(This is Part 2 of the article. Read Part 1 and Part 3 here)
The cocks crow like clockwork. Every day around 4 am, right around the time the bell is rung, they start crowing non-stop for a good hour. You then hear the pitter patter of footsteps as everyone in the dormitory starts waking up, zippers being opened and closed, bags being rustled and rummaged, doors being opened and slammed closed. Even if you’re a heavy sleeper, there’s no way you can sleep through this morning commotion. So you force yourself to get up, walk bleary eyed to the bathroom, brush your teeth (or shower), get dressed, spray a liberal amount of insect repellent (100% DEET in my case), and walk in the darkness into the meditation hall for the morning meditation session.
The meditation hall is an open air hall with sand floor and lofty ceilings made of wooden planks. Rows of burlap sacks have been arranged neatly facing the front of the hall, where a wooden platform for the monk (or whoever is guiding the meditation session). We sit cross-legged, with sitting mats, and pillows to help make our meditation more comfortable – which is a hard feat to accomplish after 3 hours. When it becomes unbearable, there are short benches for us to sit on. The men sit on the left hand side of the room, women on the right. In the morning and the evening, they lit a few candles – one at each corner of the hall – that makes the whole scene quite surreal. A hundred people sitting unmoving, in silence and darkness for hours on end.
Most people find the first few days to be the hardest. It’s a complete change of routine, starting with the 4am wake up call and 8+ hours of sitting cross-legged meditating. People who are used to 3 meals a day are not accustomed to the fast. People are restless as they don’t have the usual distractions that normally occupy us (jobs, family and friends, the news, social media, hobbies). Most crucially, almost everyone is experiencing caffeine withdrawal.
And I think the rules affect some more than others. Although the staff is pretty laissez-faire in general, they will approach and reprimand you if you’re caught talking, keeping and using your cellphones or laptops, leaving the boundary of the compound, or sleeping during meditation time. If you’re a repeat offender, you’ll be asked to leave the retreat. As adults, unless you’re in the military, we are not used to following rules. So it seems that many participants feel they just lose their freedom – unable to do what they want as they please.
Personally, I find the rules liberating. There’s naturally social pressure to have to interact and socialize with people you live in close proximity with, i.e. other participants. By explicitly removing this social pressure, you now don’t have to acknowledge and interact with other people. You can avoid eye contact without feeling you’re being rude. When someone is walking towards you, you can ignore them. And when you’re sitting in the dining hall, you don’t have to acknowledge or think about what to say to the person sitting next to you.
And with regards to the separation between men and women. I had initially thought that this is a superfluous rule, along with the clothing rules (only loose clothing covering the shoulders and the knees for both men and women). They should have treated us like adults and that we know how to co-mingle between the sexes without succumbing to our basic instincts. But I then thought about the various overnight events I had attended: camps, National Sales Meeting, group expeditions, etc. Invariably, when groups of men and women of reproductive age who are not related to each other live together in close quarters for more than a few hours (especially under stressful conditions), hookups happen. That’s just the law of nature. Producers of reality TV shows like Real World, Jersey Shores, Survivor, etc. know this and exploit it. Also, law of nature: when someone tells you don’t think about sensual pleasures, you think about it more. So with tension of all sorts running high, it’s probably a wise decision to separate the two genders and keep distractions to a minimum.

Even the bell – a sonorous gong-like sound that rules our lives and haunts our dreams – is annoying at first. But overtime, I grow to appreciate the simplicity that it provides. I don’t have to keep track of what time it is and where I need to be. It’s simple: when it rings, that means we have to gather back in the meditation hall. At the end of the meditation session, we go the dining hall for our meals or tea break. After meals, you have some free time to do your chores, until the next bell, and so on… Time is suddenly irrelevant.
“The definition of a retreat is to surrender, to lower one’s battle flag,” the retreat coordinator had said on our first morning meditation session. I smiled thinking about the metaphor of the modern life as a type of warfare, our daily struggle. It sounds silly, but once you let the simplicity of the monastic life takes over, you soon realize that life outside is a struggle.
