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Going on retreat is a daunting prospect, but having glimpsed a little of the mess in my own mind, I needed to look deeper. Having seen the chaos, peace seemed all the more elusive. If I wanted to find the stillness in which to hear that tiny woodlouse creeping along, perhaps I needed more intensive meditation. The thought of week in silence, meditating most of every day, was both tempting and terrifying.
It was a couple of years later that I went on my first retreat at John's Crook's farmhouse in mid Wales. Maenllwyd (pronounced man-thloyd) is a tiny, solid, stone house, nestling in a little cwm or valley, just below the edge of the moor. All around it the sheep graze among the grey rocks and heather, chomping and bleating. Reached by a few miles of rough track meandering between the fields, the house has no electricity, no gas, no phone, and not even mobile phone reception. It is cold there, even in summer, the outlook is bleak, and the nearest tiny village is miles away down the valley.
The house itself is full of ancient furniture, decorated with sheep skulls and bones, lit by oil lamps, and heated by an ancient kitchen range that belches out smoke when the wind is in the wrong direction. Meals are eaten in silence in what was once a small barn, and retreatants sleep on wooden platforms above. Across the rough, unpaved farmyard with its mud and sheep pens, is another barn now converted into a meditation hall.
When I went on my first retreat in 1982, the pipes all froze, the roof was in urgent need of repair, and the wind blew right through the barn where a dozen or so of us beginners slept. Owls flew in, and the bats roosted just above us. That January the snow was fifteen feet deep down in the valley and a snowplough had cut through just as far as the nearest farm below. It was there that we left our cars and trudged up through the fields. I was given a walking stick to help me, for I was eight months pregnant with my first child, Emily.
We meditated for many hours each day, in half hour sessions with brief breaks in between, huddled in blankets in the subzero house with our breaths visibly steaming in the cold air. We longed for the work periods when you could get warm splitting wood, or beating carpets, or even chopping vegetables in the kitchen near the warm range. Water had to be fetched from the snow edged stream - the one duty I was excused of on account of my ungainly size!
I got the chance I had wanted - to get away and contemplate myself and my life before motherhood. But I also got far more than I had bargained for. Perhaps I expected that, with a whole week of practice, meditation would become easy and I'd be quickly transformed into a superior person or even become enlightened. Instead, the long hours of sitting exposed the horrible mess in my mind; the visions, the fears, the anger and resentment, the guilt, the worries, and the perplexity.
Now I understood the need for a calm mind. We were told that calming the mind is the starting point of all meditation, but that it can also take you all the way. We were told even scarier things; that what you are searching for is here right now, that there is really nothing to strive for, and that once you arrive you will realise there was nowhere to go in the first place; that however hard you work, and you must work hard, in the end you will know that there is nothing to be done.
To explain the Zen method more clearly, John used to say "Let it come. Let it be. Let it go". This roughly means - when any ideas or feelings or troubles come along in meditation, don't fight them, don't engage with them, don't push them away or hang onto them, just go through this same gentle process again and again: let them arise in the mind, let them be whatever they are without elaboration, and let them go in their own time. Then they cause you no trouble and the mind stays still - however beautiful or horrible they are.
Paying attention and letting go sounds so simple and easy. It is neither, as I quickly discovered. Hour after hour we retreatants sat there on our cushions trying to calm the mind; letting go and paying attention. Again and again my mind would slip to thoughts about the past or the future; to imaginary conversations with other people; to rerunning something I had done to make it seem better; to planning how to make amends for actions that I felt bad about. "Let it go ...". Again and again, I would slip into half-sleep and the cracks in the plaster on the ancient wall in front of me would turn into gruesome visions of horror and war and torture and suffering; over and over, again and again. "Let it be ...". One day John said "Remember there is only you and the wall, and the wall isn't doing it."
