“Relax and receive, feeling the sensations of the body breathing.” 

The words washed over us as we sat in a circle on our zafus at the beginning of the five-day meditation retreat. Dr. Nikki Mirghafori, artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California, sat toward the top of the circle, inviting us with these words as we settled into our bodies and took a breath. 

“Cultivating Peace, Wisdom, and Kindness: A 5-day Meditation Retreat for Young Adults” was hosted by Dharma Gates and sponsored by Tricycle. Dharma Gates is a grassroots nonprofit dedicated to opening pathways into formal meditation practice for young adults. Its mission is to connect young practitioners to a variety of Buddhist teachers and practice centers in an accessible manner, offering retreats on a dana (donation) basis. The organization strives to foster connections through which practitioners can cultivate compassion, resilience, and clarity to meet the unique challenges of our times.

This retreat, hosted at Claymont Society in Charles Town, West Virginia, focused on fostering a space for young adults to step back from the day-to-day bustle and reconnect with each other, ourselves, and the dharma. Balancing sitting instruction, dharma talks, relational practices in the form of improv, and walking meditation, the retreat offered an opportunity to explore the world of the dharma and encouraged us to take our practice into all aspects of life, not just the cushion.

I arrived Wednesday afternoon, excited and anxious, but open to whatever was to come. I had done a handful of daylong retreats before, but this was truly my first formal silent retreat. After checking in, kind smiles and friendly conversation ensued as we enjoyed a vegan dinner of vegetable stir fry made by the very humble and incredibly warm chef on site, Manuel. After we finished eating, I sat on the lawn with Nikki and some fellow retreatants, checking in about how we were feeling. That’s when we met Chilli-dog. Chilli, Manuel’s dog, was a chestnut-colored dachshund with big brown eyes and floppy ears. As he ran through the field, we realized that he was chasing rabbits left and right, even crawling his way down what I assumed to be a rabbit hole. Jumping all around, Nikki likened our mind to Chilli-dog. I thought about how funny it was that he was literally going down rabbit holes, chasing the bunny like we chase our thoughts. Nikki said we should try to avoid a “Chilli-mind.” 

The evening came, and the unsure energy buzzed around the meditation hall as we sat, awaiting the terrifying practice of renouncing our cell phones. After introductions and a brief share from each member of the group, the ritual began. Pens and paper were passed around, and we each wrote a letter to our future self, which we would open and read on Sunday. We were instructed then to wrap our phone in the piece of paper, tape it up, and write encouraging words on the paper, if we wished. Settling in and closing our eyes, we took a few breaths, and one by one, as we felt ready, we stood up and walked to the center of the circle, offering our phones in the basket and bowing to the statue of the Buddha. Nikki honored each release with the sound of a bell. I felt a sense of relief, freedom, even joy, as I dropped my phone in and let go.

The session progressed by taking the precepts together, taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha, and relaxing into a guided meditation. The retreat had officially begun. We sauntered off to our rooms to rest before the first full day ahead.

Thursday morning came, and we enjoyed a silent breakfast after an optional 6:30 a.m. sit. After cleaning up with my fellow dish crew, the first session of the day began, and we settled again onto our cushions. A feeling of butterflies in my stomach arose, as I knew what was to come—improv. 

Nikki had taught both improv and mindfulness courses, and shared with us how similar the two are. Improv is about letting go of planning and tuning awareness into the present moment. It is important in improv, I learned, to not only become grounded and present with what is coming up in your own body but also to pay close attention to the people around you. First up, a name game. We went around the circle, stating our name alongside a movement, gesture, or dance move. I was toward the end. Nikki reminded us to stay present and let go of trying to prepare. That was easier said than done, as my mind ruminated on what move I was going to make. Three people down, twenty-six to go. I’ll do a spin. Eight people down, twenty-one to go. I can’t do a spin, too many people have spun already. Maybe a curtsy, yes that’s it! Fifteen people down, now just a handful more. The curtsy was used already! What will I do? What if it’s my turn and I freeze and do nothing? I’ll look really stupid then. Three people to go before my turn, and my mind was blank. I didn’t have any gesture in mind, but I had no choice but to let the moments pass until all eyes were on me. Without thinking, I just did. Jumping from one side to the other, announcing my name, “ERIN,” and it was over. That’s when the lesson stuck, and I truly let go. 

The theme arose again and again throughout the retreat: Don’t plan, just be. Rather than thinking into the next moment, I leaned back into right now. In our discussion session a few days later, Nikki offered something of great value to me: Rather than FOMO, the fear of missing out, embrace JOMO, the joy of missing out. Referring to the mind wandering into the future or backtracking to the past, we can just rest in the present moment, joyful that we’re missing some made-up future event. 

The anxiety dissipated, and my body began to feel at ease again. A few more games, and the nerves I felt initially turned into openness and full-belly laughs. Connection was blossoming before my eyes.

At lunch we officially entered the space of noble silence, narrowing our sense doors. In the short free time before the next sessions, I wandered the grounds, following a grassy path through the wooded field and stumbling upon a big, tall, bountiful tree locally called “grandmother tree.” As I sat under her long branches, I wrote: 

Oh, grandmother tree
Big, tall, proud, and beautiful.
Your base stable
Your limbs long and outstretched.
Hold me under your grace and power.
I surrender to you,
Grandmother tree. 

The sessions that followed that afternoon were interspersed with guided, silent, and walking meditations. Many of us chose to walk outside, connecting with the land with mindful steps and gentle movements. 

One of the notable guided meditations from Nikki invited us to receive our intention; our reason for being at the retreat. We imagined picking up a stone, asking ourselves “why are we here?” and dropping it into an imagined well. Nikki instructed us to again “relax and receive” whatever came up, not forcing or searching, but opening to whatever arose. The meditation steered us more deeply into our intention, picking up two more stones and dropping them in the well, asking what was truly the reason, the intention, for our being there.  

In addition to the meditation sessions, each day we settled into the meditation hall at 4:30 p.m. for Nikki’s dharma talk. Of the many teachings she offered, two really stood out to me. The first came closer to the start of the retreat and focused on mindfulness of emotions. Nikki offered a practical tool for when emotions arise in practice, known as RAFT or RAFCT:

– R: Recognize the emotion. Drop the story.

– A: Accept/Allow it to be here, held spaciously.

– The middle way between suppression and indulgence.

– F: Feel in the body.

– If needed, C: Compassion—addressing yourself: “Sweetheart, you’re having a hard time,” or “This is hard, dear.”

– T: Trust in the unfolding of the practice, in your capacity to awaken.

I found myself returning to this often, both on and off the cushion when feelings arose. Feeling into each emotion and exploring them with curiosity helped cultivate an acceptance and comfort within difficulty. 

Another dharma talk focused on the five hindrances, or the kilesas. Nikki explained these as coverings or veils that show up in practice, and offered skillful ways of working with them when they show up. As the days of practice went on, I was able to pinpoint exactly which hindrances were showing up for me, and how to explore the feelings that came with them. Reflecting back on RAFT, I approached these hindrances with a middle-way mindset—not allowing myself to fall too deeply into their trap, but letting them arise with compassion.

The final session of each day began at 8:30 p.m., and a bit of lightness entered the room when Nikki invited us to join in a communal chant that we all already knew—Row, row, row your boat. This idea was taken from a retreat she had done with Jack Kornfield. She noted how beautiful a dharma song it is. We sang together before making our way to sleep.

The latter part of the retreat was when I truly began to experience an openness, softness, and gratitude. I explored the many winding trails with a curious mind and soft feet, and at each turn I was in awe of everything—the dewy spider webs collecting in the trees; the family of deer grazing in the fields; the group of horses running in the hazy dawn. I relaxed into the experiences that moved around and within me, an awareness surfacing moment by moment, almost effortlessly.

The spider webs especially drew me in. Really looking at them, like I had never seen them before, I asked myself, What was their purpose? What can they teach me? I closely studied an armor-backed spider weaving its web. It was focused, detailed, mindful even. Pulling the silk with its back leg to place it where it wanted, creating an intricate mandala that was strong yet fragile. The web is what sustains the spider, a net to catch its food. But with a strong gust of wind or a creature like me walking into it, the entire trap is gone. I imagine that the spider doesn’t mind—it is used to this happening. It isn’t attached to the work of art it has just made, rather just picks up in a new spot to weave another. 

I came back to the question, what can the spiders teach me? I landed on a visualization for myself—a spider web in my mind, like a death trap for old patterns and stories. I let them stick to the web, then blow away in the wind. Weaving a new web in my mind, I was then ready for the next story to stick. 

