Some of us go to the beach or camping by a river or lake for our holidays.
Some of us stay home and read books.
The really exhausted ones, the spiritually exhausted ones, go on retreat.
That’s what I did between Christmas and new year.
It was billed as a yoga and meditation retreat.
On December 27, I loaded up with two unknown fellow retreaters and hitched a lift to Healesville, deep in a valley where prayer flags fluttered in the breeze, to a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of old wooden rooms that I suppose once constituted a mountain guesthouse. Buddha, in various statue forms, and a few of his followers have since moved in.
Each day began with a gong at what seemed to be some time around daybreak.
We did asanas (yoga poses) and pranayama (breathing exercises with meditation), yoga nidra (lying down yoga for feeling into the body), inquiry, some chanting and lots of eating – very healthy tucker.
And we could talk. And lie under vast mountain trees in waist-high grass and watch the clouds float by and the butterflies dance.
Fortunately renunciation was off the agenda.
The Buddhists served very nice coffee and cake on-site and outdoors overlooking the valley.
This wasn’t religion.
This was true spiritual experience.
