Wednesday, May 30, 2007
My leg died in meditation
It’s one thing to give your body a workout – but let's not neglect our minds.

All week I have been on an urban retreat at the London Buddhist Centre. I’m not a Buddhist but I love the idea of retreats.

It probably started at school. Mine – all girls and Catholic- used to spirit us away to some disused scout hall or mouldy football clubrooms once a year for retreat.

The retreats usually run by priests or nuns would follow a similar pattern each year.

There would be a theme (Year of Indigenous Peoples, Praying for Peace or Reconciliation and the Family) and a mass at the end. We got into groups and rehearsed bits together. There was always competition as to who would be in the liturgical dance. No one wanted to read. The shy girls who didn’t know quite what to do with themselves used to usher and hand out mass booklets.

There would always be a secular push to get modern music to replace hymns. One year a group of girls fought a bloody battle against the nuns to get Terence Trent D’Arby’s Sign Your Name used in the offertory procession.

The nuns won. They always did.

But I digress… retreats of time-past are different from retreats of today. For a start I now have a choice as whether to attend one or not.

And my fellow retreatees are likely to be strangers of different ages and backgrounds– not schoolmates for whom every aspect of the retreat was heavy with some sort of social meaning; where even the affirmation exercises where you had to write on a bit of paper what you liked about each other, had a schoolgirl sting (Deborah you don’t smell as bad as you used to, Natasha I like you sunglasses, Veronica, you would be cool if you didn’t try too hard…..)

Instead the Urban Retreat in Bethnal Green (see pic above of the Shrine Room) was all about hanging with the hommies in the ‘hood. We chose to be here and chill. We weren’t compelled by nuns or religious instruction teachers or our parents.

There is an article on the Urban Retreat coming up on cnn.com in a couple of weeks - so watch this space - but in the context of this fitness blog I can’t recommend highly enough doing some meditation as part of your exercise regime.

Practitioners call it a workout for your brain. It does make you more clear-headed and calmer.

However, meditation is not the easiest art. I got up at 5.30am this morning after a sullen 5 hours sleep. “Not enough!” I cried into the pillow as I do most mornings. But the night before at the meditation centre I had promised a Buddhist priest I would go to the morning session and isn’t there like bad karma or something if you break a promise to a priest?

So propelled by guilt and also a sort of wonder (it was still dark, I was walking across the eerie pre-dawn wasteland of Euston Station, I was catching 2 tube lines to go to meditation) I arrived at 6.50 am for the session.

It was fairly straightforward. A group of us sat in a room upright and balanced on a little pile of cushions. We closed our eyes and then we…. just sat. For an hour.

My mind wandered. My heels itched. My leg told my brain, “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!”

I got hungry, I was cold, then hot. I was tired. I became bored with myself too quickly. How could anyone stand my company for more than 15 minutes, I wondered idly. I’m bored with myself already. ‘Shut up, you’re being negative,’ said the good cop in my head. ‘Keep quiet, you’re meant to be meditating,’ said another voice.

Thoughts wandered to beaches and peaches and whale barnacles and decaying apple cores.... argghhh! Make it stop! ‘People go mad meditating, they must’ – said my unconvinced leg to my brain.

And just when I was plotting my escape a little bell rang and it was over.

But it was too late for my poor old leg. It had died at some point during meditation and could not be revived. I sunk back against the wall in some sort of weird stupor.

I dragged my dead leg behind me to breakfast at the Buddhist café next door.

My fellow meditiators and retreaters emerged at my table like creatures coming out of a fog. We spoke to each other slowly and with care. Each organic cornflake was individual and quite special. Each person in this big, teeming, grubby old city was a seething swirl of inner life, hopes, anxieties, dreams – unique and human. Just like me.

I got the bus back to Oxford Circus – staring down at all the people who passed by – wondering about them all. I felt sleepy but also more aware. I felt like my mind had gone to the gym and was now on a post-exercise endorphin high.

I thought for all the turmoil of meditation – the dead legs and the rancid thoughts – it's worth it for this nice feeling of calm.

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Brigid,
This blog made me laugh - your descriptions of Catholic school retreats are very similar to the ones I had through High school and I dreaded them!!
As such I had never given any consideration to returning in later life...but it would be interesting to see whether you get more out of such things when you are in a different place in your life.
PS Loved the reference to Terence Trent D’Arby! Sign Your Name Across my Heart was such a great song!
ABOUT THIS BLOG
Welcome to the diary of a reluctant exerciser. Having previously shunned fitness regimes in favour of bacon sandwiches, Brigid Delaney vows to finally shape up, get fit and eat more healthily. Over the next three months read how she gets on in a brave new world of gyms, exercise classes and no bacon sandwiches.
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