A Weekend in Rancho Palos Verdes
Reflections on my First Residential Meditation Retreat
You know how you feel when you are applying to college or graduate school, or for that new job? That feeling like…ooh, I can’t wait ‘til I get accepted!
Then you get accepted and the next thought is…ooh, I can’t wait to get started!
And then you get started.
About, oh, I dunno, a couple of weeks or days in, you are overwhelmed, and your next thought is either “Why did I want to do this again?” or “I can’t wait to get out of here!”
That’s what it felt like going to my first multi-day residential meditation retreat.
Multi-day—yeah, it was only a weekend. It was like, 2.5 days. Evening Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday, and then Monday morning. It was a long weekend.
Perhaps, with my love affair with mindfulness, you might think I’d be blissed out, singing the praises of meditating all day long with like-minded people. Alas, no. Nope. Definitely not.
My back is still hurting as I’m typing this. I had felt my back seize up on Saturday and am probably in need of a good massage and lots of yoga.
The pain in my back, hips, and legs were what occupied my mind most of the time I was there.
And while many attendees were seasoned practitioners, I quickly realized that people, even meditating people, are still just people. Long-time meditators still had issues sharing bathrooms, still judged others for doing things the right or wrong way, and still had pissing contests.
The First Day
When I arrived, I was assigned a room where I met my roommate, an older woman who had arrived earlier and had already set up her side of the room and was happy to share with me what to expect, since she had done this many times before. She also said that we were lucky because we had gotten one of the good rooms.
“Are there not as good rooms?” I asked, having no frame of reference.
“Oh yes, there are rooms up the stairs. Here, we are close to the hall.” The meditation hall, a large gathering place where we did all our sitting meditations and Dharma Talks together, was just down the sidewalk.
We walked up those stairs to get to the dining hall where everyone was mingling and talking, waiting for the kitchen staff to open the doors and invite us in. I quietly found an unoccupied square of concrete and planted my feet there. Perhaps I looked lonely because I was quickly approached by a tall older woman—okay, let's just get this out of the way. Most people were 1) older, as in north of 60, 2) women, and 3) white.
Anyway, this particular older white woman welcomed me with a large warm smile and asked me the standard questions. Was this my first retreat? Where was I from? What do I do? She was a lesbian somatic therapist (she offered up this information, I didn’t ask) who had been coming to this particular retreat for 30 years. When we sat, she introduced me to her life partner and a colleague she had trained with. Across the table sat a woman I would guess to be about my age or mid-thirtiesish, who had boldly brought her own food.
Her food had meat in it. The center only served vegetarian meals and she insisted she needed the extra protein. I thought she looked like the type to hang out at the gym, you know, actively, and probably did need the extra protein. This was also her first retreat, and she was a bit nervous. I confessed to being nervous too. I told her I would probably cry, knowing myself and how easily I turn into a sappy ball of snot.
I noticed that the women at the table sat at one end and talked about therapy and meditation while, at the other end of the table, sat a group of men who were talking about work, how AI is taking over everything, and what their wives do for work. There was an invisible wall there and I wanted to breach it, but it felt like a silent covenant that the men would bro out and us ladies would discuss our feelings. I found it ironic. Here we were, all of us trying to reach enlightenment, and we were most comfortable swimming in our gender-divided nonsense.
I was relieved when, after dinner, we took our vow of silence. Humorously, we also took a vow of celibacy (you mean no weekend coming-to-God orgasms?). We vowed not to ingest drugs or alcohol and not to kill any living creature. No communion wine or sacrificial lambs this weekend.
Just kidding. I wasn’t looking forward to killing anything. But seriously, not even bugs. No killing. I did buy a bottle of wine on my way home, though.
Finally, we vowed not to take anything that wasn’t freely offered. Confession: I took a packet of honey from the dining hall and carried it in my pocket all day long on Saturday to put in my evening tea because there was no honey offered at the tea counter.
Saturday
I walked in beautiful gardens and through a labyrinth while contemplating the teachings.
I will attempt to share these without looking anything up online. Because we were discouraged from 1) using our phones 2) reading or 3) writing, I am going to dutifully go off memory. I apologize now for whatever butchery my poor memory does to these sacred teachings.
The foundations of all things:
Impermanence: This too shall pass. Everything does. Everything is constantly changing.