On the second-to-last day I had a one-on-one practice discussion with Nikki. She graciously set aside time for each of us to meet with her during the retreat. Holding a warm space for me to share whatever I wanted to share, she listened intently and offered nuggets of wisdom for me to take with me on my way.

The final full day came, and I enjoyed a midmorning walking meditation along a gravel path in the woods. This is where I rediscovered the sound of gravel under my feet. Crunching and crackling as I stepped softly, the sound wrapped around my eardrums and delighted me. I moved my foot different ways as I walked back and forth, listening to each piece of gravel colliding with those around it. After a few more meditation sessions and a cup of tea on a warm rock in the sun, I thanked the land for providing, quite literally, such fertile ground for practice.

My retreat experience was one of spaciousness, compassion, warmth, and a collective energy that was fostered so beautifully by our teacher, Nikki. I left feeling calmer than I had in a while, more in awe of everything around me, and more connected to others. The retreat came to an official end as we broke noble silence, and kind chatter filled the building and grounds as we shared our experiences and contact information. Going on our way, we wished one another luck with our respective practices, and said goodbye until next time.

♦

Dharma Gates offers many retreats by donation! Learn more about them and see their upcoming retreats here.

The post A Few Days of Silence appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Three-year retreat is one of the focal points of committed Tibetan Buddhist practice. And yet there are virtually no published, first-person accounts of what it entails to spend three years, three months, and three days in intense, sometimes solitary, practice. Vicki Mackenzie’s Cave in the Snow, a third-person narrative of Tenzin Palmo’s twelve years in a mountain cave, revealed little of that practitioner’s personal, inner journey. Diane Rigdzin Berger’s memoir exposes a great deal.

Most three-year retreats occur in a group setting, and the rules of such a retreat, specified by the supervising lama, usually restrict broadcasting details about specific practices and inner experiences to outsiders. In Berger’s case, the rules were a little more relaxed, and although she couldn’t give details of specific practices, her story comprises a rich tapestry from which anyone knowledgeable about Tibetan Buddhism can get a clear picture of what she was practicing and how these practices affected her. We can also be thankful that the author is an experienced writer with a gift for description and a poetic touch. She brings the reader right into the heart of her retreat. 

Not only was this a solo retreat, but necessity required Berger to move from place to place, supported by friends, family, and sangha members in several Pacific Northwest locales. Her retreat was directed by Kilung Rinpoche, lama and head of the Pema Kilaya sangha, based near Seattle. Berger draws on journal entries from the retreat and reflections added once she had decided to write a book about it.

The texture of Berger’s memoir is flowing and atmospheric. Closed retreat brings greatly heightened sensitivity, and here she is generously open, giving the reader access to everything from her emotional struggles and occasional physical difficulties to her insights, dreams, and inner reactions to practice. All of this is richly embroidered with references to the abundant wildlife that inhabited her various retreat settings and her feelings of close attunement to the natural world.

Despite the unusual mobile aspect of the retreat, we are given a very clear idea of what it means to be in a long, solitary, and essentially traditional Tibetan Buddhist retreat. Berger often practiced five or six sessions per day. Appropriate altars were maintained in each setting. Full attention was given to protectors and local spirits. Sang and incense offerings (such as the well-known Riwo Sangchö) were performed regularly. Her practices included Dzogchen meditation, deity sadhana practices, lengthy mantra recitation, foundational practices (ngondro) and prostrations, predawn fire pujas, daily tsoks (food offerings), and other rituals. Anyone familiar with the more advanced Tibetan Buddhist practices can guess what other, more esoteric, activities Berger was engaged in.

But why would a Westerner, and in particular Diane Berger, attempt such a feat? “To achieve enlightenment?” or “to be free?” This is, of course, the final goal for all Buddhists. But deep practices—especially those addressed in long retreats in this tradition—are done more specifically to remove obstacles to realization. And what that boiled down to for Ms. Berger, as she explains it, was to free herself from the distractions and sidetracks she had acquired from life. Perhaps these could be called her personal neuroses. Berger came to her retreat as a seasoned meditator, with decades of experience in the Tibetan tradition. She had received teachings from a number of highly regarded lamas and had practiced in Tibet and Nepal. But she was not, by nature, a recluse. Leading an exceptionally active life, early on she had worked as a journalist and later helped found a humanitarian foundation and a Buddhist sangha. Like many modern people, she was engaged with society and proactive. She had married twice, raised children, and had grandchildren.

Contemplating in her journal the benefits of her retreat, she wrote, “And now, somehow, perhaps that is the big miracle after these three years—it has become simple to sit for practice. No underlying diversionary pull, no addictive ideas, no some-thing else.”

Because her book is so open and honest about her inner world and its difficulties—similar to those all of us in the modern world acquire—we are given a realistic picture of what deep Tibetan Buddhist practice can release us from and how that comes about. This became especially clear in those transitional moments when Berger moved from one venue to the next—by car, ferryboat, and even a small airplane. Anyone who has done long solo retreat knows how overwhelming it can be to suddenly need to engage other people, to encounter the normal chaos of a supermarket, to set up a new living space. At these moments, our ingrained mental and emotional patterns suddenly reveal themselves. Such encounters are woven into the multicolored fabric of Small Boat, Vast Ocean.

At the same time, it also becomes clear that the guidance of an experienced mentor was essential. (For an uninitiated person to “cook book” such a journey from written material would be impossible and potentially dangerous.) The retreat was designed for her specifically by Kilung Rinpoche, and Berger consulted with him frequently, either via in-person visits or by phone. In some of those moments when the ground seemed to fall out from under her feet, her teacher’s advice and support kept her on track. 

By literally making her three-year retreat an open book, Berger has given those on the spiritual path an incredible gift. Readers who wish to deepen their knowledge about Tibetan Buddhism, or those considering long solo retreat, will find Small Boat, Vast Ocean entertaining and enlightening.

The post Review of ‘Small Boat, Vast Ocean: My Years in Solitary Buddhist Retreat’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The San Luis Valley in south central Colorado is the size of the state of Connecticut and remarkably wide. It is flanked by the San Juan mountains to the west and the Sangre de Cristos to the east, and contains the headwaters of the Rio Grande. The valley is also amazingly flat. Looking west from the Baca Grande in the foothills of Kit Carson Mountain, everything seems laid out before you. It is as though an infinite vastness were knowable, though you cannot see most of the roads, or the herds of elk drifting across the valley floor. 

For decades, spiritual seekers have come to the Baca foothills outside the town of Crestone, which is home to various retreat centers, hermitages, and temples of Eastern and Western and New Age religions. Bejeweled shrines sit unprotected beside creek beds; massive stupas perch on outcroppings. Tibetans in particular are drawn here, having found the scenery powerfully reminiscent of the land from which they’ve been exiled since the late 1940s. Multicolored prayer flags, shredded by wind, festoon the Baca. 

I have come here to do a twelve-day solo retreat in a cabin hidden among the pygmy pines. It is early February, and the cabin has a good wood stove. It has a bucket for a bathroom, a propane burner, two water coolers, and a faucet a quarter mile down the mountain. It is, in spiritual parlance, a very protected space, especially the upstairs loft, where I will practice ten hours a day before a window looking over the tops of the pinyons and junipers, and across the San Luis Valley. 

I came to the cabin to accomplish Guru Yoga, the fourth and final ngöndro practice Tibetan Buddhists must complete in order to receive the abhisheka blessing and progress to the high Tantric teachings and empowerments. To begin a session of Guru Yoga you need to briefly go through the three other ngöndros. This includes Vajrasattva mantra, a seated practice where you repeat a hundred-syllable Sanskrit chant while visualizing Vajrasattva (which means “indestructible being”) in the form of an adolescent male seated cross-legged and floating above your head. As you say the mantra, Vajrasattva pours amrita, or nectar (literally “anti-death potion”), out the bottom of his body. The amrita enters you through the top of your head, flushes out your defilements, and washes down into the earth. 

It’s not an easy practice to get right, partly because there’s never an experience of rightness. The goal is to be in a nondual state, where there’s no right or wrong, and no “you” to evaluate anything. Once it gets going, the visualization does what it wants. I’ve seen amrita come down as water, or vodka. At times it is sparkly, or silver like mercury. Once Vajrasattva poured a stream of live rats into me. It’s a colorful religion. 

