By Susan Tarshis
It was intended to be peaceful. Like so many people who go on retreats of one stripe or another, I was longing for peace, space, somewhere to settle my mind away from the everyday world. In November of 2022, I experienced a blow to my soul and started a journey that took some time to ripen and reveal how much pain there was. You’d think this was a break-up, a death, and in a way, I suppose it was. It sounds pretty mundane, I had to deal with a grossly misbehaving staff at the little school I run, I had another teacher who could not run from their long COVID symptoms. One by one, the pillars of the program dropped away, the students grumbled in discontent, some with real rage at our historical and present failures, and then, the painful reckoning. . .put it down, wind it up, move along. What did that mean about me? What did failure to continue this legacy mean for the community? What did I need?
The first thing I knew I needed was to stop and do nothing, or at least carve out time in the persistent hell-scape of responsibility to stop and do nothing for a half hour here or there. Mindfulness, something I had trained in a long time ago, was calling me back and I started to look for places to practice that. I knew I needed a practice and a community. I needed somewhere to sit with my pain and disappointment and see what else was there. I needed to finally deal with this suffering and all the suffering it was built on. I got a lot more than I was expecting.
The first lesson I realized I had missed in my previous sterile-ish training in “medicalized Mindfulness” was that mindfulness was not the end, it was a means. You have to be mindful of something, mostly the body and the body in the environment and the breath and the feelings and the chit chatter of the mind. Once mindful, then what? What do I do with this body that has a constriction in the breath I can’t name, that is hiding in plain sight? Once I started to ask that question, what is here? I couldn’t stop. My off and on practice became an “on” practice and then things started to get real.
My sitting and noticing and longing for that unnamed thing led me to France, about an hour’s train ride outside of Bordeaux at the Lower Hamlet of the Plum Village Monastery, in the dead heat of summer, for a week of retreat in that tradition. Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh (who passed away in the winter of 2022) founded this place in the wake of his exile from Vietnam for his peace activism around the “American War” (which is what the Vietnamese call it). His particular communication of Buddhism was where I couldn’t resist but land. There is so much joy in it. There are ways to understand purpose, relating, living ethically and along with all of that, it’s bloody hard.
5am wake up, sitting meditation for 30 minutes, a reading for 15 more, 20 minutes of physical activity, breakfast in silence, 1.5 hours of a talk on a particular aspect of practical ethics, or dealing with people, or our own death, then walking mediation, then lunch in silence, then relaxation (guided or on your own) then sharing, then dinner. . .in silence, then an evening meditation and bed at 9:30. It was a joy to follow that schedule and a physical trial. It was 39 degrees some days. Everything was slow, everything should be slow, but the pain of slowing was so evident in my body. It did not like that, although it knew that was the only way. All my habits of mind, the habits of body, the slouching, the struggle to sit “properly” the striving, the adapting, this stuff was no longer in the undertone of my awareness. It was all my awareness. And then briefly, every once and a while, I could balance all my bones just so and things would relax as they were meant to (should? Needed to? Who knows?). I felt the peace in my body of that moment. There was no striving or effort-fulness. There was just my body that belonged in the world. In the words of a Zen Master, I was touching the Ultimate. You know what? There is a lot of space in there.
Have I lost you? Is it a cult? Well, there was lots of protein and no one yelled at me when I didn’t make it to any part of the program. No one asked me for my life savings. No one told me I had to drop any previous tradition, or only associate with the Plum Village people. They were more interested in my state of practice, how I was inhabiting my body most of all. Where does the body lead? The mind is so tricky. The body tells the truth. This wisdom is present in my work as a therapist too, everything seamlessly sense making.
I came home exhausted, aching. Physically, I do not feel better, but in my heart, I have moments of freedom and peace that are pointing where I go next. In noticing my body every day all the time, paying attention to it, giving it space to speak, I’m finding out quite a bit. I always knew I loved my work, but I am now sure that my work as a therapist and teacher is truly my joy and I have ideas about what I will do next after this last year of teaching in my soon to be closed entirely little school. The idea that therapist is a calling has solidified and I no longer feel silly about saying it. I won’t be a nun, but I sure will be a therapist and sit in the joy of that. My body is aging and I can’t escape that. I will enjoy every moment of its continued existence and not yell at it internally if it aches and can’t ever do a “real” push-up. I will listen to what it says about what I need and continue to decipher its cryptic messages. I have committed to moving towards what is here and not away. It’s getting easier and easier to moderate my content consumption to the basic and necessary and to notice when I’m hiding in consumption.
I’m so grateful for the experience of the suffering that led to the seeking that led me here back home in my body. This is a notion that is all over many styles of Buddhist teaching but I’m not cribbing from any of that right now. It’s just evident. It’s what happened.
Will I do this again? For sure. Things I will change? I will bring a little rechargeable fan for the stinking hot sleeps and and sugar for my instant coffee. But otherwise, I have everything I need to be happy, right here in this present moment, and I’m grateful for taking the time to see this so clearly.
Susan, I will hold (lightly) your image of balancing all your bones as a that-would-be-nice-to-achieve beacon in my current mindfulness practice.