Big Trip Day 68: 🛵 Motorbikes and Meditation 🧎🏻‍♀️ (Part 2!)
Hey friends and family,
As promised, it’s Dory and I’m back with part two of Motorbikes and Meditation: the Meditation part! We’re diving right in, starting with...
The Search for Enlightenment with the Venerable Ajarn Tong
I’d describe myself as a novice meditator – I’ve got an app on my phone, I’ve dabbled intermittently, but I don’t really have a mindfulness practice of any substance. I never would have had the confidence or the boldness to commit to a silent meditation retreat without Justin, who’s done two retreats in the past, and who helped me understand that it was both possible and worth the challenge to commit to something so disciplined, so extended, and so full of unknowns.
A few weeks ago now (yes, we’re extremely behind on the newsletter) we spent eight days at the Northern Vipassana Center, an hour outside Chiang Mai. The center is located on the grounds of Wat Phra That Si Chom Thong Worawihan, a Buddhist temple boasting a noteworthy relic: a small piece of the Buddha’s skull, enshrined next door to a massive gold stupa. The temple is full-time home to a vast retinue of monks, novices, and nuns; in the small neighborhood behind the temple, meditators from across Thailand and the world take up residence for days or sometimes months, practicing insight meditation in the style of the temple’s late leader, the Venerable Ajarn Tong.
For locals, the meditation practices are taught in Thai; the rest of us learn in our native tongue, during one on one sessions in English, Russian, French, German, and a half dozen other languages. All meditators dress in head-to-toe loose-fitting white clothes – you’re presented with two sets on arrival, and do your own laundry in your breaks – and are encouraged to follow a somewhat comically simple schedule:
4:00am: Wake up. Initially, I planned to fudge this number slightly, but it’s basically impossible to avoid. At 4am sharp, the bells begin; approximately 15 seconds later, every dog for miles joins in a chorus of spirited howling. The bells and the dogs generally last five minutes or so, at which point you are awake. So you might as well do what’s expected, which is…
4:00 - 6:00am: Meditate. All meditators at the center follow the same set of practices, in the same order. First, mindful prostration: a slow, methodical set of kneeling bows, which take about three minutes to complete. Next, walking meditation, for a fixed time – we started at five minutes; by the end of the retreat, I was doing 30 – back and forth, in whatever space was available. Finally, and for the same time interval as walking, a sitting meditation. When your digital timer went off, your cycle was complete; you’d take a 20 minute break, and then start over again. The beeping of peoples’ digital timers was a constant chorus at the center.
6:00 - 7:00am: Breakfast. Meals happened at the temple dining hall; monks in their saffron robes on one side, and nuns and laypeople in white on the other. All meals are free, and what we ate depended on what was donated by the community each day. Breakfast was nearly always noodle soup, and it was often delicious – some combination of thick rice noodles, thinly sliced tofu, greens, crispy onions, clear broth and chili. We’d queue up in the dark, always leaving a polite gap in the line for monks and novices so they could access their private entrance to the hall. By the time breakfast was over, it was dawn.
7:00 - 11:00am: Meditate. See above. Before breakfast, everyone meditates in their rooms, but at 7am the meditation halls opened. There were two gender-split halls (one for men, one for women,) an outdoor hall, and one hall with air conditioning, which was the holy grail in the heat of the afternoon. The halls were large, wooden-floored rooms with stacks of meditation cushions and bolsters, and some combination of images and statues of the Buddha. Otherwise, they were empty – meditators would cycle in and out on our own schedules, based on how long our walking and sitting intervals were at that stage in our retreat.
11:00am - 12:00pm: Lunch. Lunch! I was always tremendously excited for lunch. We happened to be at the Center at the same time as a Buddhist holy day, which meant for a few days, we were eating like kings: mushroom and tofu larb with fresh mint and salad! Red coconut curry over purple rice! Salted tamarind juice! Freaking donuts! Because not everyone is observing noble silence (which is to say, a lot of the Thai meditators and some of the foreign ones would shamelessly chat with each other whenever the chance arose) we were encouraged to take our meals back to our housing and eat in private, where no one would talk to us. I spent a lot of time sitting in front of my little shared house and looking at birds. After lunch, no more meals are served. One of the Eight Buddhist Precepts is not eating after noon, so from midday onwards we’d have tea or water or soymilk, but no more food.
12:00pm - 10:00pm: Meditate. When I first saw this time block on the schedule, I practically did a spit take. This is... a hilariously long time. An impossibly long time. How could I possibly meditate for 10 freaking hours? But after a few days, I hit a cadence. In between sittings, we were encouraged to take 20 minute breaks. Those were our windows to (mindfully) do little chores: make a cup of tea, do laundry, tidy my room, go for a walk. And the time sort of added up! Before I knew it, it’d be dusk, a.k.a. soymilk o’clock.
In the evening, the center would deliver warm, lightly sweetened soymilk to our houses in little plastic bags, in lieu of dinner. The main theme of the meditation retreat is that little things become huge, and boy did I look forward to this bag of soymilk. A delight! After soymilk o’clock, I’d usually meditate again, shower, and then go to bed early (don’t tell the Venerable Ajarn Tong, but it was definitely before 10pm.)
Throughout the retreat, Justin and I had parallel experiences. We deliberately avoided each other in meditation halls -- you left your shoes at the entrance, and we agreed before the retreat started that if we saw each others’ shoes, we’d simply go to a different hall -- because we knew we’d distract one another. We were each assigned a simple private room and bathroom in separate houses, and honestly, it wasn’t too hard to keep apart. We’d catch each others’ eyes in the lunch line and smile occasionally, but for the most part, we did our best not to engage.
Some Takeaways
I didn’t go into the retreat with many expectations, which I think was a good thing. Once a day, we’d meet one on one with our teacher Andy, a well-intentioned British guy who skipped the teaching pedagogy part of learning how to share ideas. He was just... not a great teacher. And 15 minutes a day never felt like much in the endless sea of meditation sittings.
In spite of Andy, I learned a ton during this week. I learned that I really want mindfulness to be a part of my life, and that I’m capable of doing something really hard -- something that for a few days there, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to complete. I developed a meditation practice I can return to. And I got to be a part of daily life at a Thai Buddhist temple, an experience I’ll likely never have again.
Neither Justin nor I would recommend the Northern Vipassana Center to a friend (it’s a little too dogmatic, a little too unstructured) but both of us had positive, impactful experiences nonetheless. The nice thing about meditation is that it happens in your head, on your terms. I left the center already thinking I’d like to do a vipassana retreat again -- but maybe the next one could have more guidance, more teaching... and a little less “meditate from noon to 10pm.”Â
If this email makes you want to explore meditation (which, I don’t think I’ve made this sound awesome, but maybe!) that’s great! I started off using the Balance app, which actually includes a lot of the basic principles of insight meditation, they’ve just quietly (and, I think, questionably) removed all the Buddhism from it. Still, it’s a really approachable tool; you can download it for free here.
If you want to go a little deeper, Justin’s favorite teacher (now also my favorite teacher) is Gil Fronsdal, from the Insight Meditation Center in California. In addition to offering in-person retreats, Gil does daily live meditation sittings on Youtube and offers a podcast with some really nice guided meditations and dharma talks.
Justin’s up next, so stay tuned for another newsletter updating you on our diving and climbing adventures in Southern Thailand (spoiler alert: it was awesome.)
Love,
Dory & Justin