‘Did your teeth fall out?’
‘Pardon?’
‘In your dream.’
‘Err, no, they didn’t, ma’am.’
I meet a few more young people later that week. They come as a group every year and make an odd trio in Vespers – wearing beanies, they read from their psalm sheets then adjourn for ciggies in the courtyard.
Another guy, in his twenties with a thin, sharp face that makes him look much younger, tells me he’s been coming to the monastery regularly for several years after beating a drug addiction back in Perth. His life was out of control and home detox was a nightmare but ultimately worked. Going to the monastery for the first time was important, as it ‘broke a pattern inside me’, he says. Whenever he comes, he resets his commitment to being clean. He suggests that my nightmares could just be an adjustment I have to make. Like a junkie having withdrawals, I am detoxing from the trash of modern life.
He also tells me he doesn’t know what’s happening in the Big Brother house, if Tim is still in there and if one or both of the Logan twins have been evicted (one of the twins, Logan Greg, would go on to win the series). In my spare time I walk around the higher ground of the town, arm aloft with my Nokia brick, hoping for a phone signal, but my prayers remain unanswered.
At New Norcia I don’t find the serenity I’m searching for. Instead, I get the opposite experience: turmoil. I suspect if I had stayed at the retreat longer I would have come out the other end fine – peaceful, having sorted through the mess in my mind. Maybe the bad dreams were the first part of this sorting process – like my brain was throwing up the trash first, tilling the soil to prepare for something new. I just didn’t give it enough time.
The silence does allow me to see that there is a lot of disquiet in my subconscious. It is like going into an attic filled with junk that hasn’t been touched for years. By moving a few things around, lifting things up, inspecting them, the surface is upset, dust and dirt fly about, bats are disturbed and flap around – and you just want to shut the door, pretend the whole thing didn’t happen. But it has happened. The right thing to do is finish what I’ve started, no matter how painful the process. I feel like this acknowledgement is the first step on the path to serenity – a path I realise now is more difficult than first thought. After all, people spend their whole lives in the monastery – serenity is a project that has to be made anew each day.
The thing that was missing for me at New Norcia was the lessons. I went in cold, and you don’t just stumble across serenity. You have to be shown the map and taught how to drive yourself there. Then you have to work at it again and again and again.
Back in Sydney, in the taxi on the way home from the airport, past the bright lights, the madness and noise of Kings Cross, there’s breaking news on the radio. London’s been attacked by terrorists – scores dead, hundreds maimed. The cabbie swears softly and turns up the volume. We drive slowly past the Coke sign and the neon-lit strip clubs because drunk people keep staggering in front of the cab. I think of the rustle of the long, dry grass in the night winds and the monks praying out there in the vast West Australian silence, oblivious to what’s going on in the wider world, and that T.S. Eliot line comes unbidden: Lips that would kiss/ Form prayers to broken stone.
A year later I’m living in London, just round the corner from where the bombs went off. I’m working at CNN as a features writer, which to this day remains one of the great jobs of my life. I’m plunged into the expensive, scented, pampered, posh segment of the wellness industry, where you pay people to touch you. My job is to review day spas. Two colleagues and I are working on a mini health and wellness website. We gather for editorial meetings and discuss our ideas.
‘Yar, I think we should do veganism. There are all these celeb vegans around at the moment – like Stella McCartney.’
‘Yar, great! You should go vegan for a week. “My Vegan Hell”, or some shit like that. What else we got?’
‘Bespoke barber shops for men – the ones that serve Veuve and have heated towels.’
‘Yar, fab!’
‘There’s this spa in Mayfair – they do birdshit facials. Apparently the phosphate in the shit is great for your skin!’
‘Love it! There’s also the five-hour gold-leaf spa thingy treatment at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge. They roll you in real gold leaf and then baste you in a private sauna.’
‘I think that’s where the reflexology guy is. The one who used to work on Princess Diana.’
‘He also did Mandela’s feet.’
And on it goes. All the spas open their doors to us – and from limb to limb we are stroked on a daily basis by London’s finest.
My housemates have serious jobs on newspapers – foreign desk at the Telegraph, business desk at the Times. They are pasty from the lack of sun, their necks and shoulders aching from hours spent hunched in front of computers under fluorescent lights. When they come home from work, shattered, I’m lying on the couch, glistening and dewy, sleepy and slippery from all the treatments, oils and creams that have been slathered on me. The therapists instruct me not to shower after the treatments so the lotions can soak in. I’m so moisturised that my grip is terrible. I can barely open doors. Yet I always smell expensive – like a wallet full of flowers. My main concern in life is that my skeletal structure might dissolve because I’m being massaged so much.
Then one week at our regular Soho House meetings (‘Who wants to volunteer for the coffee bean facial? We also need to cover the Holborn Musical Massage.’) the topic of meditation comes up. Meditation … wot dat? Some old-timey thing practised by Beatles in India and rich hippies in Hampstead? But who does it now? Who has the time or the patience – particularly right now, with the internet and this Facebook thing suddenly everywhere, taking up everyone’s time?
