Lurching up the steep approach road to the Maenllwyd, I liked the feel of a cottage tucked up in the hillside - a Zen mountain temple. Perhaps, not so surprisingly, I instantly recognized one of the participants as an old war-horse from other sesshins. John appeared and made me feel immediately at home. He had a sort of swashbuckling pirate look about him which I rather liked, and an immediate warmth, without it cloying. We were soon invited to say why we had come and I threw myself into the ring saying I wanted to be in charge of my life and that maybe I still gave over some of the charge to my mother. I felt I had taken a step into the unknown, being so upfront, but felt rather rattled too. It felt as if everyone else was a spiritual person who had gravitated along for the joy of it all.
I was a bit staggered to find, even though I had been warned of this, that there wasn't a spare moment in the day - it was an endless treadmill of exercises, services, long hours of sitting and, thank God, meals.
I didn't sleep too well the first night, yet remained curiously alert, somehow knowing what it is like just to remain watchful of all the twists and turns of the restless mind - like seeing through an open doorway into the room inside. I dreamt eventually of catching fat fishes - on a mackerel line.
Most of my days were spent enduring the pain in my knees. Somehow this brought all my energy forth. If I could hang on in there, I gradually discovered a steely determination to continue. I came up against the strength of the integral flow of energy which began to reveal in its depths the clarity and luminosity of something that makes it all worthwhile.
The next night I felt painfully clear, as if a part of me had been condemned to a hell too low for anyone to reach. I had been so glued to seeing myself through the eyes of my mother when I was a child, that I daren't trust my own heart mirror. I began to despair, knowing how many times in the past I could sit for long hours and yet be unable to give myself room enough to experience some of the flood of force from the core which longed to flow freely. I thought that John was probably too flippant to help me, even though I was also attracted by his humour and humanity. I felt a surge of energy and I began to growl softly - breathing a little of the fire of the dragon. Then I thought, "To hell with it all and how any of them see me" and I started to do some old bioenergetic exercises and felt a wave of the power surge down into the emptiness where so often in the past I had aborted its flow by disgorging it or by keeping it trapped down. With this I felt a touch of steel and the space I longed for. To have both together was my heart's dream. I stood there feeling a bit like the silent samuri in the Kurosaw film, like a heron on one leg, intensely alert, free and alone in the universe and on the metal of a warrior.
Later that day I led the exercise group into the field. I remember swinging my legs feeling my heavy boots acting like the weight on the end of a pendulum so I was literally goose stepping and feeling like a small boy, released into the joy of an undivided body-mind. I loved giving the exercises, feeling the energy to do that working through me, something I had stopped myself from doing in the past, as I habitually hid the energy I was ashamed of. The retreat unfolded moment by moment - moments of throbbing pain, moments of rebellion, "fuck you I am going to leave, I can't stand it any more", moments of surrender, feeling the world flowing around me, nothing left inside but the one who mysteriously knows it is all the mind.
For me the most potent medicine is the living through of previously disowned heart energy: of sitting in fear, feeling ghastly, not enough left of the conventional mind to even muster up a good intention to sit still, feeling the knots in my muscles being dismembered by the Buddha; weeping for the way I had cruelly tormented the Buddha in me, condemning the beauty, simplicity and atributelessness of my native being to a dark cellar surrounded by coils of suspicious thoughts hissing like snakes whenever something, the hero in me, dared to move to the treasure and declare it free of all the catastrophic judgements the little boy had used to surround my core.
I visualised plunging a dagger into my belly and committing the act of a Hari Kiri. This brought up a lot of fear - suddenly I thought "Perhaps this is mental Hari Kiri." It slashed through the story line with which I have kept myself tied up.
Interviews with J.C. followed smoothly, he soon caught on to where I was and I didn't feel that he at all tried to lord it over me. We discussed how I had interrupted his, to my ears, rather academic talk and he was honest about his irritation and his recognition that somewhere this had got at him. One time, I caught him looking at me after I had made an illicit joke in the Zendo as if he saw me from his heart and I felt touched and pleased by this non-threatening meeting.
I also loved, and not least because my knees were screaming with relief, going on guided walks, leaning into the countryside, becoming one with the trill of the larks, the shrill heart-touching bleats of the lambs, the deep and more resigned baahs of the adult sheep, the laments of the cows, and even the roaring of the farmer's motorbike and the scream of the RAF jets. There were times I asked myself "How would Dogen be?" Suddenly I was at the bottom of all things and everything flowed through me, yet I had the surety and the fullness of being at one with it all.
In a way, this resolved my deepest quest. How to be me? In touch with another, something I knew before but urgently needed reminding of, not by someone's words, but by that apotropaic testimony of the universe witnessing to the truth of oneself.
