The Long & Winding Road Back to Ourselves
2024 kicked my butt. Not gonna lie, it felt relentless. There were plenty of personal struggles and who can deny that the global scene — political & environmental — has felt particularly fraught. I arrived with some trepidation at the Buddhist Retreat Centre via ‘a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it’ (Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country). What would happen when I stepped off the mad mad merry-go-round?
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The first time I visited the BRC, 13 years ago, my children were little and my parents were living in Umdloti on the North Coast of tropical Kwa-Zulu Natal. Just about every holiday growing up we spent in neighbouring Umhlanga. My grandparents had a wonderful holiday home and our Christmases were made so special by them and their unmatched hospitality.
So I left my little ones with my parents and borrowed my mom’s car to give myself three days self-retreat at the famed BRC, voted top amongst the world’s best retreats, and rightly so. It is also one of the few places in South Africa that truly runs on Buddhist principles. Those three days were important, but not necessarily easy. I hiked a lot, something I missed as a mother of small children, and made some peace with my new reality.
Give up to grace.
The ocean takes care of each wave 'til it gets to shore.
You need more help than you know — Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
As a visiting teacher, the generosity shown by the BRC knows no bounds. This, my third time facilitating there, I was gifted 10 days to slowly allow my knots to untangle themselves and my mind to become more tranquil. As I gazed at the mist rolling in, basked in the sun, watched the darling troop of monkeys doting on their batch of tiny babies, listened to the birdsong, relished the delicious food, my days started to feel measured, my nervous system began to simmer down.
I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us — Anne Lamott
Every morning I woke with the dawn chorus around 5. Then enjoyed a walking meditation in the lovely labyrinth, followed by a sit in the zendo.
You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it — Mary Oliver
Breakfast brought fruit salad and the world’s most delicious chai along with porridges and cooked goodies served with the mouth watering farm baked breads. The kitchen fairies are tremendously skilled and clearly love their work.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. — Flannery O'Connor
Meditation Medicine
My days were spent practicing yoga, qi gong, hiking, reading beneath a tree and meditating, which comes from the same Latin root word (medeor) as medication meaning ‘to heal or to make whole.’ Meditation triggers a self-repair mechanism in our bodies — studies show cortisol and adrenalin production slows while endorphins and serotonin increase. Meditation beside the dam, strolling the rolling hills, circumnambulating the stupa, walking from one sacred site to the next on this blessed land, often while chanting mantras, helped me leave behind a whole helluva lot of mind clutter.
There have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time.
I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown.
The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed.— Madeleine L'Engle
All of life is a meditation, in that it calls us to pay attention. In curious mindfulness we find our playful connection to Life itself.
I hiked out to a waterfall the one day and then up to a village where I met friendly children and grannies hard at work in their kitchen gardens. I met the founding mamas of Woza Moya, created by the BRC in 2000 to provide the local community with support. I simply adore their sock monkeys of which we have a little family that grows every time I visit. Last year’s retreat on Joy had a bright pink monkey sporting a wild afro as mascot and this year we welcome Grace into the fold.
The Retreat
As humans we live here amongst the ‘family of things,’ yet somehow separate. This illusion of separation the Tibetan Buddhists term Maha Bekandze – the Great Suffering.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
When you make a pilgrimage, which is what coming to the BRC entails, it requires that you give yourself the gift of REALLY being present. I turned my phone to airplane mode and within 24 hours my monkey mind had quietened significantly.
The invitation is to do less, to slow down…all our habitual ways of doing doing doing…and invite in more presence. Mindfully walk, brush your teeth, eat, speak (probably the most challenging).
In pairs we shared the quotes on Grace you find littered throughout this piece and tied a white thread around our partner’s wrist in the Thai Buddhist tradition of Sai Sin, as a mindfulness reminder. Then took to our journals, ever a kind listening ear.
Why am I afraid to dance,I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter?
Why am I afraid to live,I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea?
Why am I afraid to love,I who love love?
— Eugene O'Neill
Journal prompt: I am afraid to… because…
The most common form of despair is not being who you are — Soren Kierkegaard
Journal prompt: Who am I?
