Happiness vs Non-Attachment

Recently, I spent 3 days at a Buddhist monastery.

No, I didn’t disguise myself as a Buddhist monk and sneak in. I was actually welcome there by the residential monks to an Introductory Retreat – the first retreat if you’ve never visited before, at the beautiful Shasta Abbey near Mt. Shasta, California.

The mostly silent retreat – mostly because we were encouraged to ask questions during “Dharma Discussions” and communicate as necessary during instruction and invited to sign up for a counseling session with a residential monk – all required the use of our voices.

I have been home for three days. There are two major things coming forward for me to share with you all:

First:

I love spending time in silence. It’s a relief for me in my overly articulated, super-verbal life. (Some might even call me bossy at times!) But I really like silence! Here’s what I wrote about it during the retreat:

“I really like the silent times where I don't talk. The thoughts that will never reach my lips somehow have a clearer, crisper -  pure bell-like quality to them. I didn't realize how the prospect of speaking thoughts (or potentially writing them) adjust them - taint them somehow. As if the intensity with which I think things that might get spoken or written created an unknown tension in my brain. It's a relief."

The fabulous monk, Reverend Mugo, to whom I talked wrote about my thoughts on silence in a kind and eloquent way on her blog with my OK and preserving my privacy. Here’s a link to her blog (url below). I highly recommend you subscribe as I find her blog to be of great spiritual insight and value, not to mention pragmatic, especially for those of us not living full time at a monastery!

http://www.jademountains.net/thoughts-unspoken/

Second:

Non-attachment is the bomb!

            (Am I attached to non-attachment?!?)

But happiness is confusing. Our constitution contains the word, stating every citizen of the United States (save slaves, indentured servants, and indigenous people at the time!) has the right to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but what exactly is happiness? Surely someone high on morphine, while at the best part of the high, feels happy, right? Some might argue that’s not really happiness, but pursuing and feeling happy can be as goal-oriented, evasive and have a chasing-the-dragon quality, I think. For example, most people would probably categorize me as a happy person; I think I’m someone who cultivates happiness on a regular basis – for me my cultivation activities include meditation, exercise, eating healthy, being myself and spending time with people who embrace me for who I am; in other words, not feeling (or believing) that I need to be other than who I am.

I’ve been having internal dialogues and researching happiness for a while now, but from my experience at the Abbey, I’m realizing that a more non-attached way of being actually leads to what most people call happiness. It may not be as manic (though true happiness really isn’t manic) or exciting, and is likely less obvious. But life’s little annoyances don’t carry much weight when practicing non-attachment. Two examples: Yesterday while in the kitchen, I accidentally spilled some water. In the past I would’ve gotten annoyed that I did this and I know the physiological symptoms of this annoyed state were heighted blood pressure and acid throughout my body (typical physiological stress responses). Yesterday, I basically shrugged, mopped up the water, and moved on. Today, I didn’t have enough toilet paper in the bathroom and realized it too late. Our extra supply is in our overflow storage (bathroom is small), which is outside and about 20 feet away from the bathroom and no one was around to fetch some for me. Being really into personal and excrement-related hygiene would be part of my excuse why I would’ve gotten annoyed in the past. Today, upon realizing I had about one-wipe worth of TP left, said “crap” aloud to no one, and once again shrugged, decided to deal with it calmly (and not beat myself up for forgetting to replenish earlier) and just did what was necessary to remedy the situation.

Non-attachment! What a revelation. And it can be so hard to do this when absorbed in the annoying moment. It’s worth noting that I’ve called myself a “recovering perfectionist,” and I think that was a factor in my annoyance about things that I judge could have been better or perfected.

Now I’m still quite attached to certain things: family, loved ones, friends, healthy food, shelter, fun, relaxation, even meditation! But, this way of being also helps me to acknowledge that losing any of the aforementioned human needs and attachments, like family, shelter and food wouldn’t be as emotionally devastating as they would be were I not practicing non-attachment.

Meditation helps. A lot. Helps me to be in a non-attached way of being. Some call it “seeing things as they are” or “seeing the truth.”

But I’m also not trying to be attached to meditation and am mindfully aware of that as well. For now, I feel it is one of the best tools for overall health and wellness… and for seeing things as they are. Truly.

And that’s the trouble with language. Often the same word means vastly different things depending on person and context.

So, how is it for you? How do you define happiness? Non-attachment? Are you cultivating anything in your life? Does it add to your daily calm contentedness? Who are you? Are you able to be you regularly?

One final thought: Shasta Abbey is one of a handful of monasteries where male and female monks live and train together at their monastery but still practice celibacy. All the monks have shaved heads and wear similar brown robes. As you can imagine, that makes it difficult to reference a monk if one doesn’t know their name. I would smile and laugh often during my 3 days at Shasta Abbey… But during meditation I was trying to stay still and silent, so I'd let the laugh just circulate instead of letting it be audible or sharing it with someone. A common reoccurring thought was that I wanted to call the female monks monkettes or monkess, or the male monks monkers. All those words struck me as funny. I haven’t asked permission yet whether any of these terms are appropriate, so to describe a monk whose name I couldn’t recall, I simply said, the gentle-lady monk or gentleman monk.