rinpoche has been beyond generous in making space for questions, and the Theravada meditators have swelled with them, as though these Tibetan Buddhist teachings are waking them up. I feel like I’m watching bulbs pop out of the ground in warm spring sunshine.

It is Easter Sunday morning and I have arisen a lot earlier than I normally do on Sunday. Clarity dazzles. The sky is without blemish, and the sprinkling rains have left the earth glimmering green, the rolling hills covered in velvet. Everything is HD. So it hurts my heart to watch these Theravada meditators walking along staring at their feet on the ground, their faces pained from forced focus on what they think of as mindfulness: now I am raising my foot, now I am putting it down. How I long to make a joyful noise to wake them up. Look, look up! See the sky! Mix your mind with space. That is the teaching. See it now: the clarity, infinity, capacity, emptiness itself. What blessings to have been showered with such wisdom, to know this.

Now that Mingyur Rinpoche has learned to pronounce the word burrito, he likes to use it. He likes to throw it off his tongue, burrrrr…ee…toe, as an example of something that seems to make people happy. Of course people always want more of what pleases them, don’t they? So they eat more and more burr… ee…toe and then, oops! Too many burr…ee…toe. Stuffing yourself with happiness leads only to suffering. So better to seek the only source of happiness that doesn’t do that: realizing the nature of the mind that craves burr…ee...toe.

So many people come to these retreats burning with a life crisis question that needs to be answered and pounce on the teacher, hoping to shake a clear do this or that instruction out of them. In the group interview today, a gray haired woman behind me asked, slowly in obvious pain, how to know the right time to leave a bad job and not end up jobless. I could feel her anxiety, waiting for an answer, and her huge let down when Mingyur Rinpoche said knowing was no problem. He just knew the time had come to start teaching and to travel. His failure to provide an explicit how to guide was as baffling as answering in Urdu. So I wrote her a message on a napkin in the dining hall, saying when students asked him questions like that, or asked him for a divination, Trungpa Rinpoche used to say: you already know the answer in your heart of hearts. The only reason you need to ask me is because you somehow don’t like the answer your innate wisdom has provided and keep hoping for a “better” one. I watched her let out a sigh and smile as she read this. On the hill, she waved at me.

I heard somewhere that Kalu Rinpoche said it's good to say om mani padme hung to all creatures you encounter because it helps raise them to higher rebirth, and because they can recognize the sound, it will dispel fear. I keep breaking the silence by whispering Om mani padme hung to the squawking turkey and to the deer when they are close enough. One fawn stood stone still about three feet away and just looked at me as I kept up the recitation under my breath.

I have started to think of my breaking the silence to help others get answers to their painful questions as saying Om mani padme hum like that. What a blessing to be able to do this.

The retreat management announces the closing ceremony will have Tibetan style to it. We will get to come up one by one and present a khata to Rinpoche. There are only 40 khatas for sale so folks will have to share. Back in my room, I discover I have five khatas—my most expensive ones. When nobody is in the hall, I run around and put four of them randomly on four doorknobs in a reckless act of generosity. I have absolutely no idea who I have gifted.

Bunny slope hiking trails have been thoughtfully carved across this landscape, often leading to forest altars or meditation platforms or a bench atop a lookout. Spring is sprouting everywhere. Wild blue iris and yellow poppies have popped up amid the moss and grass still wet enough to be glinting in the sun. Birds are hopping about, chirping and scavenging. Clouds scud across a deep blue sky in breezes that are blowing all sign of April sprinkles away. Some of the retreatants are doing their housekeeping work detail, others are sitting silently mindful of their passing thoughts. The deer are on the far hill, the turkeys down below as I climb the hill behind the residence halls to the clearest vantage point. Checking to confirm I am alone, I stretch my arms out as wide as they will go and slowly start to spin, around and around like a prayer wheel. I flap my arms to be a flag and shout Om mani padme hung to nobody and everybody, giddy from the joy and glory.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

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