This is Part 1 of the story of going to a meditation retreat. Part 2 will cover the actual observations.
In 2003, US Marines in Iraq, finding themselves in yet another place where no one asked them to be, popularized the three-word quote that we must all have heard a few times in our lives:
“Embrace the Suck”
While it’s hard to tell if this is advice to self or the Iraqis, the statement itself is self-evident. After all, the suck permeates all aspects of life, whether you are in the military or working in an office or just living life. Every adult human has had to repeat this statement to themselves at some point in their life.
It’s been the quintessential core of religion, philosophy, and cults.
Contacts with matter make us feel
heat and cold, pleasure and pain.
Arjuna, you must learn to endure
fleeting things—they come and go!
When these cannot torment a man,
When suffering and joy are equal
for him and he has courage,
he is fit for immortality”.
- The Bhagavad Gita
From Buddhism:
Pain is certain, suffering is optional.
Old Greek men with lots of time:
“Here’s a lesson to test your mind’s mettle: take part of a week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantily in shabby clothes, and ask yourself if this is really the worst that you feared. It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead, for when fortune is kind the soul can build defenses against her ravages….”
– Epictetus
I like Embrace the Suck for its simplicity though. Trust the Americans to come up with catchy McPhilosophy of millennia-old ideas.
My father was a big proponent of embracing the suck.
He liked rising before the sun. I had written about this before in my India Trip Report.
It all starts in the morning. In my dad’s unwritten ‘rules of life’, the first rule is:
The supreme art of war is to rise before your enemy’s risen
I am only mildly exaggerating here. Mornings are war time. Waking up in my home, you will become aware, as your eyes open, of a life already in overdrive. There’s clatter of pans, religious incantations running in the TV, the smell of coffee in the air, things being cut and ground, conversations, water being filled in the bathroom, doors being opened and closed and a general air of being in the middle of war theatre. The time, if you were to look at it, would be 5.30 am. Roosters are still sleeping.
He used to take cold showers in the morning. If I slept beyond 6, he would be very ‘unhappy’ that I was sleeping in.
He valued physical effort and took up physically taxing activities like elaborate sweeping and mopping the house, climbing the walls of the house to cut overgrowth from trees (sometimes the branches would be skirting electric lines!), fixing things in the house or setting up the pooja room very elaborately for rituals. Often, he wanted all of us to partake.
Not that he only valued hard things. He had (and continues to have) zest for life (E.g. he loves to travel, watch movies, splurge on things he likes, go out to eat, etc.) but he’d need to do the hard physical things frequently.
Even when we traveled, it included some components of the suck, like walking long distances, taking crowded public transport that’s suboptimal, or getting roasted in the sun.
He wasn’t a stoic about it either. When he’d engage in embracing the suck, it was truly the suck for him. We were all expected to equally wallow in the suck, he’d often get frustrated and we’d get a verbal lashing or two. I’d assist sometimes and find it physically and mentally draining. Everyone would be on a knife’s edge because you can’t be relaxing when he was in his embrace the suck moment.
But it developed a kind of hard humility in me, of occasionally doing laborious things, of suffering and maybe feeling less entitled in life, perhaps.
However, the moment I began to live independently, I swung left hard. I took a Gatling gun to discomfort. I indulged in comforts and fully embraced anything that made life easier. I wanted to destroy the suck. Trying to actively bring it on yourself was a symptom of not loving yourself enough, I concluded.
The world, however, is round. Life is a circle. You run from home to come back to it. What goes around, comes around. Yada yada.
Increasingly in recent times, I have thought about embracing the suck more. For one, I find myself whining about things that I didn’t imagine I would be having today:
The internet being slow, for exactly 120 seconds
Food orders being delayed by 20 minutes
The temperature being just a few degrees off
I had grown soft. My baseline of comfort had escalated.
I needed to bring some suck back into my life. Although I do visit Bengaluru every once in a while and take Uber rides across the city, the suck it filled me was too infrequent.
I took you on this scenic route to say, N and I went to a three-day (but technically 48-hour) silent meditation retreat. While the goal was just ‘another new experience’ I hoped that it would help with two things:
Silence the constant thrum of the matrix inside me
Help me ‘embrace the suck’
It was great…mostly.
A Meditation retreat?
I began 2024 with the realization that yet another year had stealthily slipped by while I was watching shows on TV.
Eager to make the most of this year and like any true man of action, I made…..an Excel sheet of goals. It was beautiful. It had columns and formatting and check boxes and everything. And then once I was done, I looked at the sheet in admiration and my expression turned into a frown as it hit me that I had to now actually do those things.
One of those goals was to experience a 3-day silent meditation retreat for the first time in my life.
Why?
Over the last few years, I have increasingly felt like an appendage to my phone rather than the other way around. My phone was lugging my messy, organic ass around like an unhappy necessity.
Additionally, my recent interactions with dogs, cats, and little children confirmed another deep fear: my attention span had now conclusively slipped below theirs.