Like everyone else (and their grandmas), I was introduced to mindfulness meditation a few years ago through Headspace app. Since then, I’ve tried to meditate a few times a week, 15-20 minutes each session; nothing compared to the 2-3 hour session we have to sit through, four times daily.
Each meditation session begins with a talk – either by one of the monks or the retreat coordinator, or we would be listening to a recording of a monk translating Ajahn Buddhadasa’s (the founder of the monastery who passed away in 1993) talks in the 1980s – 1990s. Most of the talks relate to Buddhism and anapanasati (mindfulness with breathing) techniques as a way to cultivate the seven factors of enlightenment.
For the first few days, the meditations are guided. One of the staff provides guidance on what to do – paying attention to your breath, noticing what short breaths and long breaths do to your body, emotion, and mind. You can do it with your eyes open or closed, while sitting or standing. Inevitably, thoughts and emotions will arise. You’re supposed to notice them, let them go and go back to the breaths. By focusing on the breaths, one can eventually develop a quiet and clear mind and become able to observe life unfolding as is, without all the background chatters, biases and judgments that tend to color our perspectives.
This practice doesn’t turn you into a better person instantly, but I noticed the shift in my perspective when doing the daily chores. During registration, we all had to pick a chore to do around the monastery from a list. It ranged from raking leaves, cleaning the toilet, wiping the dining hall tables, bringing trash from the dorm to the main garbage area, and so on. For whatever reason, I picked mopping the dining hall after breakfast as my chore. I have never liked mopping. It’s probably at the bottom of my list in terms of house chores I can tolerate.
Why the hell did I pick this duty, I asked myself when I surveyed the large dining hall with four large dining tables spanning the length of the hall and chairs all around the tables. This is not the kind of space that you can mop quickly. I had to bend down to get the mop under the tables, carefully navigating the legs of the chairs, over and over again. It seemed that out of my intense desire to escape one suffering (i.e. toilet cleaning), I ended up picking an even more miserable suffering to take on. Granted that I had a partner to mop only the women’s side of the dining hall; this job was still not a piece of cake.
On day 1, I thought of multiple ways to do the chore quicker, more efficiently. I cursed (silently) at the chairs as my mop kept getting tangled in the legs of the chairs. I cursed (silently) at everyone for tracking in sand from outside. I judged my mopping partner, Grace (I didn’t know her real name so I called her Grace since she looks like my college friend), for dragging the mop around and not really picking up dirt. I was suspicious of the two women who were supposed to sweep the hall. “I bet they didn’t sweep under the table,” I thought. Some sections were still dirty; I could feel sand everywhere. The next day after breakfast, I parked myself at the end of the hall, paying close attention to the sweepers. “No wonder!” I almost exclaimed. “She’s not even sweeping under the table!” I managed to find fault with everything that they were doing and I even thought of going up to give them a piece of my mind, teach them how to sweep. I did not. I just clutched my water bottle, fuming in my seat.
I was still dissatisfied the next few days, but I noticed my perspectives shifted ever so slightly. For one, I stopped identifying with my thoughts. I noticed various thoughts arise, but I stopped labeling the thought as my thought. By day 5, I was actually grateful to be given a chore to do, something for me to practice mindfulness. I focused on the mopping: how the tiles turned from dull to shiny as the mop passed through. It was satisfying to see the water in the bucket turned brown from all the dust the mop picked up and to admire how clean the floor feel afterwards. Instead of blaming the sweepers for not doing their job well, I just let it go and thought to myself, “I guess this section is dusty from the way the wind blows and how the hall is situated. It just got more sand on this section,” or “This is exactly why the dining hall needs to be mopped daily.” Instead of being upset with others who lingered in the dining hall and walking on sections that had been mopped, I figured out that it’s best to leave the outer section for last.
Mopping was a good analogy to the over-perfectionist, hyper-critical judgments I tend to have, especially at work. Although it applies to my relationships as well. I work myself up over things that really don’t matter. I hold myself (and others) to a really high standard, and become really critical, then angry and frustrated, when the bar isn’t met. I am by no means cured of my neuroses, but at least now I am more aware of when the hyper-critical chatters start and can start letting them go.
As I often tell people, vipassana doesn’t cure you of your craziness, it just makes you more aware that you’re crazy.
(Read Part 3 here)