Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  But with yoga there’s something else, something other than movement, some other alchemy which gets all of us – teachers, students, celebrities and beginners – in its thrall. There’s something else at work, other than the contraction and release of muscle, other than your heart pumping your blood a bit harder.

  Yoga opens you up. Channels within you that you didn’t know you had (the body within your body) make themselves felt. These channels force you open and make you feel more loose and alive.

  The yoga sermons lose their potential to annoy and instead can hit you in tender, devastating places.

  You drink them up. You didn’t realise you were so thirsty.

  It’s a mild winter in Western Australia. Patches of wildflowers have already blossomed, and the road weaves through the canola fields like a ribbon in bright yellow hair. I’m in the car with my three younger brothers, and we are driving to the monastery town of New Norcia, where they will drop me off to do a religious retreat. It’s my first, if you don’t count the ones we had to do for school, and I am nervous.

  The week before, I had hopped jauntily on a bus at Sydney’s Central Station for a travel assignment and disembarked in Perth five days later, bent over like a crone. The five-day trip across the Nullarbor had soldered my body into the shape of the seat on the Greyhound bus. We’d driven through each night and emerged from the darkness into brilliant dawns and then … nothing. The road was flat and featureless. Kangaroos moved around the periphery like the dots that swim in your vision when you’re tired. There were two drivers and they did the trip in shifts. On the bus were just four other passengers. We all sat apart and didn’t make eye contact, even at the roadhouses and toilet blocks. To start a conversation might get you caught in something dull for days, duller even than the road. It was a bitch of an assignment – sleeping sitting up, truck-stop pies for dinner, and, at the end, the gleaming Perth bus depot, rinsed with morning sun.

  The travel editor of my newspaper knew the assignment would be gruelling and not particularly glamorous. Would I perhaps like to do another travel story when I arrived in Perth? Cover something I was truly interested in? Maybe Rottnest Island? Or the Margaret River wineries?

  ‘Well, there is this place,’ I tell him. ‘It’s sort of weird. A hippy I met at a fruit market told me about it. It’s a Benedictine monastery in the middle of nowhere and they accept guests.’

  ‘Odd place to choose, but yeah, sure,’ said my editor. ‘Whatever floats your boat.’

  And so off I went.

  *

  That year, 2005, I’d started having this weird thing with spirituality and religion, a tentative flirtation that seemed to come from nowhere. In those early days, I couldn’t quite own up to it, and was disguising my curiosity under the detachment of reporting assignments for the Sydney Morning Herald.

  Initially I started attending evangelical church services as a reporter. For youth night after work on a Friday or for service on a Sunday, I trekked ninety minutes out to the suburbs and the mega-church Hillsong. I was fascinated with this new, different and spectacular way people were worshipping. It was such a break from the traditional church of my youth – the cycle of sitting, kneeling and standing, the murmured incantation of the Sanctus, the incense and the old men in purple vestments. The modern churches were fishers of men – just like religion has been forever, but on their hooks was a tastier type of bait. They knew how people were living – these aspirational, prosperous John Howard voters in the suburbs – so when there was a group baptism at the church, there was also a giant screen showing rugby league, with a free sausage sizzle. The church leaders I interviewed spoke as if religion were a product: was it attractive enough, did it offer enough for people to choose it? Self-realisation and self-actualisation were recurring themes in our discussions.

  I found myself being drawn in. I was living the high life in Sydney. I had a good newspaper job and a flat in Potts Point with my friend Patrick, a political staffer. We fancied ourselves as It kids, part of a scene where everyone seemed to work in politics or the media. We hosted a lot of dinner parties and on some perfect, rowdy nights in our cave-like flat, it felt like we were at the centre of the universe.

  But what I was really seeking under the noise, movement and entertainment of my life was something deeper, more quiet and difficult to fathom. It was a quicksilver element that moved beneath the surface of all things. In this mysterious, non-secular space, things existed that could be felt but not seen.