But on day one of the retreat I felt completely stuck, even though I’d done the practice hundreds of times. I sat chanting the mantra, gazing inwardly upward at Vajrasattva, but he had nothing for me—no amrita, no vodka, no mercury, sewer rats, blood, pus, molasses, motor oil, nothing. Often you run into a wall several days in, after you’ve settled. That’s when you find out what’s really going on with you, at which point you might scream, or sing, or get violently ill, or lie curled up devastated for a few hours. But here was the wall, and my retreat had barely begun. 

My mind went to Vajratopa, who is Vajrasattva’s consort, and who often goes missing in the iconography. But she’s there in the longer liturgical text, and in some of the illustrations, straddling Vajrasattva in yab-yum, or “primordial union,” her haunches in his lap, her feet hooked at the ankles behind his waist. She is holding a knife in one hand and a skull cup in the other. I kept chanting, picturing them up there above my head. I hoped the nectar would pour from their union, enter my body and harmonize my masculine and feminine aspects, which seemed to be in a lifelong tug-of-war. 

In the months before the retreat I’d been attending a “trans feminine spectrum” support group at my local LGBT center. On the first Wednesday of each month, forty or so people crammed into a small room to commit this act of support. We tried arranging our chairs in a circle, but there were too many of us. The circle spread to the walls and then spiraled inward. We went around introducing ourselves and our pronouns, which varied from “she/ her” to “he/him” to “either” to “I don’t know” to “I don’t care.” (It would be another couple years before “they/them” would come on the scene.)

The discussions were free-for-alls. There were so many people, so little time. The important thing for me was the space itself, which was brimming with energy, and the sense of change. It was 2013. Trans fashion models were beginning to come out. Laura Jane Grace was fronting the punk band Against Me!, Laverne Cox would soon appear on the cover of Time. Amanda Simpson, a trans woman, was working in the Commerce Department for the Obama Administration. Ordinary trans people—quietly, one by one—were beginning to come out at their jobs and at colleges.

Yet the people in that room, including the facilitators, were in bad shape. There was a lot of PTSD, depression, addiction, eating disorders, suicidality. Many had far more pressing issues than gender. Then again, having your gender identity in a constant state of upheaval magnifies every issue. “How come we only meet once a month?” was a question repeated monthly.

I wasn’t doing so well myself. I hadn’t worked a regular job since I’d returned from being a poet-in-residence at a college in Oklahoma, and my unemployment insurance had run out. I did some freelance editing, taught workshops in my living room and at conferences, and published poems in good journals for little money. Being underemployed in New York is scary. This is how people go homeless, I told myself. I was spending savings on rent. I didn’t eat out or go to the movies.

I would later learn the terrifying word “decompensation,” which sounded like a financial term until I looked it up: “a breakdown in an individual’s coping mechanisms resulting in progressive loss of functioning.” Was six years of intense Buddhist practice, which encouraged me to renounce all hope and striving, making me decompensate? Each day, when I contemplated the Four Reminders—meant to turn the mind to meditation practice—the one about my “precious human birth” set me on edge, while the death reminder didn’t faze me a bit.

I had a brief relationship with a young woman named Liz, who managed a Starbucks in Philadelphia. Liz wanted to be a poet, and had talent, but was too depressed to do anything about it. We’d met at a writing conference held at a big hotel. She was tracking me, staring at me from the backs of rooms. She was tall, pretty, and lost. She was bisexual, and liked that I crossdressed. I liked her humor and directness. “I was going to give you a call last night,” she once explained, “but then I didn’t.” We tried being boyfriend and girlfriend, but I sensed, after a disastrous road trip, it wasn’t going to work. There was a huge age gap, and you could say our depressions didn’t get along.

Still, we were very fond of each other, and remained friends. We liked to dress up and go out together, both in Philly and New York. The first time we did this we shared an unusual moment. After finishing my makeup I stepped into a skirt. 

“What just happened?” she said, looking over at me. 

“What?”

“You changed.”

“Yeah, I put on a skirt.” 

“No.” She narrowed her eyes and peered at me. “You changed.” There was a dumbfounded smirk on her face. “You’re like . . . female.” 

“I would come out,” I said to her later, “but I don’t know what I’d come out as.” 

“Who cares,” she said, “as long as you come out to yourself.” 

There are myriad ways in which trans people come out to themselves. Cracking your egg, it’s called, or just cracking. First you’re an egg, an unhatched, proto-trans person. You don’t quite realize you’re in a shell, or you may have a vague sense of a shell—of “shellness”—but you don’t quite know what it is. Others may see your shell more than you do, though they can’t see who, or what, is inside. Not until you crack. 

I’ve known trans people who were cracked by something they saw in a book or magazine, a movie or TV show. Others are cracked by meeting someone trans, or the experience of performing in drag. Sometimes it’s a sexual experience. Sometimes it’s a near-death encounter, or the death of someone you’re close to, making you stop and say, What the hell am I waiting for? Social media and the internet, with sites like Reddit and YouTube, may have hatched more of us than everything else combined. 

When I think of trans people from past generations, I never cease to marvel at them. With so much danger, and so few things in their world to crack their egg, how had these Houdinis come out? I, on the other hand, was a reverse Houdini. I’d kept a woman’s wardrobe my entire adult life, fed myself trans-related media, attended a trans support group (hello), and somehow still managed not to crack. In the end, I needed fifty years of sadness, a remote cabin, and an outrageous religion to do it. 

I didn’t even do it. Vajratopa did. 

Sitting in the loft of the cabin, chanting the hundred-syllable mantra, I was hoping Vajrasattva and Vajratopa could bring my masculine and feminine energies into balance. Instead, Vajratopa took over, pouring her skull cup of feminine nectar into the top of my head and down my spine. I felt myself shift into a female form—I don’t know how else to say it—and energy coursed through me like never before. 

A little later, Guru Yoga finished the job. In Guru Yoga practice, it is a teacher (guru) who sits above your head as you chant the simple mantra, Hear my call. You’re calling the guru from afar. You say it a million times—hear my call, hear my call—like some lost child on a mountain. A black-and-white photograph of the guru, my teacher’s teacher, sat on the shrine. I’d never seen this picture of him. He was dressed in a military uniform. His face was in three-quarter profile, looking to the side—though, as often happens in photos, he seemed to look everywhere. But I couldn’t get him to look at me. Then I called to him as a woman, and our eyes met. It’s no problem, his eyes said, to be a woman. I collapsed weeping. You should be a woman, he said. 

I closed my morning practice and came downstairs for lunch, engaging in the ordinary activities of cooking, eating, washing, and one other thing: freaking out over what the hell went on in that loft. A key meditation instruction is “look again.” Don’t come to conclusions, just come back and look again. That’s what I did later that afternoon, again that evening, and the next morning. Each time I went upstairs and reentered practice, I was female. Each time I came downstairs to check on the fire or do chores or urinate, I was in shock. 

At night, unable to sleep, I pictured living as a woman. I saw myself at a social gathering in a lush garden, standing near a tree in a print dress, holding court, smiling ear to ear as people came up to introduce themselves. A question arose from within: You mean I actually get to be me? The words were euphoric, and terrifying.

Towards the end of the retreat I grew nervous and sleepless. Was I really going to do this? Could I? I feared the responses of others, the raised eyebrows of women who’d known me for years, men scratching their heads, former students typing question marks to one another. These fears soon gave way to deeper concerns: What will I look like? How will I make a living? Will hormones make me impotent? Will they kill my creativity? Who will ever love me? 

But each morning upstairs, when I opened the day with bodhicitta practice, my heart broke open, and it was a woman’s heart. As the sun rose over the mountains behind me, pulling in the shadows and flooding the valley with light, I was overwhelmed with compassion for the world’s suffering. I wept for all the people I hadn’t helped because I’d been so stuck in my own problems all my life. 

A question arose from within: You mean I actually get to be me? The words were euphoric, and terrifying.

On a final evening walk I looked up at the mountain, determined to state out loud: “I want to be a woman.” My heart was in my throat, I could barely speak above a whisper. “I want to be a woman,” I finally said, and the mountain said, “Fine by me.” A tree said, “OK.” “Like I care?” a chipmunk weighed in. 

What visions do you trust? When you’re alone in a cabin for twelve days and something shows up in your stillest moment, is it real, or is it in need of a reality check? Is reality, as the guru suggested, a fantastic rumor? Isn’t depression, my most constant companion all these years, the result of being out of sync with reality? Could decades of thinking of myself as male be a grand illusion? Who would believe that? Did I believe it? 