The Medicine Buddha Mantra
Mantra helps soothe and focus the anxious mind. This particular one is for clearing negativity and helping us heal. Since I first did the Medicine Buddha puja with dearest Lindi, South Africa’s OG sound medicine mama, at Kagyu Samye Dzong while grieving the loss of my grandparents (and so much else) during the Covid pandemic, it has proven a balm.
TAYATA — ‘like this’ — carried beyond samsara & nirvana, samsara meaning ‘wandering’ or ‘world,’ meaning the cycles of birth and death, the suffering caused by karma that ends in nirvana when we gain insight into impermanence
OM BEKADZE BEKADZE.
MAHA BEKADZE BEKADZE — Bekandze means ‘the elimination of suffering’ and is repeated three times for the removal of suffering on the physical, emotional and Maha Bekandze, the great suffering, which stems from the illusion of separation
RADZA (Divine King) SAMUNGATE (wisdom as wide as the ocean) SOHA (so be it/ pure devotion & intention from which all manifestation arises)
The Medicine Buddha Mantra comes from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. For more on the different schools of Buddhism here’s a lovely article in Tricycle Magazine.
If you like, you can visualize Medicine Buddha sitting, looking at you. He is depicted as having a dark blue (lapis lazuli) body, this being an archetypal color of healing. It also happens to be my lifelong favourite. With his left hand he holds a bowl of healing amrita, purported to be produced by the body during deep states of meditation. With his right a medicine plant called myrobalan. In your visualization, he is at about the height of your forehead, a few feet in front of you, gazing at you with so much love. Buddha (the Awakened One) is everything beautiful gathered into one.
We had Deva Premal and the Gyuto Monks support us in chanting 108 rounds of the mantra. Gyuto was founded in 1475 and is one of the main tantric colleges of the Gelug tradition. In Tibet, monks who had completed their geshe studies would be invited to join Gyuto to receive a firm grounding in vajrayana practice. These monasteries used to be in Lhasa, Tibet, but they have been re-established in Dharamsala, India. Today, there are nearly 500 monks in the entire order. The Gyuto monks are known for their tradition of overtone singing, also described as chordal chanting.
Grace means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you — Frederick Buechner
Why 108?
According to Vedic teachings, there are 108 nadi or lines of energy that extend from the heart to the rest of the body. Each repetition is of a mantra is said to flow along one of these lines.
Although there are some differences in how the Sanskrit language is standardized, many experts say there are 54 fundamental letters. Each of these letters have a masculine and a feminine component, bringing the total to 108.
The letters of the Sanskrit alphabet are said to correspond to the petals on the lower six chakras. Reciting the Medicine Buddha mantra 108 times would stimulate each of the petals for these chakras: root chakra, sacral chakra, solar plexus chakra, heart chakra, throat chakra, third eye chakra.
The number 108 is also said to have astronomical significance. For example, the average distance from the earth to the sun is 108 times the diameter of the sun. The average distance of the earth from the moon is approximately 108 times the diameter of the moon.
Because of the significance of this number is Eastern spiritual thought, many temples have 108 steps. Many deities are given 108 names. There are said to be 108 gopis or attendants for Lord Krishna. The measure of the internal angles in a pentagon (considered to be a holy shape) is 108 degrees. In numerology, 108 is called the Universal Number. The 1 stands for consciousness, the 0 for completeness and the 8 for infinity.
If you are using mala beads to count mantra repetitions, going around the beads a single time is 108. The Western rosary has 54 beads, exactly half of a set of mala beads.
The Practices
Mantras operate in the realm of energy, vibration and transformation – so on our way into the Meditation Hall we graced one another with the gift of a healing sound bath through some of the BRC’s many gorgeous chimes and gongs. Then we entered the zendo in silence, donned a saffron robe and found a comfortable seat.
Their zendo is equipped with zafus, the round cushions, on thick rectangular mats called zabutons. Your hips should sit high so your knees can relax downward and your spine remain effortlessly long. If sitting cross legged on the floor is not comfortable for your body, try the kneeling bench, seiza, and sit in vajrasana (thunderbolt). If that doesn’t work for you, please sit on a chair.