  Something else also existed there: serenity. I define this not just as walking around feeling chilled, but, in the words of a religious friend of mine, as ‘the peace that the world cannot give’.

  I didn’t have serenity at home or at work – there was too much noise and excitement. I had to look for it, but I wasn’t sure where. Did it exist out there – at a yoga retreat? Or a church? Or was it in you, in some hard-to-reach place that only the mystics and the saints could access? And, if so, how could a normal schlub like me get there? (This question about whether serenity and divinity can be drawn from an external source, such as church-based worship, or whether divinity resides within, is one of the perennial debates in religious/spiritual circles.)

  Serenity was the missing piece of the puzzle in my quest for wellness. I had been doing yoga for around six years but hadn’t started connecting with the spiritual stuff it offered. Time and time again, year after year after year, I would be told: you can get the clean, lean body, you can glow on the outside, but unless you attend to your inner life, the project is only partly complete. The balance is off. Serenity is the rock on which all else can be built. If your foundations are built on sand, then all that rests on them is liable to collapse.

  And so, in 2005, in Western Australia, I began the search for serenity. It would prove infinitely more difficult and ultimately more rewarding than my quest to be clean and lean. It would take me to all corners of the globe, and expose me to many of the world’s major religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism. It would also introduce me to many people who had stripped the major religions for parts, and constructed something new, modern and strange. ‘This is how you get serenity,’ they would say, serving you food with complicated rituals and rules attached (food that had been dried and then cooked at temperatures of less than 46 degrees, or prepared by people wearing only white garments, or farmed in accordance with the ancient principles of the terroir), making you meditate on earth that contained electromagnetic vibrations or listen to ancient Sanskrit poetry – and charging you thousands for it.

  Sometimes it would work … a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But some of these ‘products’, as I would come to think of them, were a scam – latching on to what is a very human, and sometimes very desperate urge to glimpse the divine and also find inner peace.

  I wasn’t the only one looking. The search for serenity was becoming big business in the wellness industry, and over the next twelve years I would see it morph from a fringe, hippy concern to something vast, global and corporate.

  Serenity itself, the peace that the world cannot give, is a slippery beast. I’d find it, and hang on for dear life, but if I didn’t pay attention, if I didn’t create rituals and habits around it, it would vanish, and I would be in the same stressed, agitated place I had started. That feeling of something solid, immoveable and grounded was missing.

  But first, the start …

  *

  New Norcia is a remote Benedictine monastery town almost two hours from the most isolated city in the world – Perth. This makes New Norcia one of the most far-flung retreats on the planet. In the middle of nowhere, there won’t be any distractions. Perfect, right? Travel writer Pico Iyer, who regularly attends retreats, spoke highly of his visit to New Norcia:

  In the thirty years of almost constantly travelling around the world, I have seldom met a place so clarifying and calm as New Norcia. It makes you think again about what matters; it returns you to a sense of stillness and co
mmunity that’s hard to find in the modern world; it refreshes the soul better than any holiday. The only hardship of coming here is leaving.

  It’s also a hardship to get there. But otherwise there are few barriers to entry. You just contact the monastery and reserve a room. You don’t need to be religious, and there’s a suggested donation for food and accommodation that is quite affordable (around eighty dollars a night). It fits with the Benedictine creed: Welcome the stranger as you would welcome Christ himself.

  ‘Please come with me,’ I beg my brothers as we near the unusual-looking township of New Norcia. We’ve been playing pool and drinking beer in the old, grand and shady pub at the edge of town. It was nice in there, convivial and social, even though I was beaten at pool. The four of us – my three brothers and me – are hardly ever together all at once. Why am I cutting short time with them to spend time with me? After all, I’m with me all the time.

  I am losing signal on my phone one bar at a time, and my heart sinks as my brothers drop me at the gates. There’s no TV at the monastery – that’s fine, but I’ve become addicted to season five of Big Brother and no one will be able to text me the winner. The lack of comms and the strange old-fashioned buildings make me nervous, like Marty McFly finding himself in 1955.

