4:50 am: Alarm goes off. Launch out of bed, shower, get dressed. Turn on kettle. Brush teeth while water boils. Make tea in thermos. Grab bag. Layer up. Walk from Söpa Chöling to Gampo Abbey. Roughly 25 minutes to read, write in journal, maybe have a first cup of tea.
5:55 am: Han to line up. Enter shrine room after rinsing mouth with a few drops of blessing water dispensed into your hand. Morning liturgies. Chanting. Prostrations AKA Buddhist calisthenics. Chanting. Offering Torma. Leave shrine room in same order as arrival, chanting “Like a shooting star, a visual fault, a candle flame…” etcetera and so-on.
Service time for fifteen minutes (in silence, all of this in silence). Empty bins. Wrap up cardboard. Carry it all out to a shed. Pause. Watch sunrise/sky/clouds, shape of the day. Back inside.
7:00 am: Han for breakfast. Line up. Heaping bowl of oatmeal with stewed prunes and yogurt. Supplicate the three jewels. Add blessing water. Eat. Take vitamins. Dedicate the merit. Wash bowl. Fifteen to twenty minutes to drink tea, read, journal, watch the sky, or crows dancing on the wind.
8:00 am: Han. Line up for shrine room. Take blessing water. Go to chair instead of meditation bench on cushion. Meditation for three hours, broken by walking. 45 minutes sitting, five to eight minutes walking. Fatigue during sitting. Fall asleep. Wake up. Fall asleep. Wake up.
Follow the breath.
“Thinking”.
Fall asleep. Wake up. Watch the waves. Watch a crow hover in the wind. Watch the current push sea ice in two directions at once. Gong for walking.
Run to the loo, pee fast, back to walk as much as possible.
Clack clack. Sitting again. Single pointed awareness. 28 breaths. 34 breaths. 53 breaths. “Thinking”.
Tonglen. The in breath is compassion, the out breath is love. Crying. Softening. Gong for walking. Feeling muscles, sinew, movement.
Sitting. Pain ebbs in. Mind. Who is there to feel the pain? Where is the self? Can’t be found. Keep looking, just in case. Final gong — Bong! Bong!
Leave shrine room. Get coat, put on boots. Back to Söpa Chöling for mind/body break. Eat ravenously, toast with a bit of marmalade and butter so thick people think it’s cheese. Also snacks I brought with me from home (What is ‘home’?). This time is ours to fill. Read, journal, laundry when it’s needed, take a walk when the weather affords it. Go to the stupa. Circumambulate. Prostrate. Dedicate the merit. Walk back to Gampo Abbey. Pause to feed chickadees.
12:30 pm: Han sounds. Queue for lunch. Bow to the chef. Take a bowl and spoon and enter the kitchen. All the food here is good but lunch is extra special. Dish up on loads of whatever is offered. Ogle the choice of toppings — massaged kale, chopped tomatoes, toasted pumpkin seeds, fresh cilantro.
Small gong — Ding! Hold up bowl where you stand and supplicate. Silence breaks. Conversations slowly kindle and light. Find a seat in the dining room. Supplicate again. Add blessing water. Hand blessing water to someone down the table. Chat. Eat. Dedicate the merit.
1:30 pm: Work period begins. Go to Kalsang’s office in the basement. Many assignments possible on the facilities team. Chop wood, carry water. Or more likely, relocate wood, carry compost, toss it over a cliff (don’t lose buckets to the wind), fix some plumbing. Except Tuesdays and Fridays when I stock up over at Söpa Chöling — maybe bread, coffee, tea, soy milk, butter, fruit, but always, always, always rice cakes.
Finish up work period between 3:00 and 3:15 pm. Time for kombucha if there is any in the fridge, or more often tea, if there’s enough time for it to cool down to be drinkable. Decaffeinated green tea with honey. Remember blessing water. Gulp it down fast.
3:30 pm: Han. Silence resumes. Run to the loo. Line up. Rinse mouth with water, spit, wipe palm across hair. Enter shrine room. Meditating and walking until 6:00 pm, see previous, especially sleeping post-work period, especially if work period involved shoveling or hauling wood.
6:00 pm: Evening liturgies. Invocations! Symbols! Drumming! Sing a song. Dedicate the merit. Gong twice — Bong! Bong! Evening announcements. Little gong — Ting!Ting! Stand up, leave shrine room.