A last vision came to me while packing up to leave: a small girl, very thin, with bright, deep-set eyes, her orbital bones beginning to show. She was being held hostage. I only glimpsed her through a crack in a padlocked shack. She handed me a note on a scrap of paper. The note said, “Don’t forget me.” She was unsure I’d come back for her, yet I was her only hope, and she had no choice but to trust me. But did I trust her? Nothing in my life had worked out, and now here was this girl I’d never seen, pleading. Do I let go of everything, and base my life on her?

After a retreat there is reentry, a return to the world of daily life. Reentries are precarious and seldom uneventful. I think of the Apollo 11 astronauts returning to earth, and how, if the angle of reentry was slightly off, the command module would skip like a stone off the atmosphere, or else burn up like a meteor. I had a lot of time—most of the retreat—to contemplate returning to my life, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine it. 

Just down the mountain was a friend. Liz had arrived in Crestone for a five-day program at the retreat center. In the residence hall, after we hugged, Liz stepped back and said, “What’s going on?” I don’t know what she saw. All I’d seen in the mirror—the first mirror I’d seen in a while— was a thousand-yard stare and someone who needed a shave. 

“I want to show you something,” I said.

I walked her up the mountain to the Cabin of the Crazy One. We went up to the shrine room, now cleared and swept bare. The sun had just set, but there was still plenty of light in the valley. We stood at the window gazing out for a while. Then we sat on the floor facing each other with our legs outstretched. 

“This is where it happened,” I said.

“What happened?”

“I’m going to live as a woman.”

“OK,” she said. Then she narrowed her eyes, and tilted her head to the side. 

“What?” 

“You’re not a Tina.”

“No, I’m not.”

She thought for a moment, cocked her head the other way, and held up a finger. “You’re more of a Diana.” 

It should be mentioned that the Vajrayana Buddhist protocols I’ve described are considered restricted. Vajrayana itself is known as the “ear-whispered” lineage, and students are instructed to keep its methods and revelations secret. We even recite protector chants daily to remind us that wrathful beings stand ready to seize and devour “those who profess the tantras to all.” It would seem, then, that I have sinned by divulging the details of my practice, so if I get struck by lightning between now and the time you read this, you’ll know why. 

Personally I’m not worried, due to another Vajrayana teaching, which tells us that the highest spiritual truths are “self-secret.” Even if such things were made explicit, it would still be impossible for someone of “degraded awareness” to see them. I ought to know: nothing could have been more self-secret than my own gender. Over the years, much of what I’ve detailed in this book was told to several therapists, none of whom so much as suggested I might be trans. But even if they had, it wouldn’t have made a difference. 

There is simply no knowing a thing if it is self-secret, perhaps because that thing refuses to know itself in your presence. It is like a valley, spread out before you, hiding in plain sight. 

⧫

Adapted from This Body I Wore by Diana Goetsch(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 24, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by Diana Goetsch

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Ever since Lord Buddha instituted the annual three-month “rains retreat,” an intense period of practice for monastics taking shelter from monsoons, every great master has deemed retreat an essential part of a committed dharma practitioner’s life. But what is a retreat exactly? To go on retreat means to withdraw to a quiet or secluded place for a period of time and dedicate oneself to prayer and meditation. A retreat can be of any length, but traditionally it is for at least a few days. This withdrawal from worldly life and embrace of solitude and quiet is seen as essential to spiritual deepening, especially the opening of the heart to joy, love, compassion, and evenness. 

It is in times of crisis and hardship that we feel the need for retreat more acutely, such as this current time of pandemic and strife. The more the world is consumed by trouble and noise, the more our true hearts yearn for peace and quiet. 

Unfortunately, not everyone has the favorable conditions necessary to do long-term retreats or the financial means to travel to isolated retreat centers, if travel is even possible given COVID restrictions or conflict. The good news is we don’t have to travel to the Himalayas to find solitude and we can benefit greatly from shorter periods of retreat, even as little as one day a month. We don’t have to go anywhere; we can find the quiet we need wherever we are, right now. In fact, COVID lockdowns and restrictions are a great opportunity to turn an adverse situation to our benefit. 

What follows is a 12-point guide to using our homes as retreat locations and making the most of what little time we have to achieve a level of tranquillity and peace that will greatly enrich our lives. 

1. Set a retreat boundary. 

For the duration of your retreat, you do not go outside this boundary. Generally speaking this should be the boundary of your home. Include your yard or balcony so that you can sit in the sun and get fresh air and look up at the sky between sessions. Widely revered teacher Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche (1904–1987) once said that though we may go for retreat in the isolated mountains, our minds often remain in town. Alternately, we could be in town but our mind is embracing solitude as if it were in the mountains. This means that our attitude and motivation are more important than location. We don’t need to go off to some remote hermitage; our homes are perfectly good retreat places.

2. Set a duration. 

Generally speaking, the minimum duration is 24 hours, from dawn to dawn the following day. However we have to adapt to the actual conditions of our life. For example, if you are a stay-at-home parent and have school-aged children, you could do a retreat while the children are at school on one or more days of the week. 

What makes this a retreat rather than just intermittent practice? It’s the commitment to the retreat over an extended period of time. If we are really serious about practice there is always a way to engage in some form of retreat. We just need to use our creative intelligence to figure out what will work for us. No matter what happens, stay in retreat for the entire duration. Don’t finish early, not even by ten minutes.

3. Choose a simple practice.

It is best to start with silent sitting meditation and learning about and contemplating Buddhist fundamentals, such as impermanence, cause and effect, compassion, and shunyata. Committing to an overly complex practice when first starting out is unwise. Keep it simple and focus on the things that you can do right now without having to learn anything new. The Buddha recommended only two practices during retreat: meditation and contemplation. To ease yourself into retreat, start with an audio recording of a relaxed guided meditation. Your contemplation can be based on any of the Buddha’s teachings, but it is best to get to the heart of things and avoid complicated philosophy. The most important point is to read or listen to the teachings with an open mind, to reflect on or contemplate those teachings to gain some understanding, and then to apply those teachings to daily life. 

“This isn’t an extreme sport.”

One teaching that is a great foundation for retreat is the Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind to Dharma, which is basically a contemplation of impermanence. Understanding impermanence opens the door to the true nature of mind. Therefore, though these teachings are considered preliminary, there are no more important contemplations, no matter where we are on the path. In fact, when long term practitioners feel stuck or complain that their practice isn’t deepening, the reason is usually because they have not truly taken impermanence to heart. 

4. Set the number of sessions. 

Begin with just one or two short sessions per day. Then increase to four longer sessions per day. About two hours is a good length. This isn’t an extreme sport. A little bit of practice done with enthusiasm, energy, and joy is better than days and days of practice undertaken as though it were a test of endurance. 

5. Embrace silence. 

Turn off all devices—phone, computer, TV, stereo etc. If you can’t turn off your phone, then tell friends and family ahead of time that you will be in retreat and to not disturb you unless it is an emergency. Put the phone out of view. If you live with others, explain to them that you will not be engaging in conversation for the duration of the retreat and invest in earplugs or noise cancelling headphones to screen out their noise. Silence is an essential component to retreat.

6. Take Genyen vows for the duration of the retreat. 

Genyen vows are part of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. There are eight vows:

• Do not kill. The fullest interpretation of this vow is to be vegetarian or vegan for the duration of the retreat. This is about placing compassion (and mercy) at the center of our lives.
• Do not deceive yourself or others. In retreat, there is no one else there to talk to or deceive. In that context this vow means to be honest about what we are feeling, thinking and doing and to be honest with ourselves.
• Do not take what is not freely offered. Essentially, don’t steal. This is about being mindful of our greed and craving. In retreat, this means to simply be aware when we want things that we do not need or have not been offered. 
• Do not engage in sexual contact or stimulation. As with above, this is about reducing desire and craving for pleasure. This is more about our mind space than about any moral judgement of sex or pleasure. If we are constantly seeking pleasure our minds cannot be quiet and we cannot be still.
• Do not use alcohol or intoxicants. This is about allowing the mind to settle into its natural condition and for us to maintain the ability to see our mind clearly, without our perception being clouded or distorted. The exception to this rule is if alcohol or intoxicants are ingredients of an essential medication (such as cannabis for chronic pain). It is also a good idea to reduce or cut out caffeine and sugar as they affect the mind quite strongly. If we want to see our mind clearly, at the very least we should limit our intake of alcohol, intoxicants, caffeine, and sugar. 
• Change your clothes. This vow asks us to wear simple clothing reserved for practice or retreat only. This can be as simple as wearing a maroon meditation shawl during practice sessions, or indeed for your entire retreat time. It might be reserving a favorite t-shirt or socks just for retreat. The point of this is to help us step into the retreat mindset by donning retreat clothing. 
• Change your name. For the duration of the retreat we use our refuge name, or at least try to remember the meaning behind our refuge name while we are in retreat. If we don’t have a refuge name, we can choose a name for ourselves. It should be something that inspires us to connect humbly and gently with our spiritual nature. Modifying our dress and name facilitates the letting go of who we currently believe we are, and opens us to the possibility that we are not what we think we are, specifically that our identities and sense of self are truly empty and insubstantial.
• Changing your mind. This refers to renouncing worldly life and livelihood. In terms of livelihood, this vow means that we don’t do any paid or mundane work during our retreat. Beyond that, it means to remind ourselves of impermanence so that we turn our mind away from pointless things and activity toward meaningful activity such as dharma practice. 

