Silent Retreat – part 2

Well - here I am, alive and well and on a plane to Japan.
We’ve got about 10 hours of flight time left and I’m thinking about how exactly to write about my experience at the silent retreat.
Frankly, I’m having some difficulty.

Words are such wonderful little creatures, they truly are, but they don’t convey things perfectly.
They are signposts pointing towards a destination, but they are not the destination itself.
This makes them a bit wieldy when trying to describe something that is subtle and delicate.
It would be like trying to explain the geometric dimensions of a single blade of grass, or the exact weight of a single dandelion parachute in the wind.

Plus, on a more obvious level, trying to use words to describe the benefits of silence is, well, kinda funny. It’s like trying to start a fire using dirt and a gallon of spring water.

Anyways.

One thing I can speak to is just how easy it was to go without talking for days.
It was a bit abrupt at first, but I soon realized that all the words that come from our mouths start as thoughts in our head. It seems obvious, but when I got to actually see and think the words in my head, but not speak them, it became quite evident how unnecessary most of what we say is.  We speak impulsively, compulsively almost, but rarely is it consequential.

All day, every day, for 10 days, our schedule was the same:

430am - 630am    Meditation
630am – 8am       Breakfast/break
8am - 11am         Meditation
11am - 1pm         Lunch
1pm  -  5pm        Meditation
5pm – 6pm         Fruit/ tea break
6pm – 7pm         Meditation
7pm – 830pm     Discourse  (teacher discusses next days meditation exercise)
830pm – 9pm     Meditate
9pm – 430am      Sleep


After about 12 hours of this, I forgot I even had a cell phone, or an email account, or a car, or a wallet even. It was just me and my sweat pants and my t-shirt. That’s it.
If you’re thinking “wow, that sounds liberating”, you’d be right.
If you’re thinking “I wouldn’t be able to live without my phone  or  my email or  my car and especially without talking!” you’d be only partially right.

See, there is a part of you that identifies yourself with your phone, with your email, with your car, with your Ipod and laptop and lattes and career and relationships and your thoughts and your words and with your persona… and that part of you would NOT be able to live without those things-
But, strangely enough, if you take all those things away, you won’t die.
SO, who is left?
~

Unfortunately, to truly understand the answer to that question one needs to discover it for themselves, which is why I’m having trouble justifying recounting my experience at the retreat
…
I should have just written about Boner Camps.

: )

Sigh.

To keep it simple, I’ll say this:

Below all the chaos in you mind, there is peace.
Below all the clutter of your thoughts, there is space.
And below all the noise in your head, there is silence.

In that peace, in that space, and in that silence lies much more than I could have ever imagined.


Alright.
Gotta run...
A very pretty Korean stewardess is making her way up the aisle with my salmon teriyaki and chardonnay –  she doesn’t speak a lick of English, which will preclude us from speaking niceties to each other.

Thank god.


****keep an eye out in June for more blogging, from JAPAN!