From Doing To Being
9th January 2025
Silent Meditation Retreats
Many of you may have listened to the talk about Gaynor my wife arranging the flowers on the morning of a Silent Meditation Retreat. If you haven’t the link is it the bottom of this blog.
For now I am going to use a slightly different image. A while ago we had a plasterer in our home plastering the walls, as we had some work done in the lounge.
He would slap on the plaster then get busy skimming it, making it even. He would do this a few times but then I noticed he stopped. He would cease to slap on and skim and just stand there. He would just look at the work. He would get closer and look along the wall, up the wall and down the wall.
We would observe for only a few minutes, but nevertheless he would just look. In other words he would be doing - slapping on and skimming and would be being - just standing and looking.
This is a metaphor for our lives. We need to do, we need to work, to go shopping, meet friends etc. However, it appears to be very easy to get lost in a haze of doing and forgetting about the other side of the coin…to be, and being is the Modus Operandi of a silent retreat.
If the plasterer did not stop and just look at his work, in other words entering into a mode I am calling being, he would not know what the finished product would look like. It may be a huge mess and of course we would call him back for a big fat refund.
Meditation and indeed going on a silent meditation retreat is a way of being rather than doing. We may not see it like this as many people are doing lots in their meditation. When we meditate to get somewhere and to achieve something we are just continuing the doing mode in a more spirituals subtle form.
The plasterer is stepping back from the plaster, so what in meditation and entering a meditation retreat are we stepping back from?
Two things come to mind. Firstly we are stepping back for the doing of life. To step out of the busyness of life and in the words of John Lennon, to spend time, “watching the wheels go round and round.’ This in our society is not really valued as it is in the eastern cultures. All spiritual traditions encourage in different ways, for us to sit down, be quiet and just be. Some call is listening to God, Sufism calls it resting in the arms of the beloved. In Buddhism they use a number of terms, resting in presence, relaxing into awareness, resting in your true self, we can also call it simply being at home.
The second thing that comes to mind is that we are stepping back from our own mental and emotional experience. To live a sane and fulfilling life I think this is essential for the vast majority of us. If we don’t develop the capacity to step back from our turbulent mental world then we will forever be living life on the emotional roller coaster, and it is not fun.
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