7. Ask a retreat mentor to answer any important questions that arise. 

The mentor can either be your dharma teacher or a trusted and experienced practitioner who has done numerous retreats before. If the retreats are short don’t contact the retreat mentor during the retreat unless your questions are urgent. Retreat is a time for learning how our own minds work and becoming comfortable with our minds.

8. Start small and slow and build up capacity and confidence over time. 

On the retreat session (whether it’s an hour, day, or weekend), simply settle into doing all of the above. Choose an easy meditation practice, read dharma books, and gently contemplate the fundamentals. Stay within your comfort zone until you settle into a rhythm. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And doing retreat is about softening the heart and mind. It’s not about hardening yourself for retreat, but softening into it. 

Each retreat session, build a little more routine and structure into your day. Eventually, develop more or longer session periods and stay consistent: Practice at the same time, in the same place, and for the same duration. Consistency and persistency is the key. Turn these weekend retreats into a long term and sustainable practice.

9. Be honest with yourself about your capacity.  

Go slow. By going too big too quickly, you run the risk of developing an aversion and not wanting to practice again. Accept where you are and build from there. Not even Siddhartha Gautama was Shakyamuni Buddha to begin with. Young Mila became Milarepa over time. Yeshe Tsogyal started out as an ordinary Tibetan girl and became the first fully enlightened being in the Tibetan tradition. We all start somewhere. We have to build our capacity and confidence slowly. 

10. Have no expectations! 

Be patient, kind, and gentle with yourself. Practicing self-compassion and love in retreat is vital. Totally relax between sessions. If you need to rest, then rest. Resting in stillness and quiet in-between sessions is just as important as the session time itself as this is when the practice filters down from our heads to our hearts and deepens. When obstacles arise, remember that the majority are mind-made, so relax. There is nothing to fear in the mind. Obstacles are inevitable; don’t feel disappointed when they arise.

11. Arouse joy at the start of each session. 

We begin with joy so that the sessions become something that we look forward to and savor rather than dread and approach as a chore. Joy makes retreat wonderful rather than laborious. (Read this article about embracing joy.)

12. Remember what a tremendous opportunity and privilege it is to be able to practice the dharma and to do a retreat. 

Countless beings do not have this opportunity so savor it, enjoy it and make the most of the time. 

If you are looking for more inspiration, there is a concise teaching on retreat by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo that is available for free online in the book Three Teachings.

The most important thing to remember about retreat is to keep a relaxed and open-hearted attitude. If we relax and keep our hearts open, even short periods of retreat can be deeply transformative. All the best and good luck! 

The post 12 Steps for a DIY At-Home Retreat  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When we break for lunch at my Saturday meditation retreats, I often tell people, “Please enjoy your food.” All morning I have been offering various instructions in sitting and walking meditation, and by lunchtime we have also had an hour of yoga with further directives, so I may leave it at that. I don’t want eating to be another chore, or yet another place to worry about whether or not you are doing it “right.” We do enough of that already, so I invite people to simply “please enjoy your food.”

On some occasions I might say a bit more, although I don’t want people trying too hard to “have fun.” I explain that enjoying your food is very important, because to enjoy something is how we connect to the world, to one another, to our inner being. When you enjoy your food, you will be happy and well-nourished by what you eat.

Sometimes I might also explain to people that by enjoying their food, they will naturally find themselves practicing meditation. They will be paying attention to what they are eating—noticing flavors and textures and nuances of taste—because to enjoy something you need to experience it. Also, they will have to stay present, because if they get carried away by greed, they will be thinking about the future possibility and miss what they are eating in the present. Entering into full enjoyment, they will be relaxing and opening their hearts to the food, not worrying about good and bad, right and wrong, or “how well am I doing in my meditation?”

Mostly I think it’s better to say as little as possible. Then “enjoying your food” may be the best meditation you do all day. It all takes care of itself without your having to try too hard. Following the path of pleasure is deep and profound, and richly rewarding. Sometimes people complain that it doesn’t work that way, and one needs discipline and austerity and restraint. That’s nonsense, implying that one’s inherent being lacks wisdom or any sense of beauty, and consequently needs to be kept in line and retrained, tamed, subdued. Give your body some credit.

Most problems which arise in the pursuit of pleasure are due to lack of devotion—one is not fully enough committed to pleasure. Which bite of chocolate cake is no longer pleasurable? Which swallow of wine is bringing one down instead of up? Sure, restraint is needed, but it comes after pleasure or along with pleasure, not before and in place of pleasure. “Please enjoy your food.”

When pleasure or enjoyment is forbidden, then one looks for stupor, for unconsciousness, which is the closest one can get to relief from the inane drive to discipline and restrain.

Years ago at a meditation retreat we had an eating meditation. Raisins were passed out. We were encouraged to help ourselves to a small handful, “But don’t eat them yet!” I sighed. I am not thrilled with this kind of exercise. How hokey can you get? I rather prefer to have these experiences on my own, instead of having them spoon-fed to me.

We were instructed to look at the raisins, to observe their appearance, to note their color and texture, “But don’t eat them yet!” I supposed it could be worse, like “Ready now, one, two, three. Open your heart to the raisins.” Next we were invited to “Smell the raisins,” and finally, after a suitable interval allowing time for the aromas to register, we were permitted to put the raisins in our mouths, “But don’t chew them yet!”

By now I was also aware of an urge to smash something, and further, when I looked into this, a sense of annoyance. “Leave me alone,” I complained (loudly to myself). “Let me eat, for goodness sake.” To have one’s act of eating abruptly arrested is upsetting and disturbing. Get something tasty in your mouth, and your teeth want to close on it. But WAIT! We were then instructed to simply feel the raisins in our mouth, their texture, their presence. We were obliged to note saliva flowing and the impulse to chew.

At last we were permitted to culminate the act of eating. The raisins could be chewed. More juices flowed. The sweet and the sticky were liberated from their packets, “But don’t swallow yet!” “Be aware of your swallowing. See if you can make your swallowing conscious.” Some people, I guess, just have a knack for knowing how to take all the fun out of things. This noting and observing, attending and awakening, by golly, doesn’t leave much opportunity for joyful abandonment, but I’ll always remember those raisins.

When I led my own eating meditation, I decided to get real. Skip the raisins. Let’s meditate on just one potato chip. So I bought a bag of Ruffles. Then I thought we could go on to oranges—my concession to wholesomeness—and conclude with Hydrox cookies. I picked Hydrox because I had heard they were the kosher Oreos (no pig fat or beef fat, I guess). Also I had heard (or maybe just made it up) that there was a secret society that met surreptitiously in semi-darkness to eat Oreo cookies and drink milk with complete awareness, and I aspired to join.

Since I didn’t want to parcel out the instructions as they had been given to me, I laid out the whole deal at the start: Pay attention. Give your attention, allow your attention to come to the potato chip, and be as fully conscious as you can of the whole process of eating just one potato chip. Just one! So you better pay attention! Observe, smell, taste, feel, swallow.

When I announced our potato chip eating meditation, I was naturally greeted with various gripes, taunts, and complaints: “I can’t eat just one.” “That’s ridiculous.” “You’re going to leave us hanging with unsatisfied desire. How could you?” Nonetheless, I remained steadfast in my instruction and passed around a bowl of potato chips, urging each participant to take just one. When everyone was ready, we commenced. “Instead of words,” Rilke says in one of his sonnets, “discoveries flow out astonished to be free.” And so it was.