6:30 pm: Han for dinner. Queue up to the kitchen. Bow. Grab bowl. Enter. Medicine Meal, it’s called, to comply with the ‘no chewing in the afternoon’ precept. We are told it’s soup but it is almost always more of a stew — thick and full of delicious chunky vegetables. There is most definitely chewing. And a lot of hot sauce, or olive oil, or salt added, or all three. Eat in silence, enjoying the filling of my belly and watching a sunset I will never see again, appreciating it all.
7:15 pm: Han. Line up. Take blessing water. Enter shrine. Thirty minutes single-pointed mindfulness. Thirty minutes on the breath. Thirty minutes loving-kindness. Best meditation of the day.
Whatever that means.
Let it go.
Gong sounds — Bong! Bong! Bong! File out, go to coats. Much shuffling, scuffling, manoeuvring in the mud room. Back to Söpa Chöling in the dark, or maybe under a full moon, or perhaps through a blizzard. Regardless, it’s beautiful. Wind so intense it knocks you over. Or maybe calm and still and not a cloud to be seen, but a million, billion, trillion stars. So. Many. Stars. Or the setting sun, blazing orange and yellow and pink and blinding white. Watching it dip below the horizon, watch the world turn. Pause. Appreciate. Back inside. Remove layers. Prep tea flask and vitamins for the am. Brush teeth. Lay out clothes for tomorrow. Crawl into bed. Read for a bit. Asleep by 9:30 pm, usually.
4:50 am: Alarm sounds.
And we begin again for the very first time.
Glossary
Blessing water — Water which was chanted over and in little vessels on every table, with tiny spoons for symbolically blessing all our food and drinks. Yes, we all made many jokes about Catholic holy water but no, it’s not really the same thing.
Dedicating the Merit — One aspect of Buddhism you may be familiar with is this whole notion of letting go. One of the ways to practice this is to offer up the benefit of any action or achievement to a greater good. Basically it’s a way of not getting too egotistical about anything we do and about remembering that we are interconnected, so anything we achieve is never done in a vacuum but with the support and blessings of many other beings, seen and unseen.
Gong — Metal bowls in various sizes used as time markers, not ever for ‘healing’ through vibrations. That’s just a bunch of white folk silliness.
Han — A wooden slab hit with a mallet in a particular pattern to indicate transition times or a five minute warning to a transition time.
(Aside: We are always in transition)
Precept — There are many precepts and we were a mix of lay practitioners, temporary- and life-monastics, so which precepts applied to who varied, but ‘no chew’ was a generally adhered to one. People would partake in ‘no chew’ chocolate in the evenings, which basically meant chocolate without fruit or nuts in, which you could let dissolve on your tongue. Life-monastics, however, were more dedicated and many didn’t even have Medicine Meal. They might have a glass of soy milk, if they ate anything at all. It’s a weird precept based on a very different time and so, not really culturally relevant, but still handy from a mindfulness and intention practice point of view. Regardless, there were a few evenings where I blatantly disregarded this precept and vigourously chewed vegan jerky in my bedroom just before bed.
Stupa — A structure modelled after the shape of a sitting Buddha, which is often a place of pilgrimage.
‘Supplicate the three jewels’/’Supplicate’ — The three jewels are the Buddha, the dharma (teachings) and the sangha (community of practitioners) and supplicating them is basically acknowledging how they support us as practitioners and how we are interconnected with them in all of our words and deeds.
Tonglen — A form of meditation used to cultivate compassion, and comfort with that which is often uncomfortable.
Torma — No bake dough creations decorated with butter, used as offerings in various ceremonies. One day we spent the time we usually meditated in the afternoon making Torma. We made a lot of it. 64 I believe. It was good fun.
Originally published on Medium
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I'm so glad you voice-overed this piece! You did such a good job illustrating with your pacing the moments of rush and bustle butting right up against the moments of stillness and reflection. And the tension between those two states and the perfection and necessary-ness of both. Also as a not-part-of-an-organized-religion person it's intriguing to get a little peek into what actually happens at a religious or spiritual retreat.
Also, I have not done it myself, but your description of a day made me think of a Nordic spa, stepping into the sauna and getting hot and and relaxed and light-headed then walking outside and plunging into the near-freezing ocean for as long as you can stand it then climbing out fast and right back into the sauna....over and over and over....