“You’re going to be quiet for two whole days?” My sister says to me, her careful placement of emphasis making clear that the concept of silence is not what she’s in disbelief of, but rather that it is me who will attempt it. I feign offense.
Signing up for a two-day silent meditation retreat in northern Thailand seemed like an excellent decision back when I made it, so many weeks ago that I now can’t remember even where I was at the time. But as we climb into a Tuk Tuk on the edge of Chiang Mai’s ‘Old City’ and ask the driver to take us to Wat Suan Dok, I feel nothing of the optimism I am sure was there at that time.
“I’m not actually looking forward to this,” I say to David as I squint against the dust kicked up by passing cars. This is an unfortunate sentiment, I know, seeing as the idea to forgo an unscripted evening of good food and potentially live music and decent wine was entirely my own. It occurs to me just how conditioned I’ve become to a state of limitless freedom. For well over 100 days I’ve done precisely what I want with the majority of them, and to surrender myself to a regulated meditation schedule and maybe (I’m not sure) ‘group activity,’ instills in me a feeling akin to claustrophobia. How I’ll ever fit back into the workplace is a question I can’t even bring myself to consider.
Soon I’m seated in the main office of the “Monk Chat” Buddhist educational program at Wat Suan Dok. Surrounded by two dozen westerners, we smile politely and make small talk as we patiently await the distribution of our all-white attire. I overhear a young man speak of San Francisco in a context that suggests he lives there. Another woman is talking about Chicago. None of this should surprise me. Did I think I was the only American in Thailand who totes a curiosity about Buddhism and meditation? No, of course not. But yes.
Like cargo we load into the back of a truck where I sit beside a pair of older women – Irish twins who have just arrived to Thailand via Laos. Also in the truck is a New Zealander who doesn’t stop talking the entire drive, his stories so laden with profanity that the Irish twin to my left asks him to please watch his mouth. She shakes her head disapprovingly at her sister.
45 minutes later we arrive at the retreat center, a relatively small outfit made up of a long, one-story U-shaped building with a blue tin roof. Tucked between small farms, the air carries a silence and a clarity both in temperature and air quality. We’re assigned rooms – men with men, women with women, and I apologize to David about this, as if it’s a detail I should have foreseen. David bunks with a greying Spaniard named Victor, whose snoring I later hear through the wall that separates us. I’m with a woman named Mekayla, from Boulder. She does not snore.
The monk, wrapped in a robe the color of a Halloween pumpkin, is seated on a red-carpeted meditation pillow atop a broad platform. He gives a brief introduction, during which his unease is palpable. He remindinds me of an especially under-socialized computer engineer, and I want to tell him that we all admire him – he needn’t worry what we think – except I suspect this is not the problem. The opinions of others are probably not high on a monk’s list of concerns.
In anticipation of future misunderstandings, he asks us to raise our hand if ever we can’t decipher his English. He will gladly repeat himself. The Irish twin raises hers right away.
“I can’t understand you,” she says plainly, and I find myself hating her a little bit. This is very un-Buddhist of me, I know.
An awkward silence ensues and I imagine the monk is grappling with the same thing we all are: what is he to do about a woman who cannot understand anything he’s saying. But, fortunate for the Irish twin, his words are few and far between. After the introduction, the only words the monk utters are as guidance through a walking meditation. Looking like mental patients in our one-size-fits-all white linen pants and t-shirts we stand in imperfect formation and move our feet in obedience with his words.
“Lift-ing. Move-ing. Drop-ping. Touch-ing.” At a snail’s pace we make our way several yards across the tile floor, which is a robin’s egg blue, before “Turn-ing, Turn-ing, Turn-ing” and starting back the other direction. I try to focus on the movements. I try to study the way the warm smooth tiles feel on my heels and the balls of my feet and my big toe. This works for a few moments, but then my mind flies away. I’m searching for what it is the monk’s voice reminds me of.
We’re again seated in silence. My hands are nested in my lap as we’ve been instructed: Thumbs touching and palms open as if about to receive a very small animal. The room is freezing; we’ve all swaddled ourselves in thin white shawls, the monk also – though his is the color of a marigold. I wonder: since it’s chilly enough outdoors that I saw my breath earlier, why are all of the windows open? This is a question my mind revisits often over the upcoming thirty minutes of meditation.