First the room was loud with crunching, then quiet with savoring and swallowing. When all was fed and done, I invited comments. Many people had been startled by their experience: “I thought I would have trouble eating just one, but it really wasn’t very tasty.” “There’s nothing to it.” “There’s an instant of salt and grease, and them some tasteless pulpy stuff in your mouth.” “I can see why you might have trouble eating just one, because you take another and another to try to find some satisfaction where there is no real satisfaction to be found.” “If I was busy watching TV, I would probably think these were great; but when I actually experience what’s in my mouth, it’s kind of distasteful.”

That potato chip was pretty surprising even to me, the “experienced meditator.” Now I walk past the walls of chips in the supermarket rather easily without awakening insidious longings and the resultant thought that I really ought to “deny” myself. I don’t feel deprived. There’s nothing there worth having. And this is not just book knowledge. I know that.

The oranges were fabulous, exquisite, satisfying, “Juicy . . . refreshing . . . sweet . . . succulent . . . rapturous.” About half the participants refused to finish the Hydrox cookie. One bite and newly awakened mouths simply bid the hands to set aside what remained: “This we know to be something we do not need, desire, want or wish for. Thanks anyway.”

♦

For more from Edward Espe Brown, read “Rhubarb,” followed by “A Letter to Myself,” from Inquiring Mind. 

Related Inquiring Mind articles on food and mindful eating:

The Nothingness of the Ground

Interview with Alice Waters: Think Globally, Taste Locally

Interview with Jean Kristeller: Know Your Hunger

On the Bodhisattva Path, I Stopped Off for a Burger

The post Please Enjoy Your Food appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Solitude is hard to find. That is the problem facing Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at the beginning of Paul MacGowan’s documentary Wandering . . . But Not Lost. A renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher, best-selling author, abbot of multiple monasteries, and leader of an international network of meditation centers, Mingyur Rinpoche shocked his followers in June 2011 when he left everything behind to take up the life of a solitary wandering ascetic.

The plan was to have no plan. Following in the footsteps of the great meditation masters who sought to deepen their practice through solitary retreat, Mingyur Rinpoche absconded from his monastery in the middle of the night. With only a small backpack, a few dollars, and the robes on his back, he eluded the watchful eyes of the many aides, minders, and assistants who had tended to him since his youth. Over the next four and a half years, Mingyur Rinpoche would wander throughout India and Nepal, stopping at many of the region’s holiest sites: Varanasi, Kushi-nagar, Rishikesh, Vaishno Devi Shrine, the Boudhanath Stupa, and Lapchi Mountain. Each day he welcomed the physical and psychological challenges of the wandering life (like the lack of food, water, money, and shelter) as opportunities to develop mindfulness and nonattachment.

Wandering is decidedly in the genre of the reverential “teacher documentary”: films celebrating (and sometimes complicating) the life and legacy of influential Buddhist masters. Like Johanna Demetrakas’s Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche or Lesley Ann Patten’s Words of My Perfect Teacher about Khyentse Norbu, the film Wandering touches on the pressures of being a famous teacher and the ambivalence that such responsibility can entail. However, unlike those two films, which explore the moral complexity and fallibility of their protagonists, Wandering’s portrait of Mingyur Rinpoche is squeaky clean. Although his act is radical—undertaking a solitary spiritual quest, often at the risk of his own life—he seems to face each challenge with childlike innocence. At one point, he describes his sheltered upbringing: at 12 years old he was identified as the seventh incarnation of the 17th-century

enlightened yogi Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and was swept up in a privileged life of tutelage and training. Though his struggles intensify over the course of the film, some of the greatest shocks early on during his retreat journey were quite mundane: having to buy his own train ticket (previously, assistants had arranged all his travel), navigating lines in a crowded station, not finding a seat on the train, buying simple food on a tight budget. As a wide-eyed Mingyur Rinpoche recounts the anxiety and disorientation these experiences provoked in him, one gets the impression that he is indeed like a sheltered prince who left the palace for the first time. His journey was perhaps half spiritual retreat, half coming-of-age story.

Although Wandering is ostensibly about the spiritual work of solitude, there is another message that rises to the surface of this film: that solitude, paradoxically, is consummately social. Despite Mingyur Rinpoche’s best attempts to escape the madding crowd, at every turn the wall of his solitude is pierced by the presence of others, like flowers growing through the cracks in concrete. Mingyur Rinpoche’s recollections of his retreat are marked by the constant presence of people: he describes the overwhelming smell of passengers on the packed trains, the hustle and bustle on the streets where he slept, the dogs that stalked him on the road as he wandered. Though he has taken pains to go incognito, he is eventually recognized by one of his students, Tashila, who then drops everything to accompany him for the rest of the journey. From the Indian food peddler who donates his daily leftovers so Mingyur Rinpoche can eat, to the many Nepalese villagers who, despite their modest means, go out of their way to bring blankets and firewood to his cave, to his devoted student Tashila, who spends all his money on sleeping bags and warm shoes for his teacher, it would seem that solitude is supported by the net of sociality.

Although Wandering is ostensibly about the spiritual work of solitude, another message rises to the surface of this film: that solitude, paradoxically, is consummately social.

In one of the film’s most memorable moments, Mingyur Rinpoche recounts having nearly died—likely from food poisoning or botulism—on the steps of the stupa at Kushinagar, the site of the Buddha’s own parinirvana. Unconscious and unrecognizable—having changed out of his monastic garb to avoid attention—he awakens in a hospital to learn that he was rescued by a pilgrim he had briefly encountered a few days earlier. We know next to nothing about this man. Who was he? Where did he come from? Was he rich or poor? What did it cost him (financially and otherwise) to arrange and pay for Mingyur Rinpoche’s lifesaving medical care? One thing we do know is that Mingyur Rinpoche likely would have died—and his students would have lost their teacher—had it not been for the swift action and generosity of this stranger.

That Mingyur Rinpoche survived and could continue his ascetic practice is thanks to this unknown man. The gift of solitude, it turns out, is given by others.

Solitude is not only made possible but made meaningful by sociality. Throughout Wandering, the most profound of Mingyur Rinpoche’s contemplative insights—even when alone—lead him right back into the social world. On the brink of death, he recounts the unbinding of his mind: unable to move, he transcended his body, and his mind became a formless expanse. But within that expanse, he found others: “It felt like you’re almost unconscious and then, suddenly, completely open. No time, no direction, no up, no down. It’s completely free. . . . I am everywhere and at the same time nowhere. I was in that state for a few hours. And then I felt the connectivity with all beings. And from that connectivity, the wanting to help, was the sense of compassion. . . . The sense of compassion became stronger and stronger, connecting me with all beings.” Mingyur Rinpoche even describes his solitary struggles in terms of other people: “Some days, I didn’t have any money and nothing to eat . . . but then something happens, people give me something. . . . I thought, ‘When I love the world, the world loves me back.’”

One is left with the sense that Mingyur Rinpoche’s journey began as a retreat from the world but became a deeper immersion into it. “Now,” he says, “I feel like the street is my home. Wherever I go, I am at home.” In solitude, Mingyur Rinpoche did not escape the web of social entanglement; through solitude, he learned to experience it more fully.

The post A Profoundly Social Solitude appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A nun sounds a femur-bone trumpet next to a wake of vultures descending upon a fresh corpse laid out in the snow. The haunting image, part of a Tibetan sky burial at Yarchen Gar Monastery in China’s Sichuan Province, is not easily unseen. Witnessing the funeral ceremony firsthand is what compelled the independent Chinese filmmaker Jin Huaqing to document the residents of Yarchen Gar. More than six years of filming later, flashes from the burial ritual now appear as a refrain in Dark Red Forest, which follows some 7,000 Tibetan Buddhist nuns who shelter inside makeshift wooden huts for a 100-day retreat that takes place during the coldest part of the year.

The director manages to create a cohesive story line despite forgoing a single protagonist. Instead, he tells the story of thousands of figures, most of them masked and indistinguishable from one another. It may be disorienting at first, but what emerges is an introspective exploration of the relationships between these women. Our admiration for them deepens with each passing scene, as we watch them prostrating themselves around a frozen lake, moving insects along their path to safety, or sitting still in meditation for hours outdoors, unfazed by the snowstorm enveloping them. The physicality of their devotion is overwhelming, and it is easy to see how their martial-like commitment to cultivating compassion drew Huaqing toward them for years after his initial visit.

