Shelter from the Storm: Reflections on a Zen Retreat

This summer, I experienced what in the past might have been called a nervous breakdown – the term they use today is “burnout.” It happened quite suddenly. In the space of a few weeks, my world was upended, and for the first time in my life, I found myself feeling truly unable to cope with reality. I was anxious all the time, and I wasn’t sleeping. Anxiety was something I had lived with for many years, but it had never so completely taken hold of my life. I would lie awake at night, fixated on my fears. I didn’t know what to do. I quit my job and took up landscape gardening because I needed to do something that got me out of the house and out of my head. But the anxiety remained. At some point, I went to the doctor, who wanted to put me on medication. I was given a prescription, but I couldn’t bring myself to take it. 

I talked to a friend about my situation, and he attentively listened as I laid out the extent of my troubles. Later that same day, he sent me a message. It was a link to a meditation app. As I drove home from the city that night, I listened to meditations on the freeway. As I listened in the darkness, I experienced something approaching a sense of calm for the first time in weeks. In the coming days, the meditation app became my constant companion. Driving to and fro from my gardening clients, I played daily meditations and dharma talks. At night, I listened to Buddhist monks recounting the wisdom of past masters in bed when I couldn’t sleep.

It’s no exaggeration to say that in my darkest hours, the consolation offered me by the meditation practices felt like a lifeline, a way back to a peace of mind that had felt lost to me for good. I began to experience the fear as something less than overwhelming. But it did not go away. I looked for ways to deepen my meditation practice, thinking that this might be the way to solve my anxiety. I had known about the existence of the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper for several years. I saw on their website that you could go there for a weekend introductory retreat. On a whim, I signed up.

A few weeks later, on a balmy summer evening in early July, I pulled up at the Catskills monastery to start my retreat. Zen Mountain Monastery has existed as a Buddhist order since 1980, but the monastery building is much older, dating back to the 1930s. Built in the Arts and Crafts-style, it was designed by a Catholic priest, and when you first enter, you sense in the air the ponderous weight of European monastic history. The thick stone walls keep the air gloomy and cool even on a bright summer’s day, and as you cross the dining room with its heavy oak timbers overhead, you feel that you might encounter the ghost of a patrician Carmelite on the narrow stone staircase that leads up to the dorm rooms above. I was nervous. I still wasn’t sleeping well and was concerned about the early morning awakenings – the first group meditation of the day was scheduled for 5.30 AM.

The Zen monks who presided over the place also unnerved me. They were not unfriendly, but their greetings were neutral. They seemed to regard me with the same objectivity a scientist might view a slide sample. ‘We are strangers;” their looks seemed to say. “This is how it is.”

After a light supper, we were given a few hours of free time before the evening group meditation sitting (known as zazen). I wandered the monastery building to kill some time. I noticed a series of ink drawings in the dining room mounted on the wall. The series, known as the “Ten Ox Herding Pictures,” is famous within Zen and consists of an allegorical poem and accompanying images attributed to 12th-century China that depicts the meditator’s journey toward awakening. In the allegory, an ox represents meditation practice. A protagonist is shown tracking, finding, catching and taming the wild animal, and finally transcending it. In the final panel, the protagonist returns to society to pass on the gift of their awakening. The words that accompany the image read:

“Barefooted and naked of breast,

I mingle with the people of the world.

My clothes are ragged and dust-laden,

and I am ever blissful.

I use no magic to extend my life;

Now, before me, the dead trees

become alive.”  

Reading these words, I felt a sudden yearning to be in this state of bliss. I took my place in the meditation hall (known as the zendo) a short time later. As anyone who has ever done it can tell you, meditation is both simple and very, very hard. It is simple in that the Zen meditation technique can be taught to anyone in a matter of minutes. The simplicity of the technique correlates with the simplicity of its aims, which is to get you to be with whatever is here right now. But being with reality is something we’re finding harder and harder to do in a world where distraction has become the default state. To sit with yourself in meditation can be excruciating, as it forces you to confront everything you’ve been trying to avoid: your fears, frustrations, insane thoughts, every bad and ignoble idea, every dark and malign fantasy. All the wolves at the door come flooding in when you meditate. Worse still, meditation strands you at the center of this messiness with a single lousy instruction for guidance: observe.

There is a famous Zen Buddhist saying that you might have heard. It goes something like this: ‘Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.’

The implication is that enlightenment isn’t some beatific state where you sit all day by a riverside contemplating the universe’s perfection. Enlightenment, in fact, is simply a new relationship to the life you already inhabit. At Zen Mountain, this insight is understood experientially through a daily routine concerned as much with the practicality of taking care of the monastery and its grounds as it is with spiritual growth. What may be more accurate to say is that in Zen, there is no distinction between spiritual development and practical life. How you chop onions, mow the lawn, or write an email can be your spiritual practice if done in full consciousness of present reality.    

