Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  All my colleagues have left for the Christmas break already. I find an empty cardboard box and start clearing out my desk. The scene – fired just before Christmas – seems too cliched to be real, yet it’s actually happening.

  I begin the long, sweaty walk up the hill to the station with the box. It is too full and starting to break, and I have to carry it with my arm under the bottom, like it’s a heavy child. I ring Patrick, who is now also living in Melbourne. He comes to get me and has to hide a grin when he sees my broken box full of novelty mouse-pads and my teary eyes. But that night in his brutalist Fitzroy bunker (concrete floors like an Eastern Bloc abattoir, stair rails so sharp they slice your hand like prosciutto) he also promises to do something for me, which everyone should do for their friends when they have lost their job: lend them money.

  I move back to my writing studio in the Nicholas Building in the city, where I go each day and sit at my desk like I have a lot of work to do – except I don’t. Instead I apply for jobs that I don’t get interviews for (my CV is looking like a blood bath – bodies everywhere), and ride the lifts up and down, chatting to the elevator operators (later immortalised in a Courtney Barnett song) who, like journalists, have jobs under threat because of technological change, and host fun Friday night parties. We dance to music coming from tinny speakers, as the lights of the Arts Centre spire and Flinders Street Station provide a glittering vista that feels less like a promise of a bright future and more like a mirage.

  Patrick encourages me to look at this unexpected break from work, this lacuna in my schedule, as a gift after a hectic ten years. I don’t need to be online all the time now. There’s nowhere to go, no place to be – it’s a good re-entry point into the search for serenity. I need it more than ever now. I am feeling really down about my situation – and am quite stressed about money. I apply for Centrelink, and trying to live on $450 a fortnight is fraught. My social life disappears and so does my confidence. My friends are mostly well established in their careers and don’t think twice when booking a restaurant that will cost $100 a head. They always offer to pay my share, but shame always accompanies my gratitude. They own their own houses in tony suburbs. I’m renting a room in a share house. I’ve been poor before, but this time feels more frightening. It lingers like a winter flu that you can’t shake off.

  The months pass. What if I never get back on my feet? Don’t people always say it’s much more difficult to get a job when you’re already unemployed? Each week dozens of letters from an ‘employment provider’ arrive with various appointments in bold. I have to do an English-language test and a skills test and meet with various skills assessors in a distant suburb who will place me in work (any work, they say – legislation mandates that you can’t be choosy). While I’m being processed through the awkward hybrid of a heavily bureaucratic, partly privatised job-seeking system – with its long wait times on the phone and queues on cheap office carpet and bombardment of appointment times and letters – I ask myself, What can I control in my life? The job thing I can’t really control; I just have to keep looking, and the process will take its course. The thing I can try to control is my response to this situation. Can I take the blows and still be chill? That’s the real test, isn’t it?

  I just need to bed down some techniques to help me get there. I decide to visit a monastery again (I am more mature now, not so easily spooked), to see if I can access serenity through routine, silence and prayer, and a silent meditation retreat, which draws on more Eastern traditions.

  I book a few nights at an Anglican monastery in central Victoria. It has the same prayer schedule and emphasis on silence as New Norcia but, being Anglican, there’s less separation between men and women. I’m allowed to eat with the monks and nuns. I can also talk at mealtimes. It’s only after dinner that the monks descend into what they call the Great Silence, which lasts from 8pm until early-morning prayer the next day.

  I’m prepared for the nightmares, the anxiety, the silence and the sometimes unexpected breakthroughs that can happen on retreat in a monastery. I know you have to be still, open yourself up and almost … wait, if you want to touch on any sort of mystical experience. Unlike in New Norcia, I’m the only guest here (which is weird) but, just like in New Norcia, my days are punctuated with prayer and silence. The spaces in between the prayer sessions are to be used for personal contemplation.

  The guest building is semi-modern, built in the 1970s or ’80s, and overlooks a large brown lake that’s badly depleted after a long drought. There are crucifixes in every room and faded religious paintings, but otherwise everything – not just the lake – is brown: the carpet, the walls, the tiles. It feels like I’m the guest of an elderly relative with a strong religious bent.

  I realise, with some shame, how tied to a certain aesthetic I am. How can one truly contemplate higher things amid such drab surroundings? Where are the dreaming spires? At least New Norcia looked epic and strange. Outside, the sun beats down hot and the winds stir the stagnant water of the lake. In the still heat of the night, mosquitoes buzz around the monastic single bed like a moving shroud, keeping my mind occupied with thoughts of pest control rather than the contemplation of higher things.

  Must be silent, I tell myself. Be Zen! ‘The quieter you become, the more you can hear,’ says American spiritual teacher Ram Dass. Yet in my head I run a continuous commentary, like I am a whinger on TripAdvisor rating everything from the meals to the masses – and finding them lacking. I’m so used to judging everything, having an opinion on everything, running it through a filter that labels every experience ‘good’ or ‘bad’, that I’m unable to stop even when it’s pointless to do so. What does it matter if I don’t admire the decor? Who cares? But my mind, used to constant stimulation, locks on to anything it can find in an effort to stop from falling into uncomfortable silence. There is abundant stillness at this retreat centre yet my mind is labelling this stillness as boredom – and driving this furious inner monologue.

