I find I'm still struggling with my Koan. The retreat was a "great privilege". That is the expression I find myself using most when I'm trying to explain it for other people. The privilege lay in the opportunity to do such deep work and to be supported and feel quite safe and surrounded by calm and beauty while doing so. The greatest beauty for me lay in the lights, the assortment of candles, oil lamps and firelight.
I had been looking forward to the Retreat for weeks and weeks. It approached with growing significance at the time when I was aware that a cycle of some years' very great change, had been going on in my life. A cycle involving my parents' deaths, inheritance, home making and career suddenly brought to an end by marriage breakdown. This was followed by 4 years of recovery, finding a new home, working part-time and spending a lot of time on spiritual search - much of it with a new age slant. At the time of the WZR I am 42, a lot is behind me. I know I've been strong, I am fiercely independent but now I have started to wonder if I've been so fierce and so independent that I've painted myself into a corner. I'm also quite blank about where to go in my working life. I feel I'm approaching middle age and that this is a crunch time when I either shape a direction for myself or I blow it.
I was not aware I was bringing to the WZR a need to release pains from even further back than those of the past 7 years. This came to me right from the first evening, before the retreat had even begun, when I encountered people talking about Zanskar, where I had been 10 years ago, and talking about it from a standpoint of Buddhism, not from mountaineering machismo. This made me realise that after 10 years I would be able at last to re-read my diaries and letters from that time which had in many respects been very painful as well as beautiful. The visit had been followed by illness and my husband's refusal to tolerate Buddhism. Ten years ago I had put Buddhism away and never realised how much it really meant to me.
I didn't sleep very well at all during the retreat. However, I never found it difficult to get up at 5 am; there was no sneaking of an extra five minutes. Although getting up was not particularly enjoyable, once up, there were great compensations - seeing the state of the weather, the stars, tea. The first zazen of the morning remains one of the finest memories of the retreat.
What I gained overwhelmingly and with absolute clarity from the retreat, is the knowledge that Buddhism is important to me on a very deep level. Over and over again, I found it speaking to me with complete sense and utter clarity.
It makes sense to start the day in silence. Writing by candlelight while outside it is still dark. It's the best way to make the transition from night to day and sleep to waking.
I always found the morning chanting very beautiful.
The first day was very difficult. I experienced a lot of pain in the sitting, in my knees and lower back, and this continued throughout the week. The first day the strain of sitting also made my shoulders tense so that by evening I had a terrible headache from the tension spreading up my neck.
At first I felt very self-conscious in the silence, which it was easy for me to interpret as disapproval. I felt quite despairing by lunchtime. I was convinced I should have gone to sit in the same place I had sat in at breakfast time, and was sure everyone was annoyed with me for sitting somewhere else and causing them to be exposed to someone else's germs. The last session of zazen was so dreadful, all I could think of was the pain in my knees, back, shoulders, neck and head, taken all together they made me feel nearly sick. All I wanted was to get to bed.
In one of his first talks, John had talked about letting "it" all come up, letting "it" through and out and then see what was there, let that come up and then see what else is there. I clung on to this idea. I had wanted so much to be here, in all the awfulness, a tiny flicker of curiosity and determination made me keep going.
Next morning, my head still ached. I felt deeply, deeply sorry for myself climbing the hill. At the bottom of the hill I went a way down the lane and had a pathetic little weep in the darkness. I can't remember now what was going through my head. I do however, remember clinging to the curiosity of wanting to see what was there.
By breakfast my headache had completely gone and I felt fine. Although I experienced plenty of emotional ups and downs the rest of the time, that particular quality of pathetic misery was gone for good.
It's hard now to separate events from each day. The offering meditation in the morning, after the humming, was one of the most powerfully moving experiences I have ever had. It felt as if my heart was opened up by the arm movements. I felt a real offering up and opening of myself. There was a strong element of grief that, so often, what I have offered has not been what was wanted or appreciated. Here was a profound and beautiful experience in making such a full and complete offering of myself.
The communication exercise was good throughout. Lovely to be like that with other people. The format was quite familiar to me from co- counselling and other growth work, like the dream group I belong to. Despite making a genuine effort, I often felt I was dredging up stuff I already knew about. By the end of the week, the communication exercises had skimmed off a crust. The last morning I was aware of all sorts of new thoughts coming to me that I had never had before - new thoughts about my father and brother particularly. I felt as if I could easily have gone on for at least another week, mining into completely new depths.
The food was very good. The smells associated with the retreat are particularly memorable - wood smoke, incense and wonderful food wafting out of the kitchen while we waited. I found the peace of meditation made it easy for me to recognise what I really needed in the way of food, and not to pass my bowl for seconds just because the food had tasted so good and it would have been nice to eat more - this was a new experience for me. I know that I use food as an emotional crutch.
The evening exercises to music were a lot of fun. The first two very good and liberating. No way could I have done it without eyes closed. I remember in the second feeling very good about making a really loud noise. When we lay down I felt the snaky sinuous music working its way upwards from my lowest chakra and curving up and around each one like a snake of light. At about heart chakra level I thought - my goodness, this is the kundalini. (Since returning I have had a very vivid dream of following a huge black snake down and down through deep, bright water).
I don't remember at what point exactly, but I got back in touch with my own gentleness. About the time of my mother's final illness I remember discovering that if I clenched my fists very, very hard, I could get through the day and not break down. I seem to have become harder and more solitary since that time. To be aware of myself as a gentle being instead of a tough, independent, defensive/aggressive person was very, very special.
By the end I could have stayed in the routine of the WZR for days and days more. It was a very special experience. I still don't know who I am. What has been happening since I returned, seems to be a process of grounding who lam in who I have been. Not just re- reading of joumals but coincidences - literally bumping into people I haven't seen in years and so resolving some unfinished business. What I am, I think, is a process of becoming, but seeing, too, how much I stay the same.