There is no reason to suffer unnecessarily. Please don’t.
Then Noble Silence. A sacred opportunity to slow down, pay attention, stay curious and become ever kinder. We eat breakfast in silence at the BRC, what a wonderful way to appreciate food and gain insight into our eating habits. Eating, like breathing, is one of those things we simply cannot avoid in life, so we had best make peace with it and retrain ourselves to do it better. I’m so grateful for these ten days that helped me break out of some unhealthy emotional eating I’d been stuck in as a soothing strategy during stressful times.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. — James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
A lovely silent meditation started our second day followed by Qi Gong with the Big Buddha and after brekkie a check in at the Buddhaboma followed by the gift of Walking Meditation from the Labyrinth.
We each found a rooted friend (flower, tree, bush, weed) whom we visited throughout the weekend. Slowly, after the initial falling in love at first sight, through Goethean observation, possibly sketching this friend, we became more intimate with the plant kingdom.
You can use mantra as you practice walking meditation. Initially counting and breathing helps, then inevitably the mind gets bored, so mantra can be useful to keep the quality of mind pure rather than spiraling into stories. A hand on the heart helps to remind us that we can always get kinder, kinder still, ever kinder. A Buddha smile helps the medicine go down.
无为 Wu wei means – in Chinese – non-doing or ‘doing nothing’ the noblest kind of action according to the philosophy of Daoism – and is at the heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to the central text of Daoism, the Dao De Jing: ‘The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone’. It doesn’t mean not acting, it means ‘effortless action’ or ‘actionless action’. It means being at peace while engaged in the most frenetic tasks so that one can carry these out with maximum skill and efficiency.
It is the art of being natural if you will. Here we are, as much a part of nature as anything, but full of mind interference. What if we were to allow for Natural Grace?
After resting and lunching we played through art making.
Creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed — Magda Szabó
A process of found poetry and collage proved revealing.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn" (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’
In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium (Evangelium is a Latin word that translates to "good news" in English and refers to the gospel in Christianity), giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
— J.R.R. Tolkien (Tolkien On Fairy-stories)
Journal prompt: If you were to allow for natural Grace & effortless joy…what would your happy ending look like?
Dinner was followed by dancing cheek to cheek with Joy & Grace — sandwich yourself between them! Let loose. Howl. Sweat. We had a cathartic ball shaking our sillies out.
When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,
Like this. — Rumi
A cosy fireside chat turned into a burn ritual at Mark’s instigation. And then a sing-along at the suggestion of Amanda, our neck rub angel (bless you!). Christel, who will also be facilitating at the BRC soon, shared an original song that picked up on Tania’s beautiful art/ life process on her incredible wild land.
Morning brought gentle Yoga. For those who were requesting a recorded class, here’s one dating back to those hard lockdown days:
And here’s my Yoga playlist that floated some boats:
By request we enjoyed more lekker qi gong. Here’s a link to some of what we covered during our sessions: http://charisselouw.blogspot.com/2022/08/qi-gong-playshop.html
Stand and face me, my love,
and scatter the grace in your eyes.
— Sappho
We then sat with a new friend, someone we hadn’t connected with yet. Found a bench, looked up, lingered longer. Allowed our attention to become wide as the sky. Just sat and breathed together. We told our new friend about our other (rooted) friend, engaging all our senses. Then let the speaking/listening meditation take us where it wanted to. Till Tea time.
In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you —Jack Kornfield, Buddha’s Little Instruction Book
And just like that our weekend came to a close with some heartfelt insights shared and after Isabelle enlightened us about this particular New Moon, we committed to one small change that could allow for more grace & joy in our lives.
For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore, May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul
As the wind loves to call things to dance,May your gravity be lightened by grace. (…)
As water takes whatever shape it is in,So free may you be about who you become.
— John O'Donohue (To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings)
As always, we closed with the essential thing — Loving Kindness Meditation — and the BRC’s fab Sunday Lunch. My heartfelt thanks to the lovely circle and of course to this unparalleled sanctuary for holding us with such compassion. It’s simply the perfect place to befriend yourself.
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