Dukka or Suffering: Life is filled with suffering. Suffering is part of life. We all suffer.
Not-self: All beings are connected. Deep into the roots of our very existence, we are stardust. We are like trees in a forest with our roots interwoven in the soil that nurtures us under a sky that breathes through us.
After meals, we were given extra time before the next sitting meditation, which I used to hike up to a park that overlooked the coast. Up that high, the ocean water looked perfectly still. It was like an optical illusion, looking down at stillness as if it were a painting when I knew, conceptually, that the water was lively, moving, sloshing, crashing.
I returned to my room for a small rest before going to the next sit which would start in 15 minutes. I guess all that mental work and the hike in the sun tired me out, though, because I passed out hard and missed the sit entirely. It wasn’t until I heard my roommate enter to use the bathroom that I realized I had slept right into the next walking meditation.
Sunday
More teachings on Sunday made their way into my walking meditations. They would have made their way into my sitting meditations, I suppose, but I was too concerned with the pain in my body while I maintained an upright posture, fixed my posture, and readjusted my posture.
The Five Hindrances:
Desire: For sensory pleasure. Wanting only good experiences
Aversion: Rejecting that which we find abrasive or unpleasant
Sloth: Being too tired, not having enough energy
Anxiety: Too much energy, irritability and agitation
Doubt: Constantly questioning if you should be doing what you are doing
In the evening, we learned some more foundational things, I think there were four, but I could only remember the first two because my mind got stuck on the second one:
Human life is precious and miraculous and rare.
Death is part of life and inevitable. One day I will die.
I walked out of the Dharma Talk, into the garden, and looked out over the LA basin. It was beautiful. I thought of my beautiful daughter, my beautiful son.
They will die.
This thought crippled my mind. I felt stuck. I broke open, just as I predicted on Friday at lunch, and I cried. I cried because someday they will die.
Someday I will die.
Please, I begged in my mind to no one in particular because I’m an Atheist, please let me die before they do.
I am more afraid of losing my children than dying. And that clinging, that desperate energy that immobilized me, was attachment. Not the healthy, secure attachment of Bowlby’s Attachment Theory, but the attachment that causes Dukka because it is in denial of impermanence.
Monday
At breakfast, a woman who was easily in her 90s, hunched over and using a cane with four rubber stoppers on the bottom, made her way to the beginning of the food table. A kitchen staffer, a tall and gentle man, came quickly to help her with her tray, motioning to the food to see if she wanted it, recognizing of course that we were practicing silence. As he checked in with her and scooped eggs and potatoes onto her plate, I saw the beauty of the moment, the humanity, and I felt the tears welling up again.
This woman, who no doubt helped many, many people throughout her lifetime, was now being helped without question or expectation by someone who himself was helpless as a babe not too many years before now and would be helpless again in old age. This cycle seemed to vibrate with love, the enduring through generations and eons kind of love, that we intend to wrap the globe in when we practice Loving Kindness.
I cried right through breakfast, using my napkin as a Kleenex. But the taste of each bite was so delicious. The colors before my eyes in the details of coffee cups, clothing, and wall decorations were vivid and crisp. The weight of the fork in my hand was like a gift and I felt like I was hugging it, treating it as precious every time I touched it between bites.
NOT The Science
The teacher told us that we could investigate meditation and the teachings one element at a time, isolating it like a scientist and trying to discern its core properties. But this understanding would be limited.
Instead, she invited us, let us come to meditation as an artist, seeing not just the component parts, but their relations, their interdependence, and the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Let us see the swirl of colors, shapes, and forms. Let us not just experience meditation through the sense doors, but with the mind-heart; and let the teachings guide us into the bright and vibrant world that is the path.
Mindful Moment
Um…the whole weekend? Naw, there were plenty of mindless moments. More mindless moments than mindful moments, I’m sure.
Love is what connects us. Loving another is loving ourselves because we are part of the whole. There is no loving act that does not also give love to ourselves as well.
I wish that I could hold on to this. That I wouldn’t go right back into my quotidian reality within the next few days. But I will. I know I will slip back into familiar patterns of fretting and seeing myself as separate. I suppose this is part of the path. We come back and begin again…and again…and again.
Mood of the Moment
Here are 2 for you. :) Enjoy.