Monday, September 29, 2008
My Weekend With Buddha
OK, enough of the politics for a bit. Let's try a less controversial topic... religion!
Weekend before last, I went on my first Buddhist meditation retreat. I have to say I really wasn't looking forward to it. Like everybody, I regard my weekends as precious so I didn't much like the idea of sacrificing one. But it was something I felt I had to do to earn 'street cred' with my local Buddhist community. So I approached the thing like a trip to the dentist: as a duty, as something unpleasant that was good for me that I would just have to endure.
I'm pleased to report that I was totally wrong.
From the moment I stepped across the threshold of the retreat centre, I could tell it was going to be a great experience. There was just a vibe, a sort of serene excitement (if that makes any sense) that filled the air.
It was a non-residential retreat, meaning that you got to go home at night. The retreat was led by Sharda Rogell from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. She's a very good teacher and meditation leader. She was sensitive to the fact that there were many beginners in the room, so she broke up the sessions into digestible chunks.
The routine for the two days was a cycle of activities broken into roughly half-hour chunks: sitting meditation, walking meditation, dharma talks, discussions and interactive exercises.
Sitting meditation can be very mentally painful because you are constantly battling the contending forces of overactive thoughts and sleepiness. Yet I was amazed how much progress I made even after one day and, by the second day, I actually found myself looking forward to the sitting sessions.
When it came to the dharma talks, Sharda initially showed a great talent for explaining complex Buddhist concepts in simple, practical terms. Unfortunately, she eventually fell prey to that sickness that seems to afflict most Buddhist teachers: excessive use of Pali, the dead language in which the Buddhist scriptures were written. It frankly pisses me off when people put on airs by using an obscure foreign word to describe a concept that could just as easily be expressed in plain English. For example, many of the talks focused on the nature of "dukkha" which means suffering - and that's all it means; there is no other nuance to the word, so why not just say "suffering"? I found this to be a distraction but I got over it.
Another flaw in Sharda's approach is that she's a big-time feminist and continually injects that agenda into dharma discussions. I found that uncomfortable and frankly inappropriate. As it is, North American Buddhism attracts more females than males by a 3-to-1 margin, so statements like "we need to emphasize the feminine aspect more in our spirtuality" are kind of goofy in that context, if you ask me.
Another distraction was that many retreatants seemed to have, um, emotional issues of one sort or another: recently divorced, struggling with past abuse issues, dealing with death, illness or loss of some sort. These people were using the retreat as an alternative to therapy, which is perfectly fine except it wasn't what I'd signed up for. I've heard that some retreats stream fucked-up and non-fucked-up retreatants into different sessions; I can definitely see the value of such a practice. I was interested in focusing on mental discipline and discussing Buddist concepts, but it was hard to do that when the Q&A sessions were continually dominated by people blubbering about their troubles. (As you can see, my compassion still needs some work.)
But all of these are really minor quibbles. All in all, it was a tremendous experience. I came out of it feeling almost supernaturally cleansed and strengthened. Where I had previously dreaded the idea of a retreat, I'm now eagerly looking forward to doing it at least once or twice a year.
So I highly recommend it.
posted by Mentok @ 11:12 a.m.,
1 Comments:
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At 1:57 p.m.,
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