At a time when more and more of us are ever more hostage to our beeping phones and our blinking machines--our agendas, in short, and the chatter and clutter of the world--a monastery represents a new kind of liberation. It fills up the spaces that information can't touch, and it speak to those parts of us that feel we cannot engage with the surfaces of the world until we have built a solid foundation from which to put those surfaces in place.
-Pico Iyer
As I carried my luggage from the parking lot into the monastery turned Garrison Institute in Garrison, New York, and then up to my second floor shared room, I was deeply reminded of the writing and speaking of Pico Iyer.
Though admittedly a bit of a fan, what I have appreciated most about this British-born Indian man who now primarily lives in Japan and made his early career off of international travel writing, is his ability to so beautifully articulate our periodic need to go inward.
On his website, picoiyerjourneys.com, he even has two different side-by-side tabs titled "outerworld" and "innerworld" right next to his "welcome," which to me demonstrates the equal value he places on both.
I share this need to go inward as well.
And I also have some people in my life, as Pico Iyer has also written about, who don't entirely "get" why an ordinary suburban working mom like me would voluntarily go into silence to spend 8 days in a non-air conditioned old monastery without access to electronics, and then spend her long days engaging in various contemplative practices from 6 in the morning until 9:30 at night.
(I even had some people offer a judgey kind of response to this retreat, sending a little mom-shame in my direction because I would not be taking my 5 year-old daughter and 10 year-old son along for the ride.)
But mostly it is more of what Mr. Iyer wrote in a 2006 article titled "The Secret Journey," about his decision to retreat to a Catholic monastery on the California coastline a few times a year:
My friends, a little concerned about my defection--how could I be turning my back on them, and on the smiling self who's telling them wild stories of North Korea and Tibet and Bolivia?--find ways to tidy up my betrayal, and say (I'm sure), 'He's gone off to find himself. He needs time to rest. He travels so much, the poor thing is in desperate need of peace and quiet. He's just taking a break...He just needs to unplug...'
What I don't tell them is that I don't go there just to catch my breath, to be away from the phone, to breathe in one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the world. I go there to become another self, the self that we all are if only we choose to unpack ourselves and leave ourselves at home.
Yes.
Though not an experienced practitioner of contemplative retreats by any means, and yet having done a few, there is deep resonance in that last line in particular: I go there to become another self, the self that we all are if only we choose to unpack ourselves and leave ourselves at home.
Specifically in this last retreat, which was my first with Lama Surya Das who is a Western Buddhist teacher and writer of the Tibetan lineage, I absolutely did peel away multiple layers of self (or ego) over the course of the 8 days; or perhaps I should say, multiple layers of self were peeled away from me?
(More on that later though...)
For now, I'll just say, as I was arriving on that first day of a retreat titled: "The Natural Great Awakening: Dzogchen Center's Summer Meditation Retreat," I fairly immediately began to allow all those outer labels, that efficiently and objectively describe "me" but for certain do not define Me, to fall away which for some, including myself, can feel like a form of liberation.
Or as Mr. Iyer wrote in the same 2006 article:
I won't necessarily call this a pilgrimage, because, as [Thomas] Merton says, I'm not off to find myself; only to lose it.
I'm not off in search of anything; only--the words soon become fanciful--in pursuit of the state that is beyond searching, of being found...
You could say it's not a pilgrimage, because there's no movement involved after I step out of my car...But all the movements and journeys I have taken around the world are underwritten, at heart, by this: this is who I am when nobody is looking. This is who I'm not, because the petty, struggling, ambitious 'I' is gone. I am as still, as timeless as the plate of sea below me.
And it is all metaphor of course.
So even as I sit here writing, finding words to describe something probably not meant to be written about, and I prepare to move into the rest of my very day-to-day routines of commuting to work, seeing clients, bathing children, watering vegetables, and making lunches, I try to allow that "who I am when nobody is looking" to come forward and perhaps be with me, at least a little, as I move through my day.
Perhaps you can too.
May it be so.
