Last April, I spent two weeks in a Buddhist
monastery located East of Bordeaux for a mindfulness retreat. I wanted to share
this experience with you but time has flown and I focused on other stuffs.
However a retreat at Plum Village (that’s the name of the monastery) is a human
and spiritual experience, so enlightening that it would be a shame not to talk
about it.
Let’s start with my motivations because,
out of some Asian colleagues who regularly leave on meditation retreats, many
others were surprised by my wish to go. Simply I wanted to learn to meditate in
mindfulness and the perspective to be isolated from the outside world during
two weeks was a great part of my motivations too. I had first investigated the
catholic monastery/convents but most of the retreats were thematic week-ends
and nothing really had caught my eye.
Life in Plum Village is slow but follows a
certain discipline: get up at 5am, meditation till 7am, soft exercise till 7:45
then breakfast; after breakfast, « the joys of housekeeping », community
work (housekeeping, planting, gardening…) and meditative walk before lunch; in
the afternoon, spiritual activities (teachings, Dharma sharing…) until the
dinner at 6pm; at night, before the start of “Noble Silence” at 9pm, meditation
or free time. We generally had dinner in silence and food was consumed in
mindfulness, it means with a constant thoughtful awareness of the forces which
have driven this food to be produced, transformed then ingested and tasted and
savored by us. By the way, each and every one of our actions, even the most
simple (walking) or intuitive (go to the bathroom) was supposed to be performed
in mindfulness, with sometimes the help of little songs or lullabies to make us
focus more easily on the present time.
On the first week of retreat, I met many
people struggling with an external or internal crisis: romantic break-up,
divorce, impossibility to get over a loss, unemployment… These people wanted to
refocus on their priorities and get back their self-confidence and their hope
in the future; the Dharma sharing sessions were rather heavy emotionally and
many times I “intervened” (as far I was entitled to in this kind of
environment) as a social worker or a psychologist, trying to get people to put
their problems in perspective. On the second week, it was very different: I built
bridges with some participants who arrived the same day I did and learnt a lot
from them as most of them were much more into meditation and retreats (Vipasana
for instance) than I was.
I kept good memories from this experience
however I heartily confess ma capabilities were limited in that matter: I
appreciated the silence and the slow rhythm in the monastery, but the day I
left I was really looking forward to a more exciting life, a moving life; I
liked the atmosphere of endless benevolence but there was also a sort of torpor
that was starting to clash with my passionate and dynamic nature. I hated
meditative walks at first: to me it made no sense to walk slowly in mindfulness
while there were so many great things to watch, especially at a time of the day
when I was starting to be very hungry; one day, unexpectedly, I felt fully
serene and light during the meditative walk and since then I looked forward to
doing it every morning.
Another example: at first I felt
uncomfortable to pray in front of the Buddha, kneel down and touch the floor
with my forehead (the Touchings of the Earth), because in my heart I should
only bend over in front of God himself, and no one else. However, when I
understood that during the ceremonies I could send my prayer to who I wanted
and that no one seemed bothered by me praying my own way, I complied willfully
with this ritual. More than that, this is one of the main teachings I decided
to bring back from the monastery: I still feel something stronger when my
forehead touches the floor during prayer, and I guess this gesture may be
adapted to all prayers, all confessions and all believers.
I appreciated the silent meals, but I
hated eating systematically cold, especially the days when there was a ceremony
and we had to stand a long time in a queue to help ourselves prior to walking
slowly to the ceremony hall to wait there for ages that all the guests and
monks had gathered and prayed. It’s true that at home I sometimes eat cold, but
that’s willfully (or by laziness) and I adapt the menu for that matter; I never
eat fried rice and vegetables half cooled down. If the general idea was to
bring us to step back from food, I’d have preferred the fasting! My first decision
when leaving was to have a large kebab with a beer; even if I barely eat meat, I
suffered too much from a vegan diet to keep on. On the contrary I didn’t listen
to loud music for some time, I was enjoying the silence.
At the End of the Summer, the French TV
program “Sagesses Bouddhistes”(“Buddhism Wisdom”) focused on two familiar
characters from Plum Village, including Soeur Prune who lived in the same
hamlet as me. The program aimed first at presenting the Wake Up initiative for
encouraging young people to practice meditation on a daily basis. [1] [2] The
program also focused on the five trainings to mindfulness expressed by the Vietnamese
spiritual master Thich Nhat Hanh (Tai): respecting life, true happiness, true
love, benevolent talking and deep listening, and finally responsible
consumption.
The five trainings to mindfulness
expressed by Tai are way more complex than they seem and, if some of us chose to
commit to respect them without restriction (this is called “receiving the five
trainings”), others (like me) just consider they are some bases of reflection
to live a better life and harmonize the relationships between human beings.
These principia are way larger than simple religious practices, and are part of
“social Buddhism”, a branch of Buddhism engaged in the big problematic of the
world (environment, peace, economy…) and not only centered on religious rituals
anymore. “In “Small is Beautiful” the economist E. F. Schumacher claims that, contrary
to the market economy, the economy based on Buddhism isn’t based on the
accumulation of wealth or material assets but on the purification of the human
being. Work is also part of this search, if it is honorable and makes sense
locally.” [3]
Sources
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