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I had mentioned in some previous posts that I was getting somewhat burnt out of travel. Not that I particularly wanted to return “home” (which I don't really have right now), but that the constant moving from place to place, seeing more sights, doing more surfing, diving, and other stimulating activities, was getting a bit tiresome.
So I took Bali up on its reputation for being a spiritual place and looked around for some options. There are a few ashrams here. As far as I understand it, an ashram is a vague term describing people living together in a community whose purpose is to facilitate spiritual progression, often with the aid of a resident guru, whom people respect as wise and spiritually awakened.
However, ever since my 10-day Goenka vipassana retreat in Hawaii, I've been itching to do a similar retreat and use the breath meditation techniques that had worked very well for me in the past. This would require some more freedom in environment than most of the ashrams would provide.
Bali Silent Retreat had been mentioned to me awhile back by a friend in Zurich, and I also stumbled upon
fliers for it in Ubud. It offered a good basic environment for what I wanted to do. It was out in a beautiful natural setting, meals were healthy and taken care of, and silence guaranteed that interpersonal distractions would be minimal. To boot there was yoga and guided meditation on offer, so I could dip into those if I felt like it. I booked a one week stay, following my first visit to Ubud, and ended up extending to 11 nights, matching the vipassana retreat.
There's just barely enough internet signal there to check email, which is basically perfect to keep me away from digital distractions, but not have to fret over missing any critical (lol) emails. There's also a nice library of spiritual readings from all types of different traditions. I thought and still do think that one of the weaknesses of the vipassana retreats is their discouragement of reading and writing. While these activities can be distractions, if instead used appropriately to facilitate your practice, they can be a big help, at least for me. While there, I read “The Way it is” by Ajahn Sumedho, and “Insight Meditation” by Joseph Goldstein, which were both
great dhamma expositions. The former is the most hardcore, unforgiving, male perspective on the Buddha's teachings that I have ever come across. The latter is a lot gentler and more beginner-friendly, but still quite insightful and more practically relevant. I read a good chunk of “The Buddhist Handbook” by John Snelling, which gives a nice concise account of the teachings of Buddhism's different schools, and their historical development.
I spent a lot less time doing sitting meditation (maybe 4-5 hours a day), and a lot more time reading, doing yoga, doing walking meditation (through the beautiful rice fields), and exercising, as compared with the vipassana retreat's demands of 10.5 hours a day of sitting meditation (I probably only did 8 in reality there). I found myself getting back to some blissful, unconditioned
jhana states, which barely ever happened in vipassana. But not as easily as I had in the past. Slowly but surely, my concentration and ability to stay with the breath and stay mindful throughout the day improved during my stay there.
I had grand plans for how I was going to ease back into lay life, meditating 3x1 hour per day. I
was going to ease back into using technology, with new and improved habits, like never using a device without a specific task/intention in mind, taking short eye-breaks every 15min, longer get-up breaks every hour, etc. Well. . .that didn't exactly work out so well 😉 Old habits are hard to break.
I planned to head to an isolated place (ended up choosing Nusa Lembongan), so I wouldn't have so many social- and site-distractions, and live half way between my retreat life and my travel lifestyle for at least 1 week. I thought that taking a night in Ubud (my drop-off area from the retreat) would be more serene than travelling all the way to Lembongan on the same day. However, Ubud was like New York City in comparison to the retreat. Distractions and socialization galore. I had pretty good concentration going though, so it didn't throw me off my game much. I escaped the next day to Nusa Lembongan, a smallish surf/dive island off of the southeast of Bali. Surfing seemed like a good transition activity between meditation and lay life, and it would have been, except the few breaks on Lembongan are rather concentrated, and a high density of surfers are stacked up on each. I don't find surfing in a crowd to be much fun (maybe because I'm not good enough to navigate it in serious surf), but I had some fun and met some other travelling surfers out there.
I didn't end up sticking to my 3x1 hour meditation plan, and it's hard to say why. I've had periods of my practice where I was eager to sit when I had the time, because I was easily getting into Jhanas and generating bliss at will. I haven't been able to do that reliably in awhile, and meditation seems a lot more like work without Jhana. Incidentally, this is one reason that I consider Goenka's Jhana-less equanimity-above-all-else approach rather insane. If I am not seeing substantial and real benefits from my meditations in the here and now, then it's going to be quite difficult, at least for me, to do it for hours a day. And I don't even have a job at the moment :P
So basically, my spiritual situation is that I have techniques and intellectual understanding that I feel reliably allow me to make progress along the Buddhist description of the path to enlightenment. But at the moment, I can only seem to make progress under retreat conditions, and not in real life, at least not with all the distracting stimulations of travel, and technology (my big susceptibility) and I seriously doubt with a demanding job either. So, either I become a monk, and embrace the spiritual lifestyle full time, or continue my morning/evening sitting meditations and accept the stormy life of conditioned attachments. Heh, OK that was an excluded middle fallacy, but that's roughly how I feel it is, at least at the moment.
PS – The Bali Silent Retreat is well-run and a great place to build-your-own retreat, so to speak. There's also at least 3.5 hours a day of instructed yoga and meditation, so even if you have no idea where to begin, they can get you rolling down a love-yoga path. The food is vegetarian, copious, and (a little too!) delicious.
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