  Outside prayer time, I’m left mostly to my own devices (literally – there is no tech ban here) and wander around the desiccated lake. It’s unlike a retreat in, say, Bali, where every minute is time-tabled and the spiritual experience is curated, with participants constantly kept entertained and engaged. But it’s the quiet and emptiness that attract people here. The abbot tells me they come to the monastery for the chance to evaluate their lives.

  Apart from the second morning, when I sleep in and miss the 4.30am prayer bell, I attend all the services dotted throughout the day. It’s mostly just me and the monks and nuns, but every now and again a fresh face – a person from a nearby farm, perhaps – scurries in and takes a place in the pew. I let the singing and the prayers wash over me, and I pray for things for myself and others – things big and small. (Oh please, Lord, let me be loved. Oh please, Lord, get me a job.) And I wonder about all the monks, in all these quiet and lonely retreat centres around the world, and all the prayers each day, thrown up into the sky like paper planes.

  The visitors who come to this monastery aren’t necessarily spiritual seekers. ‘A lot of people just come looking for a sense of space,’ the abbot tells me. ‘Sometimes they come from stressful situations. Some people go to a B&B or a pub but they don’t have the same ambience and peacefulness.’ A retreat, he says, is a chance to ‘bring the warring voices within your heart to stillness. It’s about creating peace within yourself. You have the power within yourself to make changes in how you think and react. Solitude can give people the opportunity to bring about change in their own life.’

  I am not there yet. I cannot seem to dive in and have that necessary deep look at myself – at least not here. Instead I fret about money, making calculations on my phone about how much rent I can pay before my savings run out. My time in Sri Lanka, the beautiful stillness I found there, seems like something from a lifetime ago. Why can’t I just drop into that state whenever I want? Is it like peak fitness, and once the goal has been reached it must be assiduously maintai
ned?

  When it’s time to go, the abbot takes me back to the main street. It’s an old country town with wide, tree-lined streets, pretty but also hot, dry and still. Apart from the flies, there’s an air of life suspended. I browse the shops and buy a shirt I can’t afford with beautiful stitching down the front, killing time until the bus comes to take me back to Melbourne. I see one of the monks in the dairy aisle of the supermarket, sweating in his heavy black robes, the rope of his belt swinging. He’s like someone dropped into the present from medieval times, the light in the yoghurt section shining back towards his face. The light in me bows to the light in you.

  *

  The next retreat I attend is only a few days later, but it’s quite different. It’s a silent meditation retreat at a Buddhist centre on the outskirts of Melbourne. The meditation is mindfulness and the vibe is spiritual, not religious.

  With its focus on meditation, I hope that this retreat will allow me to drop into stillness and access a serene core that I’m sure lies under layers of noise but have so far been unable to access in any meaningful way since Sri Lanka. I want to take my cues from the ocean: turbulent on the surface, but with still, unchanging depths below. And there’s the hope, too, that by developing my inner serenity I will be better able to cope with blows such as losing my job, the vulnerability and uncertainty of being unemployed. Right now I’m not feeling grounded enough to take the knocks.

  A number of books illustrate the concept of untapped internal wisdom and serenity with the proverb of the beggar. It goes something like this: a beggar has been sitting on a box for years, asking for money from passers-by. One day a dude stops and says, ‘What’s in the box?’ The beggar says, ‘I’ve been sitting on it for years but I have no idea.’ Finally the beggar splits the box open and, amazingly, a treasure of gold bursts onto the ground. He’s been sitting on it all this time and never even knew.

  All humans are the beggar, and, according to spiritual teachers, it is through stillness we become aware of and break open the box of treasure we are sitting on. The treasure is serenity. We can’t get to that place via our phones; we have to go inwards.

  Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writes: ‘Everything inside and around us wants to reflect itself in us. We don’t have to go anywhere to obtain the truth. We only need to be still and things will reveal themselves in the still water of our heart.’

  Franz Kafka says: ‘You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.’

  ‘Stay put! For godsakes, stay still!’ they all seem to be saying.

  Imagine the world rolling in ecstasy at our feet, rather than the streams of data that roll off our screens then slip through our fingers, leaving no trace except agitation. While certain practices in the wellness industry are dubious (detox, meh), it’s hard to argue with the quest to be more still, calm and contemplative. And here’s the other thing – stillness costs you nothing. Yet it is the battle between stillness and distraction that we must fight anew every day. No one I know even acknowledges this battle exists.

  *

  Of the twenty of us attending the silent retreat in Healesville, some are fresh out of long-term relationships, others are dealing with stressful lives, family situations or businesses, and some people come on retreat every year, almost as a rebooting exercise.

  The days start at 6am with meditation, followed by yoga, before participants gather for a vegan breakfast (incredibly delicious), which is eaten in silence. The setting in the Victorian bush is peaceful and quiet – there is a small woodland area (out walking one day, I see another participant literally hugging a tree) and below us, a really green valley – the sort you might see in a butter commercial – rolls out. One night I see a wombat walking slowly past my cabin, and during the day summer butterflies cluster above my head, moving cutely like GIFs.

