Reflections on the meditation course

Just two days later and I seem to have forgotten everything I learned from my recent meditation course. How can it happen so quickly? Oh yeah, I’m in India. At least I recognize the negative emotions when they arise, but it’s really not that difficult to know when you are angry, irritated or annoyed. Same shit, different word. Oh and I’m back indulging in sense pleasures too. A brownie and a blended coffee please. I know happiness comes from within, but until I find sufficient quantities in there, I’m going to continue supplementing externally.

It all began circumambulating the Boudanath stupa the day the course ended. Back fully immersed in samsara, it's hard not to find yourself surrounded by inconsiderate people. I don’t know how many times people bumped into me without acknowledgment or apology. Too busy counting their beads I guess. Instead of practicing patience and emanating compassion for my fellow suffering sentient beings all I could do was grit my teeth and be reminded why negative emotions are so hard to eliminate.

And I certainly didn't help my situation yesterday by overindulging in chocolate. Short-lived happiness I know, but I couldn’t help myself. The 2-hour plane delay didn’t seem to affect me much, but hmmm...I was talking to a rather attractive Russian girl – another sense pleasure! And when I finally got to the bus station in Delhi and booked my ticket, I realized later I had been way overcharged. Grrrrr!!! It’s hard to feel compassion for a dick who pulls something like that, but I blame myself for doing my homework and for not asking around for the actual cost of the ticket. And I thought he was just a nice guy.

I still haven’t killed anything, at least that’s working. It was quite hard to not kill that mosquito on the first night outside the monastery, but I recognized it for my mother in a previous lifetime and couldn’t bring myself to do it. So hard to think of every single living being as having been my mother or my father or my sister or my brother countless times in previous lifetimes. EVERY single sentient being. What!? We’ve supposedly been reincarnated a lot of times and that is a glaringly huge understatement.

The ‘meditation course’ seemed to be a bit inappropriately named. It was really a 10-day Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism. Mostly teachings from the Buddha, some meditation and a bit about Tibetan culture, but I learned more about the latter from reading Seven Years in Tibet. Our daily schedule was as follows:

6am                                    tea

6:30-7:30am                      morning meditation

7:30am                               breakfast

9:15am-11:30am               teachings

11:30am                             lunch

2-3pm                                discussion groups

3-3:30pm                           break

3:30-5pm                           teachings

5-6pm                                tea

6-6:45pm                           meditation

6:45pm                              dinner

7:45-8:45pm                      Q&A and meditation

We were instructed to keep silent from 9pm until after lunch the following day, which wasn’t too hard to do as we could still ask questions during the teachings and we mostly managed to acknowledge others with a head nod or silly grin, when we probably should have been looking down and actually practicing ‘noble silence.'

It was quite easy waking up early as we went to bed at approximately half nine every night. It was nice to have silence after the last session as it ensured I wouldn't be blaming my fellow dormitory mates for a bad night's sleep. And fortunately for me, none of them snored. The only time I slept poorly was when I ate some processed crap a bit too late in the evening, which I presumed to be the cause. Anyway, there was something nice about being awake shortly after 5am and watching the sunrise, on most mornings anyway.

The first meditation was led by a Belgian Buddhist guy who couldn't pronounce the –th sound. Other than that, he was alright. The first teaching was taught by a Swedish woman who had been at the monastery for nearly 40 years. She was a sweet woman really, but tended to answer questions with the most drawn out answers and seemed to pull whatever she wanted to say out of her head in random fashion, which led to her being here one minute and there the next. She also had a funny habit of saying isn’t it? instead of saying right? or isn’t that right? Patience...patience.

The food was actually pretty good. We were never deprived. Mountains of rice, vegetables, some tofu, many varieties of bread, homemade peanut butter, a few kinds of tea and even instant coffee. In the morning, we always had porridge, muesli and some kind of bread. Lunch was the most varied, but always incorporated rice and dinner was pretty constantly some kind of soup and bread. Probably the least looked forward to meal of the day, but still tasted good most of the time and I tend not to like soup so that says something.

Our discussion groups were only for the first five days. They were interesting solely to get an idea of what others were thinking and how they felt about the sessions to date. After the first five days we had different activities to keep us busy. The afternoon teaching was led by a Tibetan monk, who was a very nice guy, but really said the same thing over and over. I think it was intentional in order for that specific piece of information to really be beat into our brains, but it was rather painful to hear again and again. This guy had the habit of saying Do you get it? after nearly every sentence. Got it! I skipped two of his sessions and practiced yoga on the hill for the first time in nearly five years.

The afternoon meditation session was broken into two analytical meditation sessions. We led into it with a group motivation and then we were instructed to think about certain topics within the Buddhist realm in order to think more deeply about compassion or the impermanence of things for example. It was easy to get distracted.  The post-dinner session was mostly Q&A unfortunately and a short time spent reciting mantras, which sounded nice at first, but towards the end I mostly stopped participating as I felt like a brainwashed robot just saying words I really didn’t understand.

I also had a hard time repeating some motivations including but not limited to “I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Spiritual Community…” and the mantra “Tayata Om Mune Mune Maya Munaya Soha.” And found it strange that one of the ten non-virtuous actions we should avoid was not killing but eating meat was ok as was wearing leather. As long as we didn’t do the killing I guess. And downloading free music was equivalent to stealing, another non-virtuous action, yet the Monastery book shop sold cds and dvds that were definitely not straight from the manufacturer. Hmmm…

In the end, I was glad it was over. Ten days was enough. I didn't take refuge (become a Buddhist) nor did I master the art of meditation as was not to be expected. The final two days were in complete silence and there were meditation sessions throughout the day. A bit like Vipassana I imagined, but easier as we only had two days instead of 10. And I thought that if this had been Vipassana, I probably would have gone insane and therefore concluded that it was probably a good thing I had been rejected from the five courses I had applied to over the last couple of years. Things happen for a reason. Glad I did it, but glad it’s over. I still have a lot to work on.