Five Days of Silence

Copyright 2017 American Academy of Psychotherapists (AAP). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Voices: the Art and Science of Psychotherapy and the American Academy of Psychotherapists, from 53, 1, Spring 2017.

“Breathing is the vehicle of spiritual experience, the mediator between body and mind...the connecting link between the conscious and subconscious, gross-material and fine-material.”

(Roshi Philip Kapleau from ​The Three Pillars of Zen​, p.12-13)

At Windhorse Zen Community, on the first day of a five-day silent retreat with other therapists, I sat in the ​zendo​, the meditation room, amid a confusion of sounds. The click-clack of wooden sticks. The ringing of bells. Before long, the sounds became like language: one ring of the bell signaled it was time to get settled before stillness, the wooden clappers signaled it was time to be still. Three chimes of the bell meant meditation was to start: Wake up! Wake Up! Wake Up! 

Waking up was not easy. Facing the wall, my gaze lowered to the floor, I got a headache while fighting an intense urge to sleep. And for much of the seven hours that we sat in meditation each day, thoughts crowded my mind. According to Buddhist teachings, thoughts obstruct our view of reality, and when we take our thoughts for reality, it is as if we believe a delusion. One of the main delusions is our sense that we are separate from the world and each other. Through quieting our minds, coming closer to what is known as “no-thought,” we wake to reality -- that we are a part of the whole of the world, that everything is, indeed, connected.

Each day when we chanted, one resident played the drum. It was a blast out of the trance of thoughts, out of the delusion of separateness. The drum resonated with the beats in my own heart, waking me up to my body, bringing me back home.

As the days went on, my thoughts, which had been busy, scattered, and numerous, layering atop one another in a heavy pile, became slower, easier to attend to, and fewer, the layers thinner and lighter. There were moments of clear, quiet. My attention to the body grew stronger. Sensitivity increased. The wall of thoughts, which separated me from the world, began to dissipate. In its absence: connection with self, the possibility of connection with others.

We woke up each day at 5:15 to the beat of a wooden fish drum. Out of silence and darkness, the steady, rich sound signaled morning. After dressing, I went downstairs to sip black tea and sit on the back deck, my face turned upward to see the sky, still dark. Behind me was a slim silver crescent of moon; to my right was the Little Dipper, to my left, the Big Dipper. There were shooting stars and faint traces of light -- were these traces truly in the sky, or projections of my own eye?

I became fond of the Little Dipper, who seemed to wait every morning for me. I knew it was against the rules. Each day we chanted about being no-self and chanted about free from giving up preferences for things, from mitigating attachment to what we desire. How could I profess to own something while I was attempting to move towards no-self, let alone to own the Little Dipper? But how could I help it? She was my favorite. And so, I took her as mine, tucking her into my pocket, close to my body. If I needed to, I could touch her when I lost touch with my own beauty. I could remember her jeweled nature, a formation of patterned light in seven stars. Ursa Minor, Little Bear. A piece of the vast sky. 

Quoting Chang-tzu our teacher said: ​“to the mind that is still, the universe surrenders.” ​He explained that thoughts make us separate, like we are looking at the world through a glass window. With no-thought our experience is less dual, he said, more unified. So many times I had the experience of looking at a beautiful part of nature, feeling one beat away, apart. But during this week, the quieter my mind, the more I could connect with and take in the immensity of the sky. I merged with the great landscape around me: mountains, planes overhead, red lights flashing from towers in the nearby city, trees, intricacies of tangling branches and leaves.

…

Now when the three chimes of the bell rang, the sound entered not just through my ears but through the right side of my torso, a small line of quickly moving energy. Soon I began to notice this energy coursing through my body, tiny pulses that flowed horizontally across my heart, my feet, my hip, my legs. There would be an intense vibration before it dissipated in a line, reminding me of the shooting stars.

In biology and in music, the concept of ​entrainment​ refers to two separate rhythms which, when they interact, adjust to one another, eventually becoming synchronized. Perhaps the vibration of the bell which echoed in my body did the same for each person in the room. Perhaps the bell entrained each of us to it, and thus, to one another: our minds and bodies pulsing in time to the speed and key of the bell. Sitting next to each other in silence, our bodies and the subtle aspects of energy within them, aligned.

Though I practiced meditation and used it frequently with my clients for years, at Windhorse I went deeper. Before, I trained my mind to follow the breath, to anchor my attention to the present moment, to notice thoughts without getting hooked into them, to welcome what was happening in the body with compassion, allowing it to soften. Yet there was always ​something​ to focus on, to observe. Now I was learning to stay with the breath, which gave my mind a scaffold, as I focused not on something,​ but turned toward emptiness. As my breath ebbed and flowed like waves, deeper in my body the unconscious was broiling and at times rose to the surface, coming into awareness. Quieting the mind, and following the subtlest breath, were my paths to this ocean of unconscious where both darkness and treasure lived.

The teacher, also a psychodynamic therapist, cautioned us that spiritual practice can be a defense and can be used to repress emotions. He encouraged us not to bypass emotions but to let them move through the body until their release, like a fishing hook caught in the skin. “Don't pull it back out,” he said, “pull it all the way through.”

