I signed up for this silent retreat just outside Bodhgaya a while ago, thinking it would be an excellent way to land in India. I have avoided this style of retreat for years - the Boot Camp of meditation, where you get up at 4am and sit relentlessly for eleven hours each day plunging through the freezing rivers and desolate wastelands of your own mind, all without moving a muscle! Mr Goenka has established Centres all over the world which run an identical programme, with teachings by him on tape, and a video every evening, and the same unflinching schedule.
So I tried not to think about it in advance, enjoyed the journey from Varanasi and explored Bodhgaya before getting a rickshaw out to the unpromising site: run down buildings and a general air of bureaucracy and vagueness in the registration office. I was allocated a room (the 30 or so Westerners were given their own room each, the Asian participants shared!) but the first one I went to was filthy and didn't even have a bed. The second one was better - bed, but still hadn't seen soap in years! Which at least gave me something to do during the minimal 'free time' - attempting to clean! For the rest of the day we sat and watched our minds, with excellent instruction from the tapes. Only one or two of them had warped in the heat(some dreadful chanting), and there were some interesting Hinglish moments: when you had to establish a "Berlinsed and equanimous mind"; how 'moustache' somehow rhymed with 'hostage'. Or the day when the assistant gave me the central teaching of the whole experience: "Pen is pen. Do not react on it" This kept me going for a few days of 'noticing the intense sensation in my hips'.
Oh and the craziness of silence - well of course there was the unrivalled burping, hoicking and snorcking which kept us entertained. I did try to join in a few times but simply couldn't get the action for those satisfactory hoicks. One hot afternoon a cry of such heartfelt agony was emitted from the men's side of the room, and a wave of concern went around, closely followed by suppressed grinning as we realised it had been the most extraordinary burp. So we continued to studiously ignore each other. I made my contribution to the chorus with convulsions of laughter brought about by an incident with the tape machine. Instead of our usual discourse the tape was fastforwarded and rewound endlessly. I sat with berlinsed mind noticing the sensation in my body and thinking this was an interesting new way to teach impermanence, until this wave of hilarity overtook me: shaking and weeping and gasping and watching the sensation in my body...
The hoped-for stilling of the mind and free flow in the body never came, a glimpse on the ninth day maybe. Mr Goenka was adamant that it didn't matter: simply witness whatever arises and know that it is impermanent. Anicca, Anicca, Anicca as they say in Pali. Oddly my fellow retreatants included an Anita, and Anika and a Sister Anija which made me laugh when I was finally allowed to speak with them all. Meeting these people I had not even looked at for ten days and yet knew rather intimately was a great joy and still I see at least one of the Aniccas around town and smile..
