Reflections on staying at the monastery

During January I posted a series of blog entries that were written while I was staying at the Santi Forest Monastery.  I thought for this post I'd write a short reflection on my time at the monastery, just to wrap things up.

One of the interesting things about having this blog is that I often sit down to write something with an idea of what I'm going to say, and it all ends up going in a completely different direction.  So, for this post, I deliberately haven't planned what I'll write - and I'm interested to see what direction my fingers take me!

Overall I'd describe my time at the monastery as - confronting, difficult, peaceful, slow, and sad. This is the third time I've stayed up there, usually for around three weeks at a time, and it is always a difficult time for me.  I get very envious of people who go on meditation retreats and say how rewarding or beautiful it was.  I sometimes think there's something wrong with me that I find it so very hard.

But, I try to remind myself that I have difficult things to deal with.  Because I've been living with this illness for well over a decade it's natural that in the first few years of really looking at my feelings and bodily sensations,  I'll find a lot of sadness and despair arising.  

Because I can't do normal, structured meditation, I've come up with my own structure for the day when I'm at the monastery. From whenever I wake up (usually around 8.30am) until 10.30am I lie in bed and either do a meditation, if I feel I can, or just drift in and out of an exhausted haze, trying to be with and recognise whatever sensations are there. 

At 10.30 I go up to have a shower in the communal bathroom, and then have lunch and help to clean up afterwards.  During this stay, I also had a little job, mopping the sala (hall) and setting up mats and bowls for the next day's lunch.  Then, from around 1pm until 6pm I go back to my caravan and either listen to dharma (Buddhist) talks, do some structured meditation, read a bit from Buddhist books, or rest.  

At 6pm, if I feel up to it, I go back up to the main house and have a cup of tea with the other residents. In the evening, I can do what I like - and I usually listen to an audiobook on my ipod (which has nothing whatsoever to do with Buddhism!)

So, that's my day when I'm at the monastery, and I do find it very confronting to be living so closely to my feelings, and my physical condition, without any distractions like TV, radio, family, friends, my mobile phone,  e-mail or the internet.

During this stay, I cried a lot, and felt a deep, dragging depression. It seemed like a heavy weight that I would carry with me everywhere.  There seemed to be no way to fight my way out from underneath the bleak despair.  I was really forced to feel it - day after day after day.  A couple of times, one of the monks at the monastery pulled me aside and said, 'What's up?'  He's a very perceptive person, and I suppose he could tell just by the way I looked that I was having a tough time. 

He spent quite a while talking to me, trying to get an exact feel for what I was struggling with.  He started off by saying, 'You know, it's good to try to just accept the pain, to allow it.'  I think I stopped myself before I actually rolled my eyes at him, but I'm sure I got my message across in what I said. 

'I know that! I know I'm meant to be accepting pain, moving towards it, allowing it...blah, blah, blah...all the books say it.  But, I can't do that, and that just makes me feel even worse, because I hate it so much.  All I feel is how much I don't want it to be there, and this terrible judgement for it being there.'

'Oh OK!' he said, 'So you already know that.  Well, then, what you need is  kindness and gentleness.  Forget all about meditation; forget about what everyone else is doing here.  That's not for you right now.  All you have to do is be gentle.  When you get up out of the chair think, 'Am I doing that gently?'  When you lie in bed, think 'Is this a gentle posture for my body?'  All you have to do is be kind to all of those feelings.'

He was a great support to me, and, after talking to him a few times I did feel like a lot of the fighting and resistance to what was happening subsided.  I was able to just allow the depression, sadness, and judgemental thoughts to be there, without fighting them so much or trying little 'techniques' to get rid of them.  It was  painful to allow these things to just exist.  

I laughed just then at writing 'it was  painful' - because this process is, unfortunately, not in the past - it is  painful.  And that's really what I've taken away from this stay at the monastery. I'm more able to allow difficult feelings to exist.

I got home and started to read a Stephen Levine book that I haven't picked up in about a year.  Stephen talks a lot about moving towards pain, and, since I've always had such trouble with that concept, I ended up putting the book down. I was judging myself too much (and feeling judged by Stephen!) for not being able to send my illness love, or accept it. 

