Marching into Retreat: Called to Ten Days of Silence

By the time you read this, I will be launching myself on a new adventure. Not a Lucy-and-Ethel one like traveling across country on the spur of the moment to save aging pets who are not mine; this adventure ranks as the most difficult thing I have ever done. I'm leaving Wednesday for a ten day meditation retreat at the California Vipassana Center. This is a silent retreat: no talking, no eye contact, no reading, no writing. No dinner! Nothing to do but focus on the breath and sit with the contents of my mind for ten (long) days. 


[If you're interested, check out the Introduction to the Technique which explains it all: http://www.dhamma.org/en/code.shtml].


"But why are you doing this to yourself?" demanded the oldest member of my writing class. She's managed her 84 years by telling herself what's past is past and moving on. "You're the happiest person I've ever met!"


I thought I was the happiest person I'd ever met too. Then I started meditation. At the start, meditation was very calming, very relaxing. But as Chogyam Trungpa writes in "The Myth of Freedom": "Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquillity, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes. ... Meditation practice brings our neuroses to the surface rather than hiding them at the bottom of our minds."


My "neuroses" didn't surface right away, they were far too well buried to get stirred up during a weekly thirty minute sit. They needed time. They got time on my first three day retreat a year and a half ago. And suddenly happy, helpful Alison discovered she was not nearly so happy or helpful - or so good - as she thought she was. After enduring several months of wrenching insights, I took myself to a therapist. I am English enough that that admission makes me squirm. In England, it is still considered a sign of weakness to seek psychological help. I suppose if it were as acceptable as it is here in the States, therapists would be overrun with people my age finally getting to grips with their boarding school baggage. Back in the '60's, sending your child to boarding school was a source of pride, a mark of success: who knew it would leave such scars?


Up until five years ago, I swore I loved boarding school. After all, there were midnight feasts and masses of friends and didn't we learn to be independent? And then I sat on a plane and my seat mate turned out to be a soul mate; we plunged deep into Alzheimers and life and love and death on a ten hour flight from L.A. to London. I never did find out her name. But somewhere over Iceland she said, "I've never met anyone who went to boarding school who didn't suffer from abandonment issues." I scoffed. "Not me!"


Years later I sat on my cushion and discovered: yes, me. I started to unpack the shadow bag that Robert Bly talks about, the one with all the stuff you can't bear to think about, the one that's two miles long by the time you're twenty. So why dig into this mess at all? Because it is affecting me in the present. I see how old patterns and triggers from when I was so very young are still setting me off at 56. Sometimes I feel as though I am at that point in the epic journey (or the reality TV show) where the hero is crushed, tearful, not sure what will happen next. But too late to back out now. Since the process, once started, seems to go on whether or not I actively participate, I thought it best to meet it head on. Hence the retreat.

Farnborough Hill, my old Catholic convent boarding school, continues to crop up. I found this passage in a book online, called "Recollections of the Empress Eugénie" by Augustin Filon (written around 1873, book published in 1920). Reading it, I thought gosh, the place made the heart sink even when it was fairly new.

Farnborough Hill in 1881

"The Empress has invested the residence, both inside and outside, with her own personality and one can best describe Farnborough Hill as a mansion in mourning. A mist rises from the woods and envelopes the landscape in a veil which never disappears even in the brightest days of summer. The mansion stands on a hill, bordered by tall trees, and dominates the melancholy country which it overlooks. The stranger who approaches it must, I imagine, surely feel that Farnborough shelters a great life, which has been sorely wounded by the terrible blows of Fate and is here slowly awaiting the end. 


When one first enters the house the vague melancholy of the exterior defines itself as one wanders down the deserted, dimly-lit galleries where every sound of foot-falls and of voices acquires a peculiar emphasis. The walls are hung with innumerable works of art which recall a great artist or some cherished memory. The house constitutes an incomparable record of history, and in the evening, when a single ray of electric light leaves the spectator in shadow and sheds its white radiance over pictures and statues, a vanished world springs again into life, peopled with those once well-known figures who are the real inhabitants of the dwelling, and when the Empress passes in the midst of them one is almost tempted to believe that she, too, is a shadow of the Past." 


I hauled out the suitcase of my old letters home again, looking for a record of certain pivotal moments. It was disturbing to go through bundles of letters, the weight of all those words shoring up the little self while saying nothing important at all. The beginnings of it there at age eleven, a weekly scaffold, an edifice of unreality. Everything that mattered left unsaid, lost in the spaces, the blanks on the page. Everything unpleasant put out of mind. If I don't write it, it never happened. Those times when Sue wouldn't talk to me? They got a line: "Sue and I had a bit of a quarrel, I don't know what it was about, but it's over now, thank goodness." That was as much as I ever shared. 


Here's a nun story that blows most other nun stories out of the water: 
The nuns had devised a special last resort punishment for talking after lights out. The talkers were roused from their beds into dressing gowns and slippers. They were sent down the massive staircase, normally off-limits, to the Lower Gallery. Antique high backed chairs with faded brocade seats were spaced the length of the Gallery. There the chastened talkers sat, feet dangling in fuzzy slippers, until they were allowed to return to bed.