  New Norcia is unlike any place I’ve visited in Australia. Fringed with palm trees and surrounded by fields of wheat, it could have been lifted straight from the plains of Spain’s Andalusia. It’s incongruous, plonked here in Western Australian farming country. It has two now-abandoned orphanages, once used to house children who were not strictly orphans – they were Indigenous kids, some taken from their families under government order (though I had to really prise anything about the stolen generation out of the guide when I went on a town tour).

  In 2017 the town made news for having the highest rate of clerical sexual abuse allegations for any Catholic institution or diocese, according to figures released by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The report found 7 per cent of priests from all Catholic Church authorities across Australia were accused of child sexual abuse from 1950 to 2010, but for the Benedictine Community of New Norcia the number was more than triple that, at 21.5 per cent.

  It’s no surprise, then, that the town pulses with dark undercurrents – or, as one of my brothers observed just before he shut the car door and drove away, ‘This place has bad vibes.’

  There have been no abuse allegations since 1980, and the town has reinvented itself as a tourist destination and gourmet food producer. According to the tour guide, the Benedictine monks make some of the most sought-after bread in the state, served at many of Perth’s top restaurants. From the New Norcia gift shop you can also purchase olive oil, something delicious and very calorific called New Norcia nut cake, pan chocolatti, almond biscotti, wine, port and beer.

  But beyond the pub and the gift shop, the monastery itself is vast and foreboding, set on 8000 hectares of farmland. It’s the sort of place you go alone, to be alone. The tourism is of the spiritual variety. There, you look for God, serenity – whatever you want to call it – and you work things out. One guest tells me that men turn up here in the middle of the night, having driven from Perth – desperate, with nowhere else to go. As per the Benedictine creed, the monks take them in, feed and water them, and in return the men work on the farm. In the silence and the space they get their heads together over three, four, six months. It’s like something from a Tim Winton novel. One day in the dining room my eyes lock with a young man in work boots with a missing thumb and a radiant sadness. He could have been a template for one of Winton’s broken men.

  The monastery is home to a community of sixteen monks who follow the rules laid down by Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism. Benedict (480–543) was a young Roman ascetic who wanted to devote himself to spiritual exercises and communal living, emulating the Egyptian Desert Fathers and Mothers of the third century. He wrote a handbook on how to live monastically, including the rule that monks should take a vow of obedience, stability and communal living to a particular abbey, where they would spend the rest of their lives. That’s right – the rest of their lives! It is so rare these days for anyone to spend their life doing one thing, in one place. Modern spiritual life – including retreats – tends to have more of a ‘drop-in’ quality. You have an intense few days or a week in a place, then go back to your normal life. The idea of committing to a lifelong spiritual practice in one place is mind-bending.

  The monks spend their time mostly in prayer, observing the following timetable: 5.15am – Vigils, 6.45am – Lauds, 7.30am – Conventual Mass, 12.05pm – Midday Prayer, 2.30pm – Afternoon Prayer, 6.30pm – Vespers, 8.15pm – Complines. The rest of the day is taken up by two hours’ work in the morning, two hours’ work in the afternoon, one hour of communal conversation (the day is mainly spent in silence), and meals, eaten in silence with someone reading aloud from a book.

  Immediately I chafe at one of the rules – male guests are allowed to eat with the monks, but the female guests must eat in the general dining room. This seems like such a throwback until I remember where I am: a Benedictine monastery in the middle of nowhere. It’s not meant to be progressive.

  On the first night in the general dining hall, I share meals with two women in their sixties. I begin a conversation full of steam, only to be greeted with pursed lips, cross looks and silence. One woman points to the hand-drawn sticker on her jumper. It reads, ‘Hello my name is Jan & I am on silent retreat.’

  ‘Oh, hullo, Jan. Does that mean you’re not talking?’ I ask idiotically. I am answered, again, with silence.