Mindfulness will become mainstream about seven years later, in 2014, a resurgence caused partly by the internet itself, which will splinter and shatter everyone’s concentration into teeny-tiny shards. But in 2007, meditation is still mysterious, even kind of daggy, associated with joss sticks and ugly clothing made from hemp.
My editor dispatches me to the London Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green to find out more. Maybe meditation is the thing that was missing during my time at New Norcia. Maybe it would give me the skills to stop, go inward and find serenity in a structured, deliberate way. You see, despite my great job, moisturised skin and relaxed muscles, a hunger still niggles away at me. A hunger of the spiritual kind. It’s never really gone away. I think of it as something submerged (like I’d been the week before, in a skin-plumping rose-petal bubble bath at Jurlique in Chiswick).
Over the English summer I’d stayed at a monastery in Wales for a week, and one lonely Christmas during my first months in London I’d stopped at a church in Bloomsbury after passing by and hearing a soaring fragment of a hymn. In a cold pew down the back I softly wept for reasons I did not understand. Something was missing.
After work one Thursday night I go to the London Buddhist Centre, meet Maitreyabandhu – he has one name, like Prince – and learn how to meditate. In one of the centre’s rooms, with the lights low, I practise something called Loving Kindness meditation with a group of people, mostly in their twenties and thirties, from all over the city. It feels like sending ripples of goodness into the world using only the power of our thoughts. Maitreyabandhu, the Buddhist monk who teaches us, is convinced that meditation is an effective treatment for people with anxiety and depression, and is building a new hall in the centre to cater for this cohort.
He is ahead of his time. He sees meditation as not just a tried-and-true way of relaxing, but also a bulwark against the distractions that are multiplying at a rate never experienced by humans before (this is around the time that Apple releases the first-ever iPhone, and everything changes). Distraction is the enemy of serenity. Serenity is depths and silence. Distraction is surfaces and noise. Aldous Huxley wrote of his famous novel, Brave New World, ‘Nonstop distractions
of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.’ And to this we could add paying too much attention to our quiet, inner, spiritual life. Man’s appetite for distraction, writes Huxley, is ‘almost infinite’. He was writing from the relative calm of the pre-internet 20th century, a time of ‘newspapers and television’, about distractions that ‘exceeded even the greatest excesses of Rome’. What would he make of today, when distractions are so numerous and overpowering they exceed even the visions of his brilliant imagination?
After the meditation class finishes – and I feel more relaxed than if I’d just had a three-hour, four-hand massage in a replica Egyptian crypt in a Kensington day spa – Maitreyabandhu explains to me why meditation is more necessary now than ever: ‘Modern life is incredibly complicated and fast. That is very stressful for the mind and body, and people’s quality of life diminishes. We are obsessed with choice, and people often choose things that are not in their long-term interests. You can easily feel you’ve taken the wrong path.’
I confess to him that for the last couple of years I’ve been a secret searcher – looking for something without pinning down exactly what it is that I’m looking for. Maitreyabandhu sees it all the time. ‘People feel there’s a definite meaning vacuum,’ he tells me. ‘People are increasingly realising materialism is not working; choice is not working. The basic assumption is that the more choice you have, the happier you’ll be. But what people really need is a sense that their lives matter.’ As a result of our rushed lives we can also lose touch with ourselves. Meditation is a way of checking in and assessing how things are going. We may be able to catch situations or patterns before they develop into something more entrenched.
What Maitreyabandhu says makes a lot of sense. Rather than just treating stress with an expensive massage, a practice like meditation tackles the stress before it starts to build up. From a place of calm and serenity we can better tackle the vicissitudes of life. That night I sign up for a week-long ‘urban retreat’ that Maitreyabandhu is running, to see if meditating every day and being mindful can improve my moods, sleep patterns and anxiety levels.
Before it starts, I meet with the other participants. Each person has a different reason for wanting to practise meditation. Some people want to eat more mindfully and cook more, others want to go out less and have a few more quiet nights at home reading a book. One man didn’t want to lose his temper so much with his builders, another wants to reduce the importance of his work and have a more balanced life.
If there’s one common issue in this group, it’s anger triggered by commuting on public transport. Everyone starts the day in a bad mood as a result. ‘It all goes downhill from there,’ said one Tube-hater. Many also report being anxious or worried about the future and are not inclined to ‘live in the moment’. These are all concerns common to anyone living in a large and busy city. But could we stay in London and still find serenity?
Maitreyabandhu advises us to keep our urban retreat week goals realistic. Things like meditating at the London Buddhist Centre for an hour before work are well and good, he advised, but if you are an hour and a half from the centre, are you really likely to rise at 4am each day, particularly if public transport makes you angry? Won’t that make you more unhappy, and defeat the purpose?
Instead he says to aim to come into the centre and meditate for just one or two mornings this week. And instead of radically changing habits such as diet, do something like switch off the TV for a week, or walk to work.