On the introductory weekend, you learn this by participating in the daily chores of monastic life. Following the next morning’s zazen, we were assigned tasks. In my case, I was tasked with helping two of the monks rebuild a path that had fallen into disrepair. As I shoveled gravel into a wheelbarrow, I tried to stay with what I was doing – to feel the weight of the shovel in my hand and the flex of my muscles as I tensed to pick up the barrow. But it was hard.

The morning meditation had been a real ordeal. Halfway through, I felt like getting up and leaving. It had been so hard to be with myself, and even now, as I helped the monks repair the stonework, I felt the discomfort of my own emotional state. I didn’t want to feel this feeling, this blockage in my chest; I didn’t want to be held hostage by this barrage of negative thoughts.

“Every moment is the guru,” said the American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck. “The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we’re alert. This gift is always present in anyone’s life, that moment when ‘It’s not the way I want it!”

In the afternoon, we took part in Zen body practice at the Sangha House, a modern, light-filled building that offers a counterpoint to the dark austerity of the monastery building. I don’t know if it was the physical movement or the new environment, but some of my heaviness had lifted. As my self-absorption lessened, I was better able to look out and see where I was. I began noticing my fellow students. One in particular caught my eye. She was a young woman with short dark hair–somewhat awkward and aloof. The body practice finished, and we began an art practice, in which we were encouraged to paint with black ink on white paper. The instructor asked us to keep our eyes closed and let our hands be guided intuitively, without thought or conscious intention. 

At the end of the art session, there was an opportunity to talk with the monastics about the experience of the last 24 hours at the monastery. We cleared the space and formed a circle. At one point, the dark-haired girl raised her hand. She wanted to ask about zazen, she said. She had been struggling during the sittings and found the instructions’ simplicity – just counting the breath –  to be insufficient guidance for navigating her inner turmoil. Listening to her, I could see why she had caught my attention. We were both, in our own way, struggling to be here. When the meeting was over, I sought her out. I caught up with her on the steps of the monastery.

“I’ve been finding it hard, too,” I said. Or words to that effect. She didn’t say anything; she just looked intently into my eyes. After a short time, she pressed her palms in front of her, bowed, and walked away. After she left, I went to a bench nearby and began journaling. Partway through, I sensed a presence above me. I looked up to see the girl proffering something towards me. It was a book. She bowed and left– again without speaking. It was a self-help book on the subject of healing trauma. I put down my journal and began reading. The author began by recounting a traumatic experience from their life. The strange thing was that the author’s experience closely matched something that had happened to me, something that I had only recently begun to unpack in therapy. I looked around in surprise. In that brief moment of locking eyes, had this perfect stranger seen the psychic residue of this experience in me? Do the traumatized find each other out like bioluminescent fish, catching sight of each other’s light in the darkness of the deep sea? Why else would she have returned to me with the book? When I sat for zazen that night, I found that the blocked feeling in my chest had gone. Something had lifted–a space had opened up within. I spent much of the meditation quietly crying.

The early 21st century is a hard time to be a human. Yes, the average Westerner lives a life of unparalleled privilege compared to most people on the globe and to most of human history. But this is an anxious age. The project of modernity is visibly breaking down, yet we are instructed to carry on as usual, even as we see all around us intimations of collapse. The young scream at us to do something, and we shrug our shoulders because we feel impotent to change things. In the midst of all this, we must live. And to live a full life requires courage and not a little faith.

I am still trying to understand what happened to me that weekend at the Zen monastery. But I can say that whatever healing came my way was not through the avenues I had expected. I had gone there hoping to cure my anxiety with meditation. In the end, human connection applied the salve that softened, if not forever, the hurt in my heart. When I look at things this way, the value of a place like Zen Mountain has as much to do with the container it provides as it does with any practice of self-mastery you can learn there. The fact that in our midst, there exists a community of people committed to living in peace and harmony with themselves, each other, and the natural world is something to be cherished. I felt safe at Zen Mountain, and by the final morning, I had also seen past the apparent coolness of the monastics to the deep well of generosity and warmth that existed beneath the sober habits and serious rituals.

Following the final zazen, the abbot of the monastery, known as the roshi, gave a dharma talk to an assembled gathering that included the monastics, the longer-term residents, the weekend students, and the wider community of lay Zen students who live in the area. The abbot, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, talked at some point about the value of taking whatever peace or goodwill that comes your way through Zen practice out into the world as an act of service.

Misunderstood, meditation can easily turn into a solipsistic past-time, part of the frantic culture of self-improvement that has been making Westerners neurotic for several generations now. But all meditative practices come out of wisdom traditions that cleave towards ideas of inter-connectedness and oneness. It is said that in the first months of a baby’s life, it cannot see the mother as separate from itself. The end goal of Zen is a return to this kind of consciousness. Not simply to discover you are not your “self,” but to discover that you are everything. And everyone.

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Paul Willis took part in a retreat at the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York.
For more information on the monastery and its work, visit their website.