The Staircase

I was terrified at the idea of this punishment. We all were. So of course one night it happened to me. Big deal, you say. A time-out downstairs? Where's the hardship? Well, let me tell you about the Lower Gallery in that "mansion in mourning." I was placed on the chair at the foot of the stairs. Directly in front of me were three steps down to the forbidding front door, a huge wooden affair, with bolts and iron bits, like the entrance to a dungeon. To the left the Lower Gallery extended to the Refectory. Floor to ceiling windows ran along the left side wall, moonlight playing on a huge tapestry embroidered by the Empress Eugenie herself. She died before she could finish it and rumor had it that on the anniversary of her death she would add another stitch.

The Statue

Since no-one knew exactly when she died, the Lower Gallery was a place of fear after dark. Fear that escalated to heart-stopping dread if I turned my head to the right and caught a glimpse of Jesus in the wall of mirrors. The library door was concealed in the mirrors. In front of them was a tall statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus - the one where he's holding his robe open to reveal his red heart. A votive candle perpetually burned at his feet and lit up his face eerily from below. And then all those mirrors reflecting the length of the corridor, the windows and the moonlight flooding the tapestry. Not to mention my own little white face and sad sack shapes of my fellow sinners. I didn't dare turn my head right or left. Straight ahead was the dungeon door. The very worst thing was behind me. Under the stairs was a sizable space. I glanced back to check it out. And saw ghostly, empty - wheelchairs! I sat barely breathing, clutching my stuffed dog Basil, until we were told we could climb the stairs and go back to bed. It was a punishment that worked. I never got caught again. Was it mentioned in my letters home? Of course not. 

The 11 year old in me loves this story. I relish it. It's so awful! I have told it so many times, though, I'm just playing with the words. The original terror has long mutated to anecdote - until in the course of sitting with it, a deeper understanding arose of what that story meant. It illustrates how profoundly unsafe were the adults charged with our care. At least that was my perception and it had enormous repercussions later in my life. 

I focused on Sue's "silent treatment" in my last blog as an example of my poor suffering little girl. I remember trailing Sue, walking three steps behind like a subservient wife, head bowed, between jeering schoolgirls, "There goes Sue's shadow, Sue's puppet...." I could no more have not followed her than flown to the moon. She was all I had and sooner or later she would talk to me again. If I could have pasted myself to her side, I would have. There was no such thing as too much togetherness, as far as I was concerned.

The school today - virtually unchanged!

But there was more to it, I found out sitting on my cushion. I had stopped short, focusing on my own mistreatment. Dwelt quite lovingly on it. I had never widened the lens to consider what happened to Sue. Because in the end, for all that I was so hurt, I was the one who abandoned her. In June of that first year, a girl found me as I lay crying in the long grass in the field in front of the school. A strong confident girl, one of those people who is a queen bee, a natural leader, a charismatic forcefield. She sat beside me and declared, "This can't go on. Sue keeps making you cry. You be my best friend. I won't make you cry." And as easily as that, I turned my back on the greatest friend I had ever had. The next two years, while I was securely under the wing of my powerful new best friend, Sue was experiencing what she calls now her "Lost Years." It was during this time that her mother died. She was never even told her mother was ill. I wanted to reach out to her and learned how thoroughly the door shuts when a friendship is over. 


Do I look at all this to torture myself with the past? Of course not. I look because unraveling the threads helps me understand that when I cling now it is because I am afraid I will be cast aside. When I seek protection from someone more powerful than I, it is because I am afraid I will be cast aside. Even sometimes when I crack my big smile and leap to be first to help, to please, it is because I want to be so darn winning and lovable how could anyone cast me aside? And who is this one who is so afraid she will be cast aside? The 11 year old! Well, for heaven's sake. A child is running the asylum.


And that is why I am taking the child by the hand on this cold, silent, extreme retreat. It is my choice, after all. We will face down our demons together. We will stare down abandonment and attachment and the fear of loneliness and not good enough. We will look at parents doing the best they could. We will look at nuns doing the best they could. We will look at children struggling to survive the best they could. Hopefully we will forgive us all.


I am actually looking forward to it. I am good at following rules. Six years of boarding school made me very obedient. I like structure and schedules. I did want to be a Carmelite nun once upon a time. I like the idea that ten days of following Mr Goenka's precise directions will result in transformation. I imagine it will mean growing up at last. I have no idea what that might look like and try not to think about it.  I don't want to set expectations. 


Besides, it is challenging enough just as it is. Just the drive: five and a half hours north, up near Yosemite National Park, by myself. Just finding this place: no helpful GPS Lady in my old Prius! But the earlier cross-country marathon paved the way for this experience.
Persistent questions: Will I be lucky enough to have a single room? Or will I be sharing with others? What will they be like? Will I be warm enough? Will it rain? The thin voice of anxiety threads through my day, whispering, can I do this? Can I sit from 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.? Eleven hours of meditation every day. No chance to do my beloved yoga. No dinner! Only fruit juice. And all that silence. Crumbs.

I am loaded with talismans for the journey. I have a sleeping bag from one friend, a warm coat like a blanket from another. I have my daughter's locket and Snuffy's dog tag around my neck. My Dad's watch; rings from my mother and my sister. My husband's socks and long winter underwear. And the curiously comforting words of my teacher, Victor, tucked in the back of my mind. "If you go mad, have them call us and we'll come and get you."