Retreat on Samui
Early April 2019, Koh Samui, Thailand
Everyone gathered into the large hall for the last time that day. The speaker everyone had gotten to know piecemeal through the self deprecating asides peppered throughout his lectures had said earlier that anyone interested would have a chance to speak for the first time in six days. My expectations didn’t necessarily run amok about how this may be. Not anymore. Expectations used to be a blooming, beautiful flower, growing in abstraction out of the promise of future events. By this time the soil teetered toward lifelessness. Although appealing, these aren’t the kind of flowers meant for cultivation, especially in the present moment, especially at this place.
Right there’s an example of thought teetering toward abstraction, still fighting it off.
Everyone in four groups sat in the accustomed wobbly square shaped groups, rows and columns—boys and girls—a dividing line down the middle. Candlelight gave the hall a cinematic glow. Visions of an abstract Buddhist essence. Outside sounds of crickets and endless amounts of other insects spread across the island’s forest. How many people in this moment are aware of their breaths? Or is this the off time, the time to hang up the practice as if checking out from the office? The focus had to be caught up in some building wave of anticipation. This paltry stimulus was undoubtedly the most entertainment anyone would have had in the last six days, aside from the 4 am bats flying around the barracks as the waking light turned on and the 4 am morning bell rang. The minds deprived of all the pleasures they were used to getting were now mouthwatering at the idea of seeing, hearing, in some cases speaking the individual experiences that went on inside these familiar strangers’ skins. The strangest thing, in hindsight, was that I wasn’t even remotely expecting extreme emotional displays.
A French girl probably in her late 30s walked to the stage first. Just the other day, she had made eye contact and smiled at me because a shirtless Russian looking dude somehow drove his motorbike all the way deep into the retreat’s grounds, stopped near her, looked confused, and turned back the other way. More than likely he was drunk. Mostly everyone on Samui is, outside of this retreat. That day she didn’t seem French, or maybe she did, in hindsight. Funny, the obvious yet elusive things that consideration ignores.
She said a lot of things, most of them unremembered. She did talk about feelings, though, and how she couldn’t experience an identity outside of them.
A lot of the people following her remain in fading memories. One of them, though, that stood out, was the middle aged Indian man, who seemed to have an air of negativity surrounding him since the beginning of the retreat. Overall he seemed to be unaware of how he affected other people, or simply didn’t care. Either way, it resulted in the same, not so pleasant demeanor. The very first night, in the male barracks, someone had snored louder than anything I’d ever experienced. Not only that, but the person did it all night long. I made noise cancelling creations in the dark, deep into the morning hours, MacGyver style. Toilet paper band-aided into earholes, blankets tied tightly around eyes and ears. Even the next afternoon, when everyone tried to catch up on all the sleep that didn’t happen the night before, the same culprit made the same ridiculous noise. It was obvious that he had already slept the whole night. Did he really need more? At the expense of everyone else?
It was the Indian guy. People might have a tendency to find out who is responsible for their misfortune, even if the information will do absolutely nothing to alleviate the ailments in the present or future—no talking was allowed. Perhaps it’s a craving coming from Anger that’s ordered a covert operation to gain fuel for its particular brand of fire. He had money too, as evidenced by the fluffy zafu he’d brought to use, while everyone else used the worn down pillows and wooden mini benches provided by the retreat center to sit on. The personal zafu also doubled as a pillow for the man while everyone else chose to rough it with the provided wooden pillow and thin blanket. Choices make characters, no matter how much they ultimately exist.
He had a very somber attitude going up, but also had a nervous energy about him. It was pretty quick into the story that any anger toward him quickly turned into a pitying compassion, because it was very clear this man was suffering to a great degree, and all because of his own mind. The same boat everyone is in. The make up of his mind was informed by rigid expectations from his traditional Indian family, and the cultural assumptions he couldn’t seem to see as anything other than ‘the way things should be done.’ The gist of his story was that he and his estranged wife were very ambitious people. They moved to the United States from India to make a bunch of money. As money was the priority in their relationship, or so the story suggested, the couple decided to live on the opposing coasts to maximize the moneymaking. One thing led to another and the wife stopped returning calls, eventually informed the guy that she had met someone else and sent him divorce papers. Sounds like the hack drama plot that anyone going into a relationship nowadays should probably expect. The code of conduct must be different in Indian society, but a little bit of America can ruin anything once allowed into any crevice of a tender life. All in all it didn’t feel like it was the worst thing that could have happened. The man, however, told the story with brimming passion and bare earnestness, unable to fight off the weeping, barely able to contain the raging anger from throwing his tightened nerves into a chaotic flail.
He asked a lot of questions to the instructors sitting to his side, but they simply looked at him, unresponsive. The beginning of this session started lighthearted enough, with jokes interspersed, but now the aura became dark, and uncertain. Everyone had drabbed themselves in loose fitting clothing, as recommended in the initial instructions to the retreat, but it felt like everyone wanted to uneasily pull the collars of their shirts to air out the stuffiness. It was an odd sensation of compassion and disbelief that someone at his age still acted like this.
After he was finished speaking, the trend from the following speakers seemed to be, again, lighthearted, but a tone of seriousness involving the emotional trauma seeped in to infect all the different people’s stories. A lot of the girls and women that went up to share their experiences spoke of cheating boyfriends, inabilities in being able to cope with fast paced lives and stress. So much of life, spanning across different age groups, is controlled by deep, wild, unfulfilling emotions. Even when people are given simple instruction and guidance on how to deal with them, it still seemed to be an impossibility, at least immediately. Simple instructions but difficult execution. Emotions find ways to disguise themselves and take control of the unmindful mind. If one allowed it to happen, he or she could live in an increasingly powerful emotional hell for the past six days. No writing, no speaking, no reading, no phones, no internet, no nothing. Just silence, the mind, the body. Still, given all this time, the only thing people could do was discover that there’s a raw and ugly open wound inside. The genuine emotions emitted out of those peoples’ beings is not something one sees often anymore. More often than not, it’s all simply done for effect. This was done without intention. It was a rare and powerful sight to see what goes on underneath most social veneers.