  The silence at New Norcia is famous. People come here from all round the world to hear … nothing. They just want to luxuriate in the great, vast, heavy silence of the place. In this context, small talk at dinner is a pollutant.

  Serenity is reached at New Norcia via silence, prayer and routine. The prayer timetable is pinned up in the dining room. Guests are encouraged to join the monks for prayer and mass daily at 7:30am. Most guests attend all prayer services – and then when the monks go back to the farm, the bakery or olive press, guests usually rest, read, contemplate or meditate or ramble around the massive farm. Apart from meals there’s very little interaction with others at the monastery.

  I speak with one of the monks, who tells me one of the most important elements of staying at New Norcia is developing a closer relationship with God. Strip away noise, entertainment, mobile phone reception and shopping, and replace it with farming, country life and daily prayer, and ‘the spiritual communication channels open up’.

  Some people go on retreats so they can find God, but the Benedictine way is to assume that God is already there; it’s just a matter of opening yourself up to him. It’s harder to open yourself up to God if you are talking all the time – to others or in the endless, mostly tedious monologues we have in our heads. The silence, in this context, has a sort of preparatory quality: you prepare yourself to be passive, to yield, to receive and accept. The intellect and the ego must recede for this to happen.

  At New Norcia, it’s easy to feel as though God – or at least some spiritual presence – exists. You’re stripped of distractions. No phone signal, no TV. At night the sky is vast, black and thick with stars. Apart from the pub, there are no buildings nearby, so no light pollution. The darkness is complete and the clean, dry air has a purity about it, smelling of nothing but the faint, sweet taint of wheat. There’s the occasional rumble from a truck or car travelling down the Great Northern Highway, the rustle of the wind through the high, dry grass, and the bells for prayers, but otherwise it’s totally and utterly quiet.

  I go for walks around the farm at night after Complines (it’s so dark that one night I fall in a hole) and register the vastness of the sky and the low clouds and moon as a distinct, almost malevolent physical presence (aka the ‘bad vibes’). The silence and the emptiness have an oppressive, blanket-like quality and do not, for me, e
quate with peace. Instead they leave me feeling unsettled and agitated. After several days of this – plus prayers – I am keen to leave. Some of the prayers are disquieting, Old Testamenty stuff. We are warned of this with flyers at breakfast, informing us that today we would be reciting some ‘problem psalms’. It’s like a monastic trigger warning.

  That week, I experience New Norcia as a sort of shadow land. God (or something) is here – I sense a mysterious presence – but it’s not a calming sort of god. It is large and awesome, and, when I’m walking under that massive sky, in a curious inversion of my Big Brother addiction, I feel watched.

  At least I’ll sleep well here, it’s so quiet! I think on my first night as I turn in early in my little room near the chapel. But no! New Norcia has other plans for me. That night I have nightmares of epic proportions: visceral and squalid, more real and scary than anything I’ve experienced before (apart from the time I took acid, had too much and my hand disappeared). It’s still dark when the bells for Vigils wake me at 5am, and it’s only after Vespers at 6:30pm that I stop feeling frightened. The nightmares also leave a curious moral taint, like my subconscious is throwing up things I’ve previously locked away: anyone I’ve ever sold out, everyone who’s sold me out, every story I’ve ever written that someone didn’t like, every bit of shade thrown my way, all the gossip, all the shame, all the insecurities.

  The next night I dream that all my teeth are falling out in shards, and I try but fail to push them back into my gums. It’s terrifying and grotesque. When I’m woken for Vigils, the first thing I do is check my mouth, unable to shake off images of blood, saliva and enamel crumbling like broken biscuits into my hands. That evening in the courtyard, agitated and distracted, I risk censure for breaking the silence and approach someone who turns out to be a lovely and quite chatty theology student visiting from Kentucky. ‘This is not a place you go to lightly,’ he said of New Norcia (not the courtyard). ‘This place kinda stirs things up in you. I’ve had nightmares as well. It has a vibe to it.’