  I’d discovered Aruna, the meditation teacher, via another Google search, and by the end of my time with him, I appreciate the luck of that random result. Aruna says a lot of things that weekend that hit the mark. But before the talking, there is a lot of silence – crucial to helping people evaluate their lives. ‘There is a busyness and craziness to most people’s lives,’ Aruna says, ‘and if people were to stop and look inwards, the activity of the mind would also be seen as busy and crazy.’

  After several days of silence and hours of meditation, people transform, Aruna tells me. ‘The tension in their faces releases and they become more relaxed. Stress levels reduce. It’s amazing to witness. It’s like they are in a different place, like an old part of them has dropped away.’

  People of all ages come to Aruna’s retreats, held here and in India. Some come because they feel dissatisfied, or sense there is more potential to their lives and something is holding them back. ‘There are always patterns from the past that are unresolved,’ says Aruna. ‘By turning inwards and by just “being” with these patterns, sooner or later a deeper insight dawns with a feeling of release. Then there is a resolution.’

  Some participants are facing a big decision and the retreat creates a space so they can work it out. ‘Sometimes it’s not time to make a decision but the mind always wants to know. When a decision doesn’t immediately happen, the mind impatiently worries. If there is trust and patience, the true answer will eventually arise from deep within with absolute certainty.’

  This is the state I am trying to access – the place deep within, where knowledge forms with absolute certainty, the rich seam of inner wisdom that lies dormant. The gold box that I’ve been sitting on all this time.

  *

  There are some experienced meditators on the retreat, as well as relative newbies like me. When it comes time to break the silence and ask questions, the beginners raise their hands and ask, ‘How do I stop the thoughts from coming?’ or ‘What if my leg aches and I need to change positions?’ The more experienced ones ask questions focused on sensations, rather than thoughts.

  One guy in his twenties who doesn’t wear shoes all weekend reports feeling a fire sensation in his chest and throat when he meditates. Another guy with long, silky brown hair reports seeing the colour purple.

  I want fire and purple too. Instead I get an interesting mix of anxiety (worries and fears buzz in my head, louder than usual), personal insights and lengthening periods of feeling sort of blank. The blank feeling is good – it feels like I imagine the sensation of serenity might feel: clear, like water, an emptiness that’s not particularly troubling, that doesn’t feel like a lack.

  Aruna talks about how we unconsciously process things. It usually goes something like this: action, reaction, contraction, tension. ‘The reaction is where a lot of blockage comes from – so react differently,’ he advises.

  There are other lessons. One of the most important is to live in the present. ‘You are here,’ Aruna says several times a day, meaning, ‘You are where you are meant to be.’ This is a hard one for me. Am I really meant to be unemployed right now? How to feel comfortable in this uncomfortable place? Going on Centrelink is not part of my life plan. I’m a striver and so are all my friends. We are ambitious and push for what we want. Sometimes my life looks chaotic on the outside, but don’t be fooled. I’m constantly writing lists about the future – short-, medium- and long-term goals; where I want to live; where I want to write; where I want to be; how to divide up the year. Always plotting and planning, I am, scribbling in my little journals.

  But we are told to stay firmly in the present. The past is a graveyard. The future is not here yet; it doesn’t exist.

  This radical acceptance of wherever you are right now can be life-changing if you take it on board. It means resisting nothing, because whatever is happening to you is supposed to be happening. If you resist nothing then significant levels of unhappiness would disappear immediately. But resisting nothing i
s, of course, easier said than done. And it seems a bit passive to just accept the status quo. Where does ambition fit into this philosophy? And social change?

  In the afternoon sessions there is a Q&A and I ask a lot of questions about this. (It’s great to talk again!) Are social justice and this yogic way of life incompatible? After all, social change only happens when we resist and push back against conditions we find intolerable.

  I go back and forth with this notion with Aruna, but don’t get the answer that I want to hear – which is that sometimes you must push really hard against the grain of life to effect change, that resistance can cause suffering, but sometimes it’s the best and only path to take. I mean, look at Gandhi …

  After three days of fatigue, a low-level hum of anxiety, boredom and agitation, on day four I feel clear – that is, I feel nothing, or neutral. According to the other meditators, this is a good sign. Sitting still for hours on end is more comfortable than before and emptying my mind out becomes easier. I am just a blank, mass of cells sitting in a room. Time passes … somehow. The past is a graveyard. The future doesn’t exist. This is life lived in the eternal now. Thoughts come and go but don’t stick around for very long. Is this serenity? I don’t know. There haven’t been any enormous revelations but there have been some modest insights. Some come as ‘flashes’ during meditation, others are just lurking around – stuff in the back of my brain that I haven’t got around to sorting out yet. Some sound like banal platitudes (Life is short! Be more vulnerable in your relationships! Appreciate your friends! Be grateful for your health!), but when they come to me in the silence of meditation, it’s like my heart is talking to me, not my head.