Travel Diaries #16 - Retreat
Fed up with snowboarding, I joined a meditation retreat in Chiba as I continued my trip around Japan looking for peak experiences. Which opened up a whole other can of worms
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I was sitting in the large meditation hall, not in stiff-legged agony like before, but seated in relative peace on a small pile of cushions. I could feel subtle pins and needles and the sensation of electrical charges pulsing and swirling in my face and down through my torso, arms and legs. All the energy waves and electrons and so on that make up our bodies and everything in the universe at the sub-atomic level, and I can feel it vibrating as one sensation, or so I’d been led to believe. Completely present not just in space but also in the moment; for much of the last ten days my mind has been a steady drip of thoughts that had built up to a mental waterboarding, though now each thought was a steady and conscious drop of love that I could choose to create and send out into the world at will. It was a feeling of contentment, that everything had led me here to this moment, the concepts of fate and free will and physical cause and effect blurred and so emulsified as to effectively be the same thing, both the random journey of life and the fulfilment of one’s true purpose on Earth.
Sure wasn’t I only delighted with myself. Made up altogether, like the cat that got the cream. Life was good, and despite being so wonderfully present I now couldn’t wait to get back to the real world and travel around Japan, free as a bird. I felt like I’d earned it to be honest.
I think this is what is known as a ‘peak experience’. Though it was kind of boring as well. Not like the rush of throwing myself off a cliff on a snowboard – a relatively small cliff, and onto a soft landing of course – which was the reason I’d come to Japan. But I’d gotten bored with all that as well, so I turned to something where I might get some kicks from an altogether mundane activity, if you could even call it that: sitting down and doing nothing.
Never really one for dabbling, when something has caught my interest I’ve always tended to jump in at the deep end with an almighty binge – instead of going backpacking around South-East Asia for three months, I moved there for three years; instead of booking a ski holiday for a week to France or Japan or Canada, I just moved to those places for the whole winter. A terrible packer – which is by definition always an over-packer rather than one who travels under-equipped – I’d always found it easier just to pack everything I owned and move wholesale to a place, rather than deciding what to bring and what to leave, the ultimate FOMO. And now, instead of learning to meditate by practicing in a steady and progressive manner like the completely naïve beginner I was, I booked myself into a ten day retreat with ten hours of meditation per day, and a strict ban on talking. No point going half-arsed, I thought. Maybe I could move into the temple, or wherever the retreat was on. They’d provide all my meals, simple though they might be, but I don’t fuss over food anyway, and most importantly it’d reduce the amount of decisions I have to make in my life by a great deal.
Before I’d gone there I’d been apprehensive that one of the effects of so much meditation would be that I’d have some sort of psychedelic breakdown or epiphany where I’d completely lose control of my senses and actions – and a fear of what might be revealed from the depths of my unconscious mind in such a state. Obviously I didn’t really know what I was signed up for because I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen to people when they’re meditating, even when they meditate too much. I wasn’t signing up to be tortured by the CIA or anything.
I did kind of think the silence might suit me a bit, but I also feared that it might drive me a bit mad. But I’d also kind have been secretly hoping I might get some kind of high from the experience – and maybe a bit of madness was the price to pay to experience such highs. It did drive me a bit mad for a while, I suppose, as from what I can tell, the purpose of Vipassana is to facilitate mental and spiritual breakthroughs by putting its students in the conditions in which they might suffer a mental breakdown. Solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, punishments for talking, restriction of food. All we were missing was the waterboarding really, and the electro-shock therapy, and the neo-liberal economic and political ideologies.
What is the effect of all these rules? Psychological chaos. No attachments to normality or even the passing of days – the point of the practice is to free you from your worldly attachments. You’re put in a situation where you’ve no friends, no job, no conversations, no food, no music, no hobbies, no family – nothing. No culture, no language, no means of communication, no body language, no eye-contact. No little in-jokes you share with your friends or small-talk or turns of phrase you throw in when you’re doing the shopping to let the other person know that you belong where you are, that you pose no threat, that you are normal. No news to discuss, no routines to mark the passing of time, no way of telling what day it is. No external markers of your identity whatsoever, not the ones you’d miss nor the ones you didn’t even realise you relied on so much. You have nothing but you. It’s a way of throwing your idea of yourself to the wind and letting you judge yourself.
So maybe it was like being tortured by the CIA. I once read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, which details the tactics of interrogation and brainwashing used by secret services to manipulate people’s consciousness into believing or agreeing with whatever ideology they’re trying to impose, usually free market neo-liberalism or some kind of right-wing fascism, and usually on an entire country following a secret service-backed coup. Once the mind is broken down, the perpetrator of political wrong-think is then in a state where they can be built back up again in whatever way the authorities see fit.
This process of learning how to reprogramme yourself into a state of acceptance is at times downright painful – the course teacher casually describes it as though you’re performing personal ‘brain surgery’ in the nightly lectures – and it can get as messy as physical brain surgery at times. It got easier as the days passed at the pace of a funeral procession, and to be honest I was relieved to learn on the final day that my fellow students had their difficulties as well, with some admitting to going to some dark places on their journey of transformational change.