When I encountered the unconscious, it arose as an emotion or sensation in the body, and very often, in the form of a thought connected to emotion. I learned to discern between distracting thoughts: “Why the hell is that guy next to me breathing so loudly?” and thoughts and memories that were inextricably woven into the deepest parts of me, that lived in my body. I followed these as they coursed through me, carried by my breath. Tears fell upon my cheeks when I had the thought, “I am good.” Silently, I repeated it in my mind over and over as the tears came in a wave and came again. Another time anger emerged accompanied by images of physical violence. Anger that needed to come up, to rise in my body, my heart beating strong and slow, blood traveling through my torso to my chest, lips curling, my breathing hard, then softer with its release -- to know my power and my strength.

...

At the retreat, we were ushered as a group into silence. We had rituals that went back thousands of years, each with choreographed movements. We followed the rituals and they became muscle memory, we experienced them in the body without crowding our minds with thoughts. We knew what came next in our practice by the sound of the bell. Each moment of each day we practiced no-thought, nonattachment to language -- in formal meditation practice, doing our work chores, during short breaks when we walked or rested. There was no sugar, no coffee. There was a limit to hair washing. No mirrors. No technology. No books or journals.

I experienced existence without my thoughts degrading it. The usual tangle of thoughts makes me sad or angry, weighs me down, or brings an anxiety just enough out of reach that I can’t put my finger on where it’s coming from. All of the discipline, the focused energy on no-thought and building silence, gave way to freedom. Small pleasures took on immense depth and color. After the last meditation each night, we were served fruit. Cantaloupe was the sweetest -- as my mouth filled with juices, every bud on my tongue was drenched in honey. Beneath the Milky Way, I placed the orange pieces into my mouth as slowly as I could muster.

The other important gift for me for me was community. Everyday, in ​kinhin​, a group walking meditation, we curved around the room, arms at our side, hands drawn together at our hearts. Adhering to the custom in Zen, I gazed down, towards the floor. I saw my cohorts only in peripheral vision, as I synchronized the rhythm of my steps to theirs. In a quiet, stark way we swiftly repeated the path, again and again. No one was more than or better than or less than. The pressures I normally feel in a group faded. We were together, in a line, walking. In this quiet community, I felt a blooming at the center of my chest. A spontaneous joy.

In the Zen existence it became clear to me that every moment I spent inside my head was wasting precious life - removing me from the immediacy of experience and intimate connections.

On the last day, in the ​zendo​, the sound of a radio fractured the silence in the room. Confused, I looked around to see sober faces breaking into smiles. The retreat was over. We began to hug one another with excitement and energy, saying: “We did it!” Projections I had during the silence were shattered by warm voices and hugs. A person I thought had been angry, judging me, gave me a glowing smile and told me we should keep in touch. Affection and laughter flooded the space that evening. Never had I felt so open, so included and so alive with a group of people. I laughed easily and joyously and constantly, until my cheeks ached. 

On the last day I walked in the wooded area surrounding the house, I saw tiny white blossoms. Two were curled, bent inward on themselves, with drops of water magnifying the pearly whites of their petals. I had almost walked past this, but now stood examining the intricate beauty, tears rising in me and coming to eyes, falling to my cheeks. The sights glowed in the light all around me. I looked up and noticed a leaf swirling in the sun, dancing in the shadow and slight wind like a carnival streamer. As I walked on there were more of the tiny white flowers, the ones I had almost failed to notice. But they were everywhere, in abundance, if one looked.

...

The Zentensive, created and led by Roshi Lawson Sachter, is a weeklong retreat for mental health practitioners, which combines a traditional Zen ​sesshin​ with teachings informed by Intensive Short-Term Psychodynamic Therapy (ISTDP). As the mind quiets, and we begin to see our thought patterns with more clarity, our unconscious mind becomes more accessible. Roshi Lawson facilitates this week specifically for mental health practitioners, with the premise that by exploring what arises in ourselves, we evolve our awareness and healing, which has profound implications for the work we do with clients.

The Zentensive and continued work at the intersection of Zen and ISTDP has had a significant impact on my practice as a psychotherapist. I am better able to use my own relationship with clients experientially, as it unfolds in the room, which requires a degree of sustained presence and emotional intimacy. I encourage clients to experience the emotions that arise from these in-the-moment exchanges, which usually leads them to identifying a familiarity, a memory, a pattern. And I am better able to be with them as they experience their feelings, and to encourage them to stay with the feelings themselves.

Furthermore, I acknowledge the immense mystery and complexity of the world and the self, and at the same time how limited our ways of knowing are, especially intellectually. I am able to sit with a client at the space before the unknown, without jumping to a theory as to why a symptom or phenomena is occurring. Instead, I am able to simply be present with the client and say, “We don’t know yet”, and turn to the pieces that we do know: the physical sensations and emotions that show up in the body, in the room.

Along these lines, I prioritize attention to the body and its wisdom as a path to knowing the self and mobilizing the unconscious. Our memories are not otherworldly things floating in brain chemicals, but quite physical, seated in the body. The Zentensive clarified for me that waves of emotions are intense bodily experiences, and that typically the activity of the intellectual mind blocks us from accessing the riches that are held within the body. With my clients I am better able to discern and interrupt thought patterns that are destructive or derail them from their true selves. Rather than engaging with these, I redirect attention to the body, helping clients bring awareness to their own physical experience.

The Zentensive changed me, and my practice with clients, deeply. After the Zentensive, my mind was quieter before sessions. In that stillness, I was thoroughly grounded when meeting with clients -- intrepid and at the same time, open and tender. Though life and my mind got busier in time, I have devoted myself to finding my way back, again and again, to stillness.