While impermanence is a prominent theme in the film, it’s not all doom and gloom in the dark red forest—the sea of burgundy robes that inspired the documentary’s title. Scenes of yaks poking their heads through windows and a nun confessing to having caved into her carnal desires (indulging in yak meat on Losar, the Tibetan New Year) provide moments of levity that help to buoy viewers among the otherwise grueling realities of monastic life at 13,000 feet. Seemingly banal footage of elder nuns kneading noodles in the kitchen and a patient seeking relief from the Tibetan doctor for a toothache gives a more balanced emotional tenor to the film, centered largely around the first noble truth, the truth of suffering. After all, with the rigors of living in subzero temperatures and having minimal insulation inside their simple shelters, it is an undeniably harsh existence for the Yarchen nuns.

But these devotees consider such experiences of pain to be mainly mind-made. “There is no real suffering in the world,” one nun reminds us in the opening scene. “People only suffer because of their obsessions.” When another retreatant asks her teacher where greed, hatred, and ignorance—and, as a result, suffering—come from, the lama advises her to adopt a don’t-know mind and begin again. “Restart your path to enlightenment,” he tells her. “Work on your heart like herders work on yak leather.” Such pith instructions—from male teachers as well as female faith healers and young nuns—bring real dharmic weight to the film from the outset.

Over an hour into the film, we begin to see Chinese propaganda slogans promoting ethnic unity. One banner announces a national promise to “write a new chapter of harmonious development.” Soon after, we watch as nuns work together to disassemble their cabins. They leave the monastery hauling pieces of home on their backs, though it’s not exactly clear why. The circumstances of their departure become more obvious when practitioners exchange words with the resident lama. One fears she won’t remember her way back to her village because she’s been gone too long. “I really want to help you stay, but there’s nothing I can do,” says the lama, who feels powerless, presumably against the Chinese government’s tightening restrictions and forced evictions.

He tells her, “Work on your heart like herders work on yak leather.”

The allusion to political realities is yet another way in which Dark Red Forest brings to bear sobering lessons about the inevitability of change. Since 2017, Chinese officials have reportedly demolished the homes of several thousand Yarchen residents, forcing them to relocate, and now maintain hundreds of surveillance stations around the complex. In one of the final vignettes, a displaced nun shares a reflection with the camera, which she has gradually come to feel is less intrusive. “Here in this freezing valley, birds are not only hungry but also live in fear every day of being attacked by hawks,” she says in front of a meditation hut that she has rebuilt.

The film ends where it began, with birds of prey dancing in the clouds and the blowing of a conch shell suffusing the open sky. Read as an omen, the final ballad gestures to tensions playing out in many Tibetan Buddhist monasteries under Chinese governance today. If the fate of similar institutions is any indication, Yarchen’s future and way of life are at risk of disappearing. As the sun rises in the closing scene, we drift into the dawn of not-knowing, holding on to hope that the Yarchen nuns may one day be able to find their way back home.

The post Cold Hard Truth appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When my mom and I get into the car after a retreat at the Zen Center of Ottawa and begin the long drive back to Boston, there is an obligatory period of relative silence. It feels indecent to emerge from days of formal practice, in which we’ve sat feet away from each other for hours on end but said nothing, and suddenly start blathering. We might offer a few words of salutation, and then the logistics of navigating to the highway take over. But once we are on 417 the floodgates open. 

With our senses sharpened by zazen, the talk usually turns to mindfulness, and the gift that is the opportunity to sit in a monastery setting, where room and board are provided and distractions eliminated. And so it was after our most recent retreat. As the city receded behind us and 417 opened up ahead, the sky appearing more luminous, somehow, than it had on the drive up, we waxed dharmic on the moments of recognition the retreat had offered. We went on like this for close to an hour before my mom wondered why the passing scenery looked so strange. Must be all that mindfulness, we figured, and the unusual sharpness of our sensations. Then, the highway became one lane where usually it is two, a trick even heightened visual acuity cannot accomplish. I looked for a sign to confirm that we were indeed on the right highway. Eventually we saw it: 417 West. 

Right highway. Wrong direction. The whole time we’d been celebrating the power of paying attention, we’d been traveling in the exact opposite direction from our home, setting us back a couple of hours on what is already a seven-hour drive. We turned around at the first opportunity, a new silence descending, not of contemplation but of dismay. We realized how silly this would sound—two Buddhists leaving a monastery and reveling in retreat afterglow, all the while mindlessly driving in the wrong direction—and considered the bad PR we were inadvertently giving Zen. Then the absurdity of it all set in and we began to laugh, my cheeks lifting with a rubbery ease that often accompanies my first bout of laughter post-retreat. After a brief discussion we decided to keep this little diversion to ourselves. Until now.

***

My mom has been making the drive from Boston to Ottawa several times a year for over 30 years. She once calculated that she has logged enough miles to circle the globe. She discovered Zen practice when I was a kid. I used to take chess lessons in Harvard Square from a grandmaster who kept a Super Soaker on hand to squirt pigeons on the branches above and prevent them from defecating on the board. During my lessons she would browse the Spirituality section of a local bookstore, and there she encountered a text by Venerable Anzan Hoshin roshi, the abbot at the Zen Center of Ottawa. Moved by his words, she connected with him by mail, and, encouraged by his response, began to practice at home, eventually heading north for her first retreat. The rest, as they say, is history. Sure, there are closer Zen centers to Boston, but when it comes to awakening, distance is less of a concern than clarity.

As a kid I couldn’t understand why my mom had to leave for days on end to stare at a wall. But she came home with chocolate purchased at the Duty-Free shop, and her absences began to seem about as natural as my dad’s business trips. Adults, I grasped, had the occasional need to be elsewhere, for reasons that were, at best, boring. But as I began to face the angst and uncertainty that can arise during one’s teenage years, I too sought answers. In our culturally Jewish but rational-minded household, zazen seemed as plausible an approach as any. And, as an athlete and skeptic, I appreciated that Zen required me to do something (despite that something being, in effect, nothing), and that any answers would have to be unearthed through my own efforts. I began to practice, seeking in the silence a method for navigating the confounding world beyond the cushion. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college, however, that I joined her on the narrow road to the deep north. 

As a 19-year-old with a couple days of austerity ahead of me, I did the only sensible thing I could think of at the time, and tried to pack an entire weekend’s worth of drinking into a Thursday night. It was sangria night, featuring $10 jugs of the one and only Carlo Rossi, and when my mom picked me up the next day, Carlo still had a powerful hold on me. Being in a moving vehicle did not help. As I-87 bisected snow covered fields, waves of nausea overtook me, and I had to ask my mom to pull over. As she watched from the driver’s seat, I leaned out the passenger door, staining the pristine white snow a garish purple.

Twenty-four hours later, after spending the night at the monastery and sitting all day, I sat in the passenger seat and cried. Alarmed, my mom asked what was wrong. It was difficult to explain that the reason I was crying was because, for the first time in a long time, the answer was, “Nothing.”

***

In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, composed in the 17th century, the poet Basho recounted the reverence he felt standing in front of an old monument: 

I felt as if I were in the presence of the ancients themselves, and, forgetting all the troubles I had suffered on the road, rejoiced in the utter happiness of this joyful moment, not without tears in my eyes. —trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa

Perhaps this sort of reverence following a long journey explains my tears upon leaving the Zen Center of Ottawa that first time. As we left the monastery, I felt grateful to be in the presence of the ancients, or at least to be exposed to this ancient dharma that was now available to me, and so I was not without tears in my eyes. What Basho described, and what I experienced, is pilgrimage. 

Pilgrimage is marked by a journey toward the sacred—the rising action—and a return home—falling action. Though the route may be the same, the experience of coming and going has a different flavor. The rising action is filled with anticipation and trepidation, with the knowledge that one is about to engage in an immensely trying experience. Despite all the remarks we receive when embarking on retreat about how relaxing the trip will be, Zen retreats are intensive periods of formal practice. We wake at 4:30 a.m. We sit zazen for nine hours each day, perform caretaking work, and sleep on thin mats on hard floors. By the end, one is typically worn out, sore, and paradoxically bright-eyed and alert. The ride home then, is one buoyed by the feeling of accomplishment and the sight of the sky yawning in all directions.

One of the topics of conversation on our retreat rides is often what it might be like to live in Ottawa, or to have the Zen Center in Boston. On the one hand, having that kind of access to the teachings and teachers, and the ability to join the daily or weekly sittings, would be a boon to our practice. Yet the distance also primes us for the profound, making the journey a part of the practice, and the experience one that requires a worthy undertaking. Living adjacent to the monastery would be like taking a helicopter to the top of Everest. Plus, Everest would always be looming, and how could one go about the mundanity of daily life in the shadow of that towering vista? Of course, it was the Zen teacher Dogen who wrote, “Those who regard the mundane as a hindrance to practice only understand that in the mundane there is nothing sacred. They do not yet understand that in sacredness, nothing is mundane.” Collapsing this distance is both a physical and a metaphorical challenge. We traverse the physical by putting pedal to the metal, and so I guess we do not yet understand. We collapse the metaphorical by putting ass to sitting cushion, so I guess sometimes we do.