What is important about the week is to be what Maitreyabandhu calls ‘mindful’. Mindfulness is a technique that can lead you to serenity. It is the first time I’ve heard the word that by 2014 would be here, there and everywhere – used as a cure-all for everything, from becoming more productive to having better sex to making more money. It would even be so ubiquitous in the corporate world that some charge the practice with enforcing the neoliberal agenda. Corporations like mindfulness because it ‘keeps us within the fences of the neoliberal capitalist paradigm’, management professor and Zen practitioner Ronald Purser says in the New Yorker. ‘It’s saying, “It’s your problem, get with the program, fix your stress, and get back to work!”’ But all that is to come. In 2007, mindfulness has yet to be corrupted by the market.
Maitreyabandhu explains that mindfulness involves being present in the moment, being aware of your surroundings and not letting your mind constantly race ahead to what may happen in the future or dwell excessively on what happened in the past. He advises that mindfulness can be achieved by spending time away from the internet and TV, walking instead of driving, and, of course, meditating.
While we will be spending time at work and doing our usual routine during the retreat, it will be with a twist – with this twist promoting mindfulness. Maitreyabandhu will be sending us text messages throughout the week, and we can also log on to his daily blog. Maitreyabandhu advises us to put a shrine on our desks and change our computer passwords to something that will remind us we’re on retreat. We are given a green wristband to wear throughout the week. Each time we look at it we are supposed to remember we are on retreat and to be mindful. Someone suggests that whenever we hear a siren – a very London sound, particularly for me as I live near a major hospital – we should remember to be mindful.
Maitreyabandhu also allocates us a retreat buddy. He advises us to identify potential stress points in the week, such as a deadline or a meeting with someone we find difficult, and contact our buddy to help us remain calm.
It’s Monday morning, the first day of the urban retreat, and the first text from Maitreyabandhu arrives. Relax your eyes, relax your belly, it reads. I am on a bus, stuck in Oxford Street traffic, and suddenly I feel relaxed and mindful. I puff my stomach out, I slouch in my seat and touch the green wristband. I’m not just on a packed bus going to work, I’m on retreat.
Feel the sun on your back! he texts as I am walking down Great Marlborough Street – and as instructed, I do. It feels good.
It is a gentler introduction to the workings of your inner life than going into a monastery cold, like I’d done with New Norcia. And because you are still working and living in your city while doing the retreat, it follows that the things you learn can be integrated more fully into your normal life.
The week continues. I go to work. I go to the gym. I go to the theatre. I go to the pub. I spend at least twelve hours in the spas of west London, being rubbed down with salmon roe foam or chocolate mousse or fox placenta. I have a flotation tank session. I have a whole body scrub exfoliant thing. I have a jet massage thing. I have a hot stone thing. I have an oil scalp massage. I lie in dim waiting areas on chaise longues in hotel bathrobes, sipping lemongrass tea from tiny ceramic cups and reading Tatler in cool blue rooms where it’s forever twilight. It’s lovely but I can now see this is all surface serenity. The real stuff lies within and cannot be bought or sold.
While I’m doing the same things I always do, the text messages and the blog keep me focused on being on retreat. I become more aware of what stresses me out, so I do pre-emptive strikes. I walk to work instead of taking public transport. When I go to the pub I have one drink instead of three or four (conscious drinking, it’s called) and I spend a couple of nights at home, cooking healthy food.
The highlight of the urban retreat is when I haul myself out of bed before 6am and go to the Buddhist Centre for 7am group meditation. It is tough. I am still new to meditation and an hour sitting in silence feels like having an itch I can’t scratch. Time moves so slowly. But afterwards I feel energised. Before we head off to our various workplaces, the group has breakfast together at the cafe next door, all of us still wearing our green wristbands. There’s a sense of community developing. It feels good.
Maitreyabandhu warns that discipline is needed in order to continue to experience this meditator’s high. ‘One of the big disciplines
in life is to put aside time for things that are good for you. We’ve all watched hours of TV and felt empty. How do we convince ourselves to do something better?’
I leave the retreat vowing to meditate every day. Such good intentions! But life and its many distractions get in the way – and Bethnal Green requires three line changes on the Tube and a bus. It’s not meant to be – at least not this time. The techniques I was learning are harder to integrate into my real life than I thought. My job is busy, I’m making lots of new friends, London is exciting and on weekends I get the Eurostar to Paris, or take four days off in Italy. I am young and have few cares. I start working on a novel, and go inward that way – via my imagination. Serenity can wait. At this point in my life, I feel I don’t really need it after all.
But, of course, life changes – it always does.
By 2010 I have returned to Australia, and superficially my life resembles the life I had before I left for London, when I was working at the Sydney Morning Herald and living in Potts Point. Sydney is a beautiful trashbag who won’t let me go too deep or get too much sleep. I play hard and work hard. Serenity is not a priority. My new job is as a news editor of a tabloid news website. My shifts often start at 5am. I am running on what we call the Tabloid Treadmill. It never lets up.
Warm, windy dawns; wet, empty streets; the occasional ghostly jogger running down New South Head Road in the dark; ABC News Radio on in the cab, with its urgent-seeming headlines repeated in fifteen-minute loops; weary, lonely taxi drivers … By the time I get into work, I’m plugged into the vast matrix of news – the restless, relentless 24/7 newsgathering cycle that never sleeps. By 6am the team has read every major news website in the English-speaking world and I’m preparing the morning lists and commissions.
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