The gift of silent retreat

During a meditation retreat, a woman came up to me and mouthed how much she liked a particular jacket I had on because of the colors.

It was an awkward moment for me. If there is such a thing as a visual mumble, I am pretty sure I did that when I tried to smile and move on.

In strict retreats, even eye contact is considered a break in silence. One might even say that the loud colors on my jacket were inappropriate. Most people wore plain dark clothes.

In silent living, it is hoped that an environment is created that limits our stories or neurotic tendencies, because less is apt to get activated when we minimize the external stimulus. Then we just have our own minds to deal with. Except, people are still people.

I had a roommate at the same retreat who kept breaking the silence to ask permission to do things in the room or try to figure out how to minimize her discomfort with the silence.

Then there was the man who felt he had to tell me that the etchings on the metal lamppost were from squirrels gnawing at it and that perhaps they were meditating while doing this. I didn't see the connection, unless they were simply living out their "squirrel nature." But he was determined to tell someone and I was the nearest someone.

I was amazed and frustrated by how many people could not contain themselves.

Looking back, I had hoped to glide through the retreat in my own bubble. Yet, something about the woman who made her way through the crowd to express herself, broke through and pierced my consciousness in a particular way.

Pema Chodron talks about our attachments to stuff. What would it be like if someone liked our favorite red sweater, she asks, and we gave it to them. Right then and there.

Earlier this summer, I attended a Vipassana retreat with Ralph Steele who said, "Don't take what isn't given. What if you depended on your livelihood by receiving only what was offered? Now that is a radical idea."

I am struck by my own fears and tightness around money. If this doesn't squelch soulful living, I don't know what does. Yet, I don't want to be stupid about money and other resources either.

While my "story" includes periods when resources were very limited, I am not destitute. It was time to stop thinking of myself as impoverished and to let go of the grasping of material things. This is just one jacket.

My sense of this woman's delight moved me to give her the one-size-fits-all jacket at the end of the conference. She nodded an "ah-hah" as she remembered our intersection a few days earlier saying how much she loved the colors. It was the end of the retreat and time to go.

Who was this woman? She is the woman who liked bright colors and who expressed so elegantly in a non-verbal way something that brought joy to both of us. And, that is all that I need to know.