Of course, the practice of meditation is that your supposed to treat both mental depths and mental peaks with the same detached equanimity. You just observe reality as it is, not as you’d like it to be or fear it might become. And so I shouldn’t have been getting so carried away with my blissful state on the final day than on the trickier days that preceded it. Maybe that was the lesson I was to take away from the experience.
On the final day, communication with your fellow student is restored, the whole process comes full circle, and all of the difficulties of the practice disappear dramatically. The hard work pays off and your sanity is restored to you, as if part of it were inextricably held with the social bonds you share with loved ones and strangers alike. Or something like that anyway.
I got chatting at one point to a Japanese lad about my age who told me that he’d done similar courses in a dozen different countries, the longest one being 30 days, towards the end of which he’d become bed-ridden due to the physical effects of his meditation practice, his body consumed by whatever was going on his head. Though this didn’t stop him from looking forward to doing a 45 day silent retreat later in the year, the mad fucker.
One profound thing I’d learned throughout the course was the relationship between mind and body, which was often curiously direct. In conducting intensive body-scanning meditation, I learned that certain repeated thoughts would be triggered by – or trigger – stiffness, aches, pains or other sensations in specific parts of my body. The body could be used to relax the mind, or increasing relaxation of the mind would relax the body.
This lad must have been doing some serious heavy lifting of the mind to have not been able to even get out of bed. Or so I assumed at the time, given that my experience had been one rooted in this reality, with thoughts of myself and home and people I knew and the world at large. Maybe this guy had been so expert at the meditation technique that his consciousness was leaving this earthly plane to go to other dimensions, leaving his seemingly paralysed corporeal form to be tended to in bed for a few days by a harem of spiritual nurses, that I hadn’t been told about because I was only a noob to the world, an amateur here on a passing visit.
Maybe their existence was only communicated to your mind ascended to the fifth dimension, or the eighth, and while you were here stuck here on this mortal coil, with human trivialities running around your head like a Loony Tunes cartoon, you couldn’t access the divine communication from above. Or maybe he was a homeless mendicant, and just went from centre to centre doing retreats, never being able to communicate or form relationships with any one person or place, but being able to live rent and bill-free, on a healthy if sparse vegan diet that was adequate for his diminutive frame. His energy needs would be far less when he’s living in the godly realm in any case, only needing three weeks of food while he spent the last week of the course in a state of Buddha-like contentment and bliss, with no caloric requirements required from rice or chicken or those egg sandwiches and delicious cream and custard eclairs you get at Lawson’s, like I did. Maybe this lad had it all bloody-well sussed.
I left the meditation centre in high spirits, having made it through my ten days of brain surgery and found myself having all the sense of wonder and awe I’d been looking for. I smoked two cigarettes that I found in a pack in my bag back in the hostel, and nearly threw up. More figuratively than literally – they left a bad taste in my mouth anyway. Vipassana is good for addictions, we’d been told, all suffering being caused by cravings and aversions to things. Maybe all my vices would just melt away and now I’d never want anything ever again.
Even though I’d gone looking for this oneness with the universe from the highs of life – adrenaline rushes on top of mountains – I’d found it in the opposite: good old-fashioned down-to-earth graft. Maybe I’d been craving peak experiences a bit too much and needed to accept the depths of life – or god forbid, the boring bits – for what they were. Just accepting that sometimes you have to sit there and do nothing. It turned out you could have all of this from the most mundane experience in the world – just sitting there.
Not just the self-observation, but the practical aspect of the retreat – the ban on communication – made me realise so many things, such as the importance of connections with friends, but also of friendliness with strangers, compassion for those around you, the power that showing interest in others can have on your own mental health, and any other number of things. Humans are social creatures, and this was starkly shown by putting us all in a mental prison with one another, and then forbidding the usual social interaction that we so take for granted we don’t even notice it.
Things were looking good, and I was in good form. I was staying in a hostel run by an incredibly hospitable fella named Hide (Hee-day), who had already picked me up and dropped me off from enough train stations and meditation centres for me to book a week at his hostel. He rented me a surfboard and a wetsuit and I took to the waters on the nearby beach. Japanese wetsuits are the best, he reckons. Surfing tests one’s patience to a far greater degree than snowboarding, whose chairlifts and use of gravity are tools of instant gratification.
I was content bobbing in the waves, as I considered how I’d spend my last couple of weeks in Japan, newly enlightened. I wanted to travel, I wanted to see all the Japanese things, I wanted to meet people, I wanted to write. When I got out of the water I just popped my surfboard on the homemade rack that hung from the right hand side of the Dutch-style bike, and pedalled home through paddy fields at a leisurely pace.
I was free to travel wherever I pleased, yet another open-ended road trip. The hero in my own real-life game. The ban on talking – the source of so many struggles and the facilitator of CIA-like interrogation by one’s own demons, the psychological waterboarding – had been lifted. I could go anywhere, and talk to whoever I wanted.
I just had one problem – I didn’t have anyone to talk to.
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