Sitting across from me at dinner on the first night of my meditation retreat, I am confronted by the vision of a very large, middle-aged woman who probably outweighs me by more than 100 pounds. And joining her is my old friend…judgment.
And, yet, as much as judgment has my attention, I find myself marveling at how this woman slowly chews her food with closed eyes, putting her fork down between each bite. I’m either witnessing Buddhist discipline or epicurean ecstasy. And, it occurs to me that her digestion tract probably doesn’t experience the traffic jams that go on in my belly given the way I inhale my meals. So, I inhale a deep breath instead and take in the fact that here I am – equal parts excitement and apprehension – choosing to experience a week at the Buddhist meditation center, Spirit Rock, in Marin County, California.
The gong wakes us up each morning in our dormitory at 5:40 am and within thirty minutes we’re doing yoga before our first forty-five minute “sit” of the day, which takes us from yawning to breakfast at 7:15. Every day consists of five sits, two additional sits with instruction, one sit with chanting, six walking meditations, two yoga sessions and one evening Dharma talk (Dharma defined as natural law or truth). Strip out the yoga and the Dharma talk and we have fourteen daily meditation sessions over seven days. That means nearly 100 meditation experiences in one week! Looking at this schedule, I wondered if I’d signed up for the spiritual equivalent of an Ironman. But, there was time for a daily catnap post-lunch, which I came to savor as my dessert.
For nearly a quarter century, I was a CEO who never napped. I gave new meaning to the word “mindful” as my mind (and schedule) was always full. Sleeping felt like a character flaw when there were so many other ways to be more productive with my time. And, yet, I was taught how to meditate ten years ago by an elder sage who felt that I was ripe for transformation. Patiently, she taught me everything she’d learned about this ancient form of contemplation over her fifty years of practice. But, on my daily list of to-do’s rarely did meditation rise from the bottom.
The co-conspirator in this tale is my bosom buddy, Vanda, who in my view floats through life expertly – with only the occasional human thud on the ground. It was time I witnessed this training ritual that seems to keep her psychically elevated. Finding myself once again on the treadmill of life, I was ready for my own magic carpet ride.
As I approached my first day at Spirit Rock, I wondered what I would miss most during the week of Buddhist boot camp. Talking? Sugar? Alcohol? Meat? Email? Facebook? Twitter? Google? No contact with the “default world” outside Spirit Rock’s gates? Time would tell. But, I imagined the one thing I probably would miss the most during my week in isolation was lingering with the Sunday New York Times in my bathtub.
The truth is, I am transfixed and frightened by stillness. I feel so much more important, wanted, admired, fill in the blank, when I have a stacked calendar. I get some perverse joy – in a Rubik’s cube kind of way – in finding the space to add one more appointment to a day already stuffed to the gills. Hence, in the first half of 2012, I gave virtually one speech every weekday, sometimes four on the same day.
In so many ways, I was ready for the surrender. In the past five years, I’ve been forced to surrender on many fronts: to my emotional limits when my eight-year relationship ended and my family life imploded, to my physical limits when my heart stopped on stage at the end of a speech, and to my mental limits when I sold and let go of the majority of the company I founded after two once in a lifetime downturns in the same decade.
Any first-born son of a Marine Captain (I’m Stephen Jr., a “chip off the old block”) is going to have a convulsive relationship with the word “surrender,” but somehow that first afternoon walk at Spirit Rock – when I watched hypnotically as a cow chewed grass in the pasture – helped to prepare me for the week ahead.
While it may sound exotic – or like a luxury – to be cultivating peace, love and understanding at a silent meditation retreat, we all cultivate something each day, whether it’s a desire to succeed, a need to please, or an ability to look busy doing nothing. This particular retreat focused on the ancient practice of cultivating what the Buddha called “Metta,” and my week would be spent meditating and doing exercises associated with feeling and sharing “loving kindness.” Sounded harmless enough. So. I packed my new meditation bench and my Tibetan prayer bead bracelet to experience some Marin “Metta-cation.” (I might call it a “marination” since we would be stewing in our own mental juices. In Marin, they marinate minds, not meats.)
-Chip