A People of Color Meditation Retreat
Day 1
On Wednesday, August 6, I arrived at Deer Park monastery in the mountains outside San Diego for a five day ‘People of Color’ Retreat in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.
That evening, we participated in a ritual to honour our ancestors. We would hear the Namo Avolokiteshvara Chant, and one by one we could approach the altar at the front of the room and place the objects we had brought on top of it. The first to stand up were an African American man and woman, walking towards the altar, holding their objects. I had met them at dinner and they were siblings, warm and affable, but now they were solemn, bent double it seemed, with sorrow, grief and love. I would learn later they had lost two close family members in the preceding months. Watching them, I felt something break inside me. Though the ritual was new to me, its meaning was clear. We were bowing to those who had come before us, those responsible for everything we were, all our joy, all our pain, all our mental and physical traits.
I approached the altar, placed my photograph on top, and bowed. At once I felt a release — something that had been blocked for years — and by the time I regained my cushion I was close to tears. Looking up, I saw a young woman walking away from the altar towards me, wiping her own eyes, and I realised, as I would over and again, that I was not alone.
Day 2
I took part in every activity except for at five o’clock in the evening, when I escaped to my room to meditate for an hour. I am an introvert, and America is a land of extroversion, California particularly so, which meant that I often felt like Oscar the Grouch, glaring scornfully from his trash can. What worried me the most was that afternoon’s scheduled activity of ‘sharing’ in small groups. Perhaps it was the word itself — smacking, as I saw it, of emotional striptease.
We sat in a circle and, when someone wanted to speak, they pressed their hands together. At first we talked about own practice and how it was tested under pressure. I told the story of my experience at Copenhagen airport, of being the only passenger to be led to a small room and rubbed with a piece of plastic to test for explosives, my feelings of anger and humiliation.
I told the group, also, about my childhood, the racism, my anger towards my parents for putting me through that experience; I told, too, of my experience of letting go, of forgiving, of realising that my parents had been as frightened as I was. As I did so, I felt something shift inside me, as if the act of sharing had made the process more real.
One member of the group told of his entry into the US as a teenager, how he would hear schoolmates saying illegal immigrants should be lined up against a wall and shot. Another spoke of his own experience of childhood racism, of how he still felt uncomfortable in groups — just as I did — perpetually an outsider. Another spoke of her work as a teacher, of how she knew a Latina child who loved eating beans but would only do this in the bathroom for fear of being called a ‘wetback’. We all had our stories. Many cried.
All my life I have been told that the strong do not display their vulnerabilities, whereas in fact the reverse is true — to conceal and repress is a sign of prolonged suffering and damage, which will only lead, in the long run, to harming ourselves and others. I was still an introvert after sharing, but found this had made no difference. My resistance to sharing was never due to introversion but to shame, much of which disappeared simply by watching others being themselves.
Day 3
On our last evening we undertook a second ritual to celebrate our ancestors. We were invited to see ourselves as five year old children, fragile and vulnerable,and to smile at these children with love. We were then invited to see our father and mother as five year olds, and smile at them with love, to see our parents in ourselves, the difficulties they had experienced in ourselves.
I have often told myself that I owe it to my unborn children to continue my meditation practice. I have seen the results of unmindful parenting by those who have not confronted their own fears, rage, and complexes. Inevitably, they project these things onto their children, perpetuating a cycle of abuse. Through our practice, the nun said, we could heal not only our own pain, but that of our ancestors too, a radical proposition which still makes sense yo me, though I find its logic impossible to articulate.
The ritual was called ‘Touching the Earth’ and involved prostrating on the ground five times, expressing gratitude to our blood ancestors, our spiritual ancestors, our Native American forebears from whom we had inherited the land (this gave me pause for thought when I realised that I actually found it far easier to feel a sense of belonging here than I did in England, and for this reason), the people we loved, and lastly, to those who had caused us suffering, accepting that they had been hurt and abused in their turn.
It made me think of how my own ancestors had been affected by Brahminism and colonialism, how one gave rise to a superiority complex, the other to an inferiority complex, but how both were about the illusion of separateness, and how in these terms there was no difference between being an oppressor and oppressed: anything that gives rise to feelings of separateness and ego causes suffering in the mind.
Thich Naht Hanh refers to interbeing; he says, ‘I see you in me, and me in you’:-
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.
I know now that sharing is not something that we do but something that we are. We are shares, droplets of a whole that was never divisible in the first place. This is what I learned at Deer Park.
