The prop plane fluttered upward, and I was on to my second stop in Cambodia, Sihanoukville. I had booked a 7-night retreat at a place called Vagabond Temple. I didn’t know quite what to expect, but the schedule of yoga and meditation appealed to me as a way to deepen my program of spiritual nothingness and going to zero.
The delayering was continuing as I decided to take a pause on some of my consulting projects. My mind was racing from the emptiness and just trying to grasp at something tangible. I settled on eating a cookies and cream ice cream cup at the airport. And then a mango ice cream cup. And then a panini.
Arriving at “The Temple”
The plane landed in Sihanoukville, and my tuk-tuk driver was waiting for me. We embarked on our 45-minute journey to “The Temple” as it would be referred to. We arrived at a rusty blue gate in darkness. My luggage and I shuffled in to a haven of voices, candles, and dinnertime chatter. It was basically pitch black. Wow, this is some seriously spiritual shit, I thought to myself. Eating in the dark! It reminded me very much of coop living at Brown University, where I used to visit my friend Eliza during my college days. It turned out to be a power outage. K, that made more sense…
Page and Rueben, two volunteers, greeted me. I’m pretty sure Reuben was wearing a headband of sorts, and they welcomed me warmly. Rueben and pointed me to the vegan food laid out on the counter and offered to give me guitar lessons. All openness and authenticity. I felt much more like I was staying at someone’s home than at a hotel. That was in some ways jarring but also in other ways, very appreciated. I perched myself in a corner of a wooden table on the ground and nibbled on lentils, questioning the hygiene level of the mug and bowl. The people around me were bubbly, nice, happy. I felt like a dark cloud in the corner coming from the outside into this happy bubble. I huddled in the corner with my bowl close to my mouth and observed in my own little bubble.
As people cleared out, Rueben said my dorm room was ready, and he helped me with my luggage into a room with two Norwegian ladies. The brain fog was settling all around me (right, I hadn’t slept a wink the night before!). Tonye introduced herself.
“Er, what was your name again?” I rudely interjected in the midst of her second or third sentence to me.
I then floated into the moving meditation class led by Tess from Chicago, who had arrived from Malaysia, where she had been staying with a contract killer (this little detail, I found out yesterday). She was lovely and floaty, and we engaged in a moving series where the group acted like a flock of birds, each of us only following the movement of the person in front of us. Where am I????? It feels good and warm and supportive. Also a bit foreign, admittedly. Am I a hippie now?
The Schedule
The daily routine looks a little something like this:
- 6:30am: Wake up in silence (OK, I wake up at 4am in silence and wait for everyone to wake up)
- 7-9am: Morning yoga
- 9-10am: Breakfast
- 10-11am: Karma yoga (chores)
- 12-1pm: Dharma talk or community service
- 1pm: Lunch
- 1:30-4:30pm: Beach break
- 4:30-6pm: Yoga
- 6-7pm: Dinner
- 7-8pm: Meditation or Qigong
Dharma Talk
My first dharma talk started with some movement across the room. An Israeli-Palestinian unity type song was playing, and we engaged in a form of musical chairs. The music went as we swept around the room, and when the music stopped, we hugged the person in front of us. Deeply. Like you would hug your most intimate friend or lover. The experience was incredibly intimate, and it opened me up a bit. I just naturally felt closer to people and felt like the walls were coming down. Awkward and amazing.
Then we did a “what’s up?” session where we shared our names and what was going on with us that day while sitting in a circle. Intense. Then we turned to the topic of the day. We talked about the following passage from a wandering vagabond monk:
Listen up all you seekers, bad dwellers in distraction. For ages now you’ve been entranced, beguiled and fooled by appearances and experiences.
Are you aware of that?
Are you?
Right this very instance you’re under the spell of mistaken perception. You have got to watch out. Don’t let yourself get carried away by this fake and empty life.
You’re mind is spinning around with lots of useless projects.
It’s a waste.
Give it up. Thinking about the hundred plans you want to accomplish, with never enough time to finish them, just weighs down your mind.
You are completely distracted by all these projects, which never come to an end. With never enough time to finish them they just weigh down your mind, while only spreading out little ripples in the water.
Don’t be a fool.
Just sit tight.
How a propos… More delayering needed.
Other Program Elements
Later that day, I had a reiki treatment from those who were graduating from the Reiki Level 1 class.
Instead of yoga that night, we had an improv session. We broke out into groups and assembled a sort of emotional orchestra comprised of the sounds of Cambodia…or emotions…and other things. We acted out scenes and put together silent murals and played a sort of charades. Everyone was amazing and funny! Luckily, I was in a group where my other members were directive and thought of everything. One silent scene I acted out was a tiger breaking out of a cage at the circus. My one moment in the spotlight involved me saying, “I read that there’s no nudity allowed,” with some moment of anguish as I was rushing to an ambulance. Carrying it forward from there was tough. It required some guts and just trying to be in the present moment. I said it and then I forgot to commit to the scene. My brain was already…gone. All in good fun though. Letting go.
Dinner that night was emotional. A few of the community members who had been there for a 2-month program were leaving.We each had a funny theater role to play (mine was to be a character that was insistent on preaching non-violence). There were speeches, jokes, a special vegan dinner, and me observing as an anthropologist of sorts watching the last episode of “The Real World” unfold before me without ever having seen any of the episodes leading up to that moment. Contributions and growth were noted, ups and down were referred to. I just sat there imagining the drama of the past few months as they talked about the special energy at The Temple and how things were changing with the arrival of newcomers (i.e., people like me, New Yorker juju).
Yesterday, we did some community service in lieu of the dharma talk. We helped sand and paint a school gate. The kids are so happy and cute! But their living conditions and the poverty is heartbreaking. It made me want to do more service projects. I wish I could be less selfish in this moment in my life, but I still feel so low energy and burnt out. I wish I could wake up in the morning and then that I could chip away in a meaningful way towards causes like eradicating poverty. Turn back the clock to a time when I was more idealistic and filled with energy to dedicate towards missions and causes. I think it will come back. For now, it was great to have a moment, a day.
Last night, I was in a separate open living room type space with my new friend Adrian. We played the guitar together. I taught him parts of Hallelujah and then Ruben came by and we learned to play the blues. Brad, a 45-year-old father of an 8-year-old who had arrived for a detox, joined with Adrian’s sister. I played and sang for them. I felt very uncomfortable. Then we talked about Trump, our travel experiences, global politics, our views.
It is weird hanging out with people who are so open and loving and quite similar and yet different from myself. This is a bubble where you can do that. There are no real pressures of real life. Once economics, responsibility, real codependence enter the picture, it becomes a different story. I am enjoying the hippie wonderland for now.
I feel my own otherness pretty distinctly. “Dancing in the moonlight” is playing in the background now, and people are chopping veggies for dinner in the background as I type away sitting on the floor with my computer perched on the wooden table.
I want to be alone, but I know this is also good for me. With every situation, there is a lesson to be learned. And there are reasons for a certain constellation of people to enter your life at a given moment.
It will all make sense in reverse to future me.