But, after reading a few pages of this book after returning from the monastery, I burst into tears. I was reading a chapter about a  woman whose son had died.  Stephen talked about her including her grief in her heart, and all of a sudden I thought, 'I understand that, I know what he means.' And I had an awareness of how I was moving towards my pain - allowing it to tear my heart open.  I had a vision of me literally stepping into my illness.  

It was very sad, but also quite beautiful, because I had a realisation of how cutting myself off from my illness had cut me off to life.  Over the next few days I realised that although I think I'm 'getting no-where' with this meditation, and that my stays at the monastery are just a complete waste of time - things are slowly changing, and moving.

This is one of the more luxurious huts at the monastery

- I stayed in this one on my first visit.

First day at the monastery

This post was written in December 2009, when I was spending a month staying at a Buddhist monastery near Sydney, Australia. 

It’s my first day at the monastery.  I arrived last night after an exhausting day of car-train-bus-plane travel, and was surprised at how at home I felt immediately.  The first time I came to here, a year ago, I felt completely alienated.  I didn’t know very much at all about Buddhism, and was particularly ignorant about how a monastery worked.

I had the general feeling that Buddhism wasn’t really into rules, but was a ‘free-and-easy’ kind of religion. My primary attraction to Buddhism meditation had come when I heard that the Buddha had said something along the lines of ‘here’s what I know to be true, but don’t trust me – work it out for yourself.’  ‘A religion that actually allows you to think for yourself?  I want a piece of that!’ I thought.

So, I was in for a surprise when I got to the monastery, which is located in acres of bushland a few hours out of Sydney. It's run in the tradition of Thai Theravadan forest monasteries - with an emphasis on solitary meditation, and living as the Buddha did. 

The Buddha set down rules, called 'precepts,' for his monks and nuns, which are followed to this day by monastics in the Theravadan tradition.  While I’m at the monastery I follow the 8 basic precepts which include refraining from: stealing, consciously lying, games, music, singing, and dancing.  (Yes, I’ve had to leave my ghetto-blaster and tap-shoes at the monastery gates).  One of the 8 precepts is to refrain from eating food between midday and dawn the next day, but because I’ve got a medical condition I’m exempt from this precept and can have an evening meal. 

Ordained Buddhist monastics have a code of discipline called the Patimoka, which is a list of the precepts.  The Patimoka lists 227 precepts for monks, and 311 for nuns.  It includes  precepts about how to eat, how to wash clothes, how to wash yourself, and how often to shave your head.  Here's a few:

• Should any bhikkhu [monk] have a blanket made of a mixture containing silk, it is to be forfeited and confessed.
• Should any bhikkhu knowingly deprive an animal of life, it is to be confessed.
• Should any bhikkhu try to frighten another bhikkhu, it is to be confessed. 

The first time I came to this monastery, I was completely bowled over by all these precepts.  ‘This is worse than the Catholic Church,’ I thought, ‘This is like a prison!  What are these people doing here when they could be free!’  I was in full reaction mode, reeling from a kind of culture shock.  Didn’t the Buddha encourage people to think for themselves?  How could I make sense of this?

As time went on, I came to see that for the monastics, these rules somehow offered a greater, not lesser, degree of freedom.  Not being able to handle money, grow vegetables, or cook food, allowed them to experience dependence, and interdependence, on the world, and also, practically, gave them time to devote themselves to their meditation practice. The precepts also encouraged mindfulness in everyday life - not just when meditating.

I don’t pretend to have any  in depth understanding of how following the precepts works for the monastics; what I actually realised was that it wasn’t really any of my business.  It worked for them – and they weren’t asking me to follow hundreds of precepts, just some fairly basic ones – so why worry about it?  I saw that I was following my path, and they were following theirs, and to just get on with it.

So, here I am, at my third visit to Santi Forest Monastery.  Just getting on with it...

(Actually, what I’m doing is avoiding meditation practice by writing a blog post.  Naughty, naughty.)