***

One of our pastimes, born perhaps, of our desire to focus on the journey and not the destination, is planning the route North. When my mom first began to travel to Ottawa, she navigated using a map, finding the straight lines to Montreal, and then west to Ottawa. But the border crossing en route to Montreal tends to back up, and so she began heading West, through Mohawk Country in upstate New York. The overall driving time was longer, but less of it was spent sitting at the border, inching along. Further iterations on this route introduced the ferry across Lake Champlain, a perfect opportunity to eat a bagel while staring out at the choppy blue water. 

When I began to make trips to the Zen Center on my own, I used the awesome new technology of MapQuest to print out directions. My first drives were fraught not only with retreat trepidation, but with the terror of missing a turn and not being able to reorient myself, with only French road signs to aid me. It seemed miraculous that I could arrive at this specific point by following this detailed, turn-by-turn, multiple-page printout. But missing a turn would be to drive right off the page and remove myself entirely from the miracle. The advent of navigation apps has mitigated the need for any route planning, of course. Now we can just plug in the address and point the car North, a different kind of miracle that has removed much of the miraculousness of arrival. 

I always know I’m on the right track when I encounter the windmills near Clinton, New York. My mom has long had an affinity for windmills (“Big Friendly Giants,” she calls them), and that affinity, like practice itself, has transferred to me. A less welcome landmark is the strip club in a seemingly desolate section of farm country over the border. Not because of any particular Puritan streak, but because the stark reminder of sense pleasure just prior to its absence is triggering in a highly unproductive way. 

Yet even in writing this I see that I have it wrong. The whole point of a retreat is sense pleasure: the pleasure of the belly rising and falling with each breath, the feet crackling the floorboards during walking meditation, the posture aligned and alert, the thumbs touching in the mudra. It is about relinquishing the addiction to extremes of pleasure that result in desolate strip clubs and appreciating the brilliance of everyday sensation. In that case, perhaps that landmark, like all landmarks really, can become an opportunity to practice. May it trigger a reminder not of strippers but of the need to strip away the mechanisms by which we reinforce craving and desire. It’s just an edifice, after all.

***

Being in retreat means being isolated from the world-at-large. I have emerged from retreat to learn of the Indonesian tsunami, to learn that a friend’s father had passed away, or simply that nothing significant at all had taken place, except perhaps in my own mind.

On April 19, 2013, a monk told us at the conclusion of our retreat that our home city was on lockdown due to the events that had unfolded after the Boston Marathon bombing. Just a few days earlier, rather than heading downtown on race day, where my brother-in-law was about to propose after completing the marathon, I had stayed home to pack and dwell in pre-retreat anxiety. I wasn’t sure what canceling the retreat would accomplish, so we made the decision to continue as planned, even though news was still unfolding about the bombing. At least it would give us something to do (despite that something being, in effect, nothing). The events of the next couple days rocked the city, and all the while I sat staring at a wall. When I called my wife after getting in the car, she breathlessly summarized the violence and fear that had continued throughout the week. My mom and I pointed the car South without any of the buoyancy that typically accompanies the drive home. With a manhunt occurring, we weren’t even sure if we could get home. As we approached an eerily silent city, we encountered only police vehicles and signs advertising the lockdown. 

The retreat afterglow, like all states, is largely cultivated. Absent the proper context, it evaporates. There is a sense, sometimes, of leaving a retreat and feeling the walls of tendency and habit closing in again. Or the walls of duty and identity. I’m moved by the fact that I can enter a set of walls in which I can spend a few days shedding the accumulated burden of self, and occasionally discouraged by how quickly I pick up where I left off. Yet I take heart in the notion that each visit to the monastery chips away at the walls I’ve built up. I’m just an edifice, after all.

***

Perhaps what I’m trying to say is best expressed by the writer Brian Doyle: “I’m a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.”

The narrow road to the deep North, upon which I’ve left so many shreds and shards of ego, has been the defining feature of my first 20 years as a Zen student. Yet the pandemic has kept us off that road for the longest stretch since either my mom or I took up sitting retreats. The last time we traveled that road together, in which we pointed the car in the opposite direction, was the first retreat I participated in since the birth of my daughter. Will she one day sit beside me on the narrow road to the deep North? I’m afraid of planting the seed of pilgrimage within her, for I know the ordeal it entails. Yet I also know it is the ordeal I am most thankful for, and perhaps the greatest gift I can give. And besides, we might be in need of a reliable navigator.

The post The Narrow Road to the Deep North appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 1995 Judith Skinner started a traditional three-year Tibetan Buddhist retreat in her rent-controlled San Francisco apartment. 24 years later, she’s still on retreat. Judith reflects on her two decades spent largely in solitude and her motivation for entering retreat.

This film was available to stream until midnight on January 31, 2020. Tricycle’s screening has ended, but you can find the film on Vimeo.

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Where Else but Here?

There is a story about a husband and wife on silent retreat with the great Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki. At some point the husband is going for an interview with him, and the wife says, “Can I take your spot? I’m having a really hard time and I want to leave the retreat.” So the husband says okay.

She goes and sits down in front of Shunryu Suzuki and says, with her car keys in her hand, “I’m leaving.” And he replies, “You’re free to leave, but there’s nowhere to go.”

I teach silent retreats and I see this all the time. Someone tells me they’re leaving, and I tell them that they’re free to go. Then they get to the parking lot and they just break down and don’t know what to do. Then they come back and sit down. And after that they are ready because they realize, Where could I really go?

_{From The World Comes to You: Notes on Practice, Love, and Social Action, by Michael Stone © 2019. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications. Michael Stone (1974–2017) was a teacher of yoga and Buddhism. He wrote several books, including The Inner Tradition of Yoga and Awake in the World.}

Divine Fear

It’s good to feel the fear of being terrified by our own mind. Buddha experienced this fear. In his teachings he said that he was terrified by the violence and insanity that exist in the world. Of course, we don’t have to live in this fear all of the time. However, it is important to find time here and there, perhaps a few times a week, to sit and to literally feel this divine fear. The point is to always be mindful if we can. To be mindful means that in one way or another we are observing our mind. We observe what is happening inside and see the thoughts, feelings, and emotions we are experiencing in that very moment, without judgment but at the same time creating a space where we are not indulging in them. We then have the choice not to feed the dangerous wolf. Sometimes when we look, we see that the dangerous wolf is very active and powerful. He is actually winning. Then, in that very moment, we have the choice not to feed it. That’s all we have to do, not feed it.

_{From Choosing Compassion: How to Be of Benefit in a World That Needs Our Love, by Anam Thubten © 2019. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications (shambhala.com). Anam Thubten is the founder and spiritual advisor of the Dharmata Foundation.}

Renavigating Renunciation  

I was confused for a long time about renunciation. This is not entirely my fault. In the Buddhist monasteries where I ordained and practiced, renunciation was a physical, ritual, communal, and obligatory action. Every few days we shaved our heads to signify cutting off delusion. We lived as simply as possible and renounced worldly accomplishments by turning away from professions that made a lot of money. In many spiritual traditions throughout the world, internal renunciation is symbolized and catalyzed by physical acts: shaving the head, living in poverty, departing from family. The idea is to change your body in order to change your heart and mind.

The mistake I made along the way was believing that renunciation is supposed to hurt. And I’ve actually heard this message echoed in dharma centers in the West as well as Zen monasteries in Japan.

But renunciation is not supposed to hurt. It’s supposed to clear away the psychological clutter in our lives that get in the way of joy.

In the noble eightfold path, “right intention” or “right thought” means the intention to renounce, the intention of goodwill, and the intention of harmlessness. The key mistake I made with renunciation during my monastic career was the belief that renunciation can be compelled from the outside in, rather than the inside out. I believed I could will myself to renounce. But renunciation comes from understanding, not force.

_{From “Joyful Renunciation,” by Gesshin Claire Greenwood, originally published on the blog That’s So Zen on April 10, 2019. Gesshin Claire Greenwood is an ordained Soto Zen priest. She is the author of Bow First, Ask Questions Later: Ordination, Love, and Monastic Zen in Japan, and Just Enough: Vegan Recipes and Stories from Japan’s Buddhist Temples.}

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