On leaving retreat and the search for justice

"I have a gift for you", said brother Phap Ban on the last day of summer retreat in Plum Village. "Two more days: your day of travelling home, and your first day at home. Use your breathing, use your awareness, arrive in each moment just like here. You will discover many new things, maybe see your home like it is for the first time."

I recognize the truth of this encouraging offer. Coming out of retreat is a very interesting process. The first time I did it, it was a shock. With my sense doors wide open, even the friendly train station in Bordeaux seemed a chaos of sharp sound, bright colours, stress and violence. I held on to my breath for dear life, struggling not to let my body and mind forget the reality of their spacious, relaxed true nature as I had experienced it during the past weeks. Of course, I lost it - after a week or so at home all my habit energies had resurfaced. I found myself positioned like a very unskilful hunter outside the fox's den - every time a new bad habit of body, speech or mind showed itself, I would try to whack it over the head as hard as I could, hoping to kill it off once and for all.

Unfortunately, bad habits don't respond very well to such a violent approach. The only result, predictably, was that the process of reverting to my usual not-so-mindful state became much more painful than it would have had to be. These days, coming out of retreat is a much more pleasant experience. I enjoy my enhanced awareness and concentration, and try to maintain them as long as I can, but I don't struggle. When my mind reverts to more common states, I go back to enjoying my everyday practice at home and with the sangha as best I can. But in the process, I often make interesting discoveries.

On the TGV towards Paris, the woman who came to check our tickets was young, tall, very beautiful and very stern. She smiled as she looked at our Interrail passes, but in her eyes there was something else - measuring, questioning, suspicion. "Excusez-moi", she said, and walked off with our passes to talk to her colleagues at the other end of the carriage. "We should fill those out", I said in shaky french as she came back, and reached for the passes to add today's date to them. But she held them back: "It is a bit late for that, isn't it? Boarding the train without having filled out your pass - that is what we call fraud." She seemed amused, in a cold way, enjoying framing these stupid people who were trying to rip off the SNCF but didn't have the brains to get away with it. I tried explaining and arguing; after all, we just hadn't known the importance of filling out our passes before boarding. But she wouldn't budge: "It is your responsibility to be aware of the rules", she said, and fined us 20 €.

As she left, my partner was visibly irritated, while I felt a familiar hot lump in my throat. At first, I wasn't sure what it was about. It wasn't the money - anyway, 20 € is nothing in the general bankruptcy of travelling to France by train. I leant back in my chair, coming back to my breathing and allowing the lump to be there, holding it with compassion. I found tears in my eyes. "I am sad", I told my partner with suprise, as the tears began to flow down my cheeks. "Oh", he said. "Why?" I didn't know. The interaction itself had been mildly unpleasant but really nothing that would have made me cry under ordinary circumstances.

Looking at the sadness welling up in me, I could feel the impulse to push it away, recognizing my habit of not allowing certain emotions deemed unfit for the public sphere and the conscious mind to manifest. This time, however, being so fresh out of retreat, I had the mindfulness and awareness to greet my sadness with friendliness and compassion. "Welcome", I whispered under my breath to the lump in my throat. "You are welcome here, my sadness." With this invitation, the feeling expanded, filling my whole chest, the whole of my abdomen, the whole of my heart and mind. I had the sensation of looking into a deep, clear well, a stream of cool, clear water springing up from the earth, flowing, flowing, flowing. It was painful, but not in the ordinary sense of the word, because there was so much release and relaxation in the experience. I felt I could continue to cry like this forever, like the well of tears would never run dry. My partner held my hands, breathing with me, letting me be.

"Looking deeply", said Thây in a retreat a few years ago, "is not about analyzing." I am still in the process of grasping what this means - my way of being in the world has been that of an intellectual and activist, where all activities are rooted in analyzing. In meditation, I am beginning to learn another way: just opening my heart and mind to that which calls for my attention, listening for the stories, images and emotions within it, without jumping to conclusions too quickly as regards what they mean. Breathing and looking into my sadness this way, the images that came up were, somewhat surprisingly, largely work-related. I saw myself bent over heaps of student papers, lecturing, bent over my computer, the endless days and nights struggling to finish yet another report or paper, all of these times when I try so hard, so very hard, and yet only very rarely feel deep in my heart that I do enough. I felt the deep injustice in how I judge my own efforts and how I treat myself. I realized that feeling unfairly treated by the woman checking our tickets had put me in touch with this deeper undercurrent of unfairness in my own life - my tendency to judge myself much too harshly, which is also mirrored in a tendency to judge others. Looking at this, I could feel infinite sadness, for myself and all others caught in the same net of judgement and harshness, and also the immense relief that would come with a greater degree of acceptance and appreciation.

As crying slowly subsided, I remembered how someone once asked Thây a question about how to be efficient in working for social justice. I have forgotten most of the answer, but I remember the beginning: "Before we can learn how to work for justice in the world, we have to learn how to be just to ourselves." I saw how being just to myself would mean recognizing more of reality: honoring my efforts, and seeing how both my success and my failures (like everything else on the planet) are the result of immense webs of causes and conditions, the majority of which are beyond my control at each point in time. Being just would mean not taking success and failure so personally anymore; relaxing, rejoicing. This would also mean much more space and energy in the work for justice in a wider, social sense.

As the conductor walked past again, I made a conscious effort to reach out to her in my heart. "Thank you", I told her in my mind. "Thank you for doing your job. Thank you for showing me sides of myself that I need to become more aware of. Thank you for giving me this moment of caring and intimacy with the man that I love. Thank you for the seeds of kindness in you heart." I had some resistance to this reaching out - some irritation at her tone, a little bit of righteous indignation. Still, I was able to see that this opportunity to look deeply was worth a lot more than 20 € and a little bit of humiliation, and aspire to gratitude.

So I see that brother Phap Ban was right: often very - if not the most - interesting things happen after retreat, if we allow ourselves to remain soft, open and attentive as we return to the world.