‘A 3-day silent, meditation retreat ought to fix all that’, I thought.
I found the ideal 3-day offering from Dipabhavan, a monastery/meditation center perched in a small jungle on a steep hill in Koh Samui. Now, I know that Koh Samui as a location screams more White Lotus Season 3 than Embrace the Suck but hear me out.
It was free (donations are welcome) and I booked it early enough to get a slot.
Soon, an email with rules dropped (I am rephrasing them here)
Wear only loose-fitting clothing that covers arms and legs
Refrain from talking
Bring only the basic stuff needed to maintain Civilized Human 1.0 levels (toothpaste, soap, and a towel), plus mosquito repellants and a flashlight.
N and I spent a few mental cycles trying to find the right clothes and then patched together whatever we had.
Registration
On the sweltering Friday afternoon on March 1, when we reached the location to register, the room felt like a million degrees. Sweat streamed down my back and I was surprised by the number of people milling around (47 participants, I would later learn). They were mostly white with a few exceptions. Surprisingly about half of them were younger than us.
In groups of three, we were re-instructed about the rules of the retreat. For people who arrived together like N and I, special instructions asking us not to communicate or acknowledge each other during the retreat were dispensed.
“You can smile though, we don’t want you all to look like zombies”
We were then whisked away up a steep hill in a Songthaew. A hectic five-minute ride (awkwardly sliding around while looking sheepishly at fellow retreaters) took us to the monastery. The location was beautiful - on the side of a hill, surrounded by thick vegetation and with glimpses of the sea.
I have a knack of going to incredible places to get bored:
In an open dining hall (Sala) three people had set up a little supply chain to process us by first getting our level of experience (“um…first retreat of my life”), collecting our phone and wallet for storage, and handing a rucksack with things to carry to our dormitory.
N and I separated from this point on.
Making my bed
Shorn of my phone and lugging the rucksack, I went up the short but steep 300-meter incline that led to the men’s dormitory. En route, about halfway up the incline, I spotted a beautiful little temple with an amazing view of the mountains and the sea. I would end up spending a lot of alone time in this spot in the coming two days.
The men’s dorm was right below the meditation hall where I presumed we would be spending a lot of time in the coming days. At this point, I had sweat enough to create drinking water for a dozen people on Dune. Feeling sticky and hot, the first whispers of ‘embrace the suck’ was echoing in my head. Then I looked at the entrance to the men’s dorm and the whispers became the grave voice of Morgan Freeman telling me to ‘embrace the damn suck’.
The inside of the dorm stayed true to my impression of the entrance.
The rooms were plywood cubes with walls that did not go all the way up. Anything anyone did in any room of the dorm, you could hear - a sniffle, a creak, a burp, or a fart. There was just enough room for a wooden cot that was shedding powder thanks to termites. A hole in the wall (let’s call it a window) revealed the forest. My lizard brain jumped in, ‘dude what about the creepy, crawlies that might come visiting at night’. On cue, a lizard slithered across the wall.
Of course, there was no fan so the open ‘window’ was partly welcome although everything felt stifling and no breeze entered the room. The temperature inside the room was primordial. With blurry vision, thanks to the salty sweat streaming down my face, I inspected the rucksack I had been given for its contents. It contained:
a case for the rectangular cushion bed that lay on the cot
a case for the small square cushion pillow and
a mosquito net.
Having maneuvered the cushion into cases, I got into the task of putting up a mosquito net which tested the limits of my physics, patience, and patheticness.
After spending about the same time some PHDs do with their thesis, I had achieved to tie three out of the four corners of it to random spots in the room like a stray nail in the plywood, the clothes rod, and a third side I had tied to a nail that was too far away but connected using elaborate physics of using a clothes hanger as a go-between. This still left the fourth side limply lying on the bed and this is how I would sleep the next two days.
Also, have you sweat so much that you make the floor wet?
If this was a simple baby test of how I’d survive in less-than-ideal circumstances, much less the wild, I had failed it miserably.
Thus having ‘made the bed’, I left the dorm, housebroken into submission.
Coming up in the next edition are my observations from the actual retreat including:
Time dilation when you have no stimulation
I found my Wilson in a small water bottle
N’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge my existence over the two days
Elements of embracing the suck: a room where you couldn’t sleep, the Gong at 4.30 am, sitting for hours on the floor and the sweltering heat
Men can bond without a word being spoken as long as they are engaged in common activities.
And more….
Have a meditation retreat story yourself? Let me know in the comments.
Could be Worse,
Tyag
Well I started using a meditation app one week ago, so you can say we're pretty much on the same level. Jokes aside, it sounds like an experience for sure, and kind of the one you were looking for, too? Waiting for pt. 2 to see if I should start feeling inspired!
Such a brilliant and funny read!! I love the idea of embracing the suck - I grew up with a very similar sentiment in my family - but it was more of the buddhist inclination (as that's what we are!) - Excited to read about the rest of the story soon!