3 day

On the last Friday in May 2018, I embarked on two journeys. The first was a fairly simple two hour drive to Gaunts House in Dorset, there to attend a 64 hour silent retreat organised by Zenways https://zenways.org/ . At 6pm that day I started the second journey, one from which, I have come to learn, there is no way back and which will have no end.

As the 49 participants assembled and the silent rule had yet to descend, we learned a little about each other over the evening meal. I met, and warmed to, an abstract painter and art lecturer, a maths professor, and others whose professions weren't the subject of conversation. I met a woman in her seventies, a veteran of several retreats who asked me if I'd been before. When I said I hadn't, she told me 'ooh, you're in for a surprise'.

I had, ironically, been anxious about the retreat for weeks. I had no idea what it would involve, except that it was intentionally 'intense' and that there were no breaks in a fairly relentless schedule. I had been drawn to Zen many years ago and had been meditating on and off, to be frank mainly off,  for years. At 60, I had been increasingly feeling that I was living life in a rather rudderless way, lacking purpose, not fully engaged, with a feeling of low-level fear of the future. I hoped the retreat might shake things up.

After the meal and having settled into our accommodation (my campervan in my case), we were introduced to the retreat by Julian Daizan Skinner, Rinzai Zen master and founder of Zenways, along with his assistants, junior Zen teachers Pete, Matt and Luke. Dressed in black samue and rakusu, as Daizan spoke I knew that whatever the retreat held we were in safe hands. His calmness, humour and humanity shone clearly. He explained the silent rule and importance of not distracting ourselves from the task at hand with books, music, phones, or any form of communication or touch throughout the weekend. We would be getting up at 5am and engaged in the activities of the retreat until 11 at night, with exercises to help us stay focussed even in our sleep. Our focus throughout the 64 hours would be one of five questions, which we were asked to choose and take through the weekend: who am I?, what is my true nature?, what is this?, why am I here? and where am I from?

I chose 'who am I?'

For a silent retreat, there was actually quite a lot of talking, and relatively little simple meditation. But the talking was certainly not chat, or social in any way. It took place in a series of 'group sanzens', 45 minute sessions in which we would be sat in long lines, almost knee to knee with a partner (new partner for each session). Taking it in turns to ask our partner their question, we would listen or talk for five minutes, in my case in response to the question 'who am I?', then swap. The listener was not to react in any way, merely be a witness to what the other was saying. No facial expressions, no empathy, no nodding, nothing. After the initial biographical information had been dispensed with, the process became harder and harder, as I dug further and further into the essence of 'me'. There were 31 group sanzens throughout the weekend.

By bedtime on Friday evening I think I was in a state of something like shock. I made for what I thought would be the sanctuary of my campervan, but my head was full of the experience. I got about two hours sleep.

The next day was relentless and exhausting. By the end of the afternoon, I was feeling increasingly beaten and crushed by the mercilessness of the question 'who am I?' I felt almost desperate. I began to think I couldn't go through with it. I went to speak to Daizan, remembering he had said no-one has ever gone mad on this retreat. He told me I had already done important work and that many people experience the first day as the worst, that I would doubtless sleep better tonight and that good things would come. I decided to stick with it. Later, as my resolve returned during solitary walking meditation, a deer ran out of the forest in front of me. I'm not someone who tends to read significance into random events, but this seemed to be symbolic in some way. As if to underline the point, a second deer then ran after the first.

The following morning was easier and I found that I was discovering or re-learning things about myself that I had neglected for a long time. I won't describe in detail the next 24 hours. In some ways it's almost impossible to describe, but I also don't want to set up expectations for others who might be tempted to go on the retreat. Each of us has to experience it in our own way. But I will say that things got hard again for me and I was again tempted to leave. I was very ably helped to stay engaged by Pete and Matt, and I am so grateful to them, to Daizan and to all my fellow travellers, and so glad I stayed. For me, in the end, it was life-changing.

Daizan says that most people who attend this retreat 'get it', by which he means they experience a seismic shift of awareness at some point, often in the last hours or moments of the retreat, from which they can never return. As he says, once you have visited Paris, even if only for a few hours, you can never again be someone who has not been to Paris.