The monks call it “monkey mind,” when a meditation practitioner struggles to maintain a focused concentration. My mind, I decide, looks like the footprints of a kitten whose just chased a mouse across a white kitchen floor. I think about the bird chirping outside – it’s after dark. I think about people back home. I play out entire series of dialogue in my mind. I think about what on earth to eat for dinner the following night, our last in Chiang Mai. I think that this meditation retreat is perhaps a waste of time. I think, with great satisfaction, that the monk’s voice reminds me of a clarinet.
Thai monks don’t eat dinner, I learn, but for us they serve a crowd-pleasing trough of Pad Thai. I sit watching my noodles cool while everyone serves themselves, meanwhile promising myself I’ll bring up the rear at breakfast the next morning. When the last of us has seated himself, the monk leads us in a several-verse chant bent on reminding us why we eat. “Not for pleasure…Not to produce the feeling of over-eating…” I will say this: when you acknowledge the purpose of food before consuming your first bite, it really does cause you to think twice before serving up seconds.
We are a dime a dozen in Chiang Mai.
This becomes apparent over dinner, as we all quietly chat with one another (I do note that the Irish twins are seated across the room from the New Zealander). In some circles my travel resume widens eyes and lifts brows but not here. Before I’ve even gotten out the words ‘three and a half months,’ Jen, a San Franciscan with short-cropped blonde hair interrupts me to explain that she’s been traveling since March. A quick check at my mental calendar has me widening my own eyes while I simultaneously stifle my ego.
Would you believe there is a competitiveness to travel? It’s times like this where I feel like I’m at a work-related event except instead of reciting Fortune 500 companies for whom I’ve managed advertising campaigns, I’m quoting countries.
Back in the meditation room, I contemplate this. My monkey mind does back flips.
At 9:30 our day concludes and we all shiver beneath a blue metal roof sipping tea and munching jelly-filled cookies. Mekayla and I shut the place down, me feeling grateful that the retreat wasn’t as sternly silent as I’d thought – she made for excellent conversation.
At five the next morning a bell rings outside of our door. We’d been warned that its ringer will not move on until the light in our room has turned on. Blessedly, Mekayla flips the switch and I roll over with my arm over my eyes, not to stir again until I hear her close the door behind her as she hurries off to the 5:30 meditation. I spring from bed, tighten the string around my white linen pants and sprint behind her.
We begin the meditation seated, but are given permission to finish out the remainder of the hour as we please. I walk to the back of the room and lay down beside David who is one step ahead of me in the selection of the ‘lie down’ meditation position. In no time I’ve dropped solidly into a dream; David discreetly shakes me awake when I begin to softly snore. Morning meditation, I decide, is not my ‘thing.’
After breakfast the titular event commences. We sit in half-circle facing the monk and ask him questions – none too big or too small – about Buddhism, monk-hood and, of course, meditation. All of my burning queries are answered with efficient, though friendly, matter-of-factness.
Q: To what degree are monks involved in politics?
A: They aren’t at all. They aren’t even allowed to vote.
Q: What was the most difficult thing for you to give up when you became a monk?
A: Dinner.
Q: How do you know when you’ve had a successful meditation?
A: You feel an inner happiness for no obvious reason.
We end the retreat with a doozy of a meditation. One and a half hours straight, no clarinet-tinged voice guiding us through footsteps. I’d picked up a strand of meditation beads from the donation-based concession stand and am eager to see if they help.
Low and behold, they do.
One by one I count the 108 round wooden beads in coordination with my breaths, working my way several times around the strand while I descend into a trance-like state so deep and sincere and focused that I am genuinely startled when the the monk rings his bell at the end of the hour and a half. I don’t think about food or friends or multi-layered streams of dialogue. I don’t review my to-do list. I don’t think about that old colleague who still to this day heats my cheeks in anger. I don’t write a blog post or an email in my mind. I just breath. And I count. And I bask in the simplicity of it.
In the back of another Tuk Tuk, tracing in reverse the streets between Wat Suan Dok and ‘the Old City,’ I feel a rush of happiness and wonder if it is the kind the monk talked about. Is this due to having had a successful meditation? Or is it attributed to the open-ended evening ahead of me? The run I am already mentally preparing for and dinner with a glass of red wine?
I’m going to go with the meditation.
Somewhere Seeking 