Lessons learned skiing with Zen Monks

Hitting the slopes of Andorra with the monks of Plum Village : Part One

Many of those doing soul searching have slogged to the top of the career mountain, accumulated diplomas and promotions, only to look around and realise the view is a bit of a let-down.

Success – whether it be landing a job, smashing targets, or winning an accolade - creates a spike in dopamine and endorphins, making us feel great. But no matter how good the job or how high the raise, we soon become accustomed to the bigger office and chunky salary. The buzz of success fades remarkably fast.

So then what?

Perhaps set sights on the next, bigger mountain, and hope that a more permanent sense of fulfilment will be waiting at the summit. This time, when I will have achieved this goal, I will finally be really happy! Then, bells and trumpets will sound, flags will be waved: ‘real life’ has begun at last!

Believing our happiness depends on the achievement of a future goal or milestone is a fallacy, leaving us stuck on what psychologists call ‘the hedonic treadmill’ (and which Arthur Brooks has written about beautifully here), constantly chasing the next success-induced high.

Most of us can remember milestones and achievements we are proud of, and that made us feel extremely good. I remember getting my dream internship at the UN. That was it – life, sorted. Little old me, from Scunthorpe (an industrial town in northern England often mocked for containing the rudest word in the English language) was working for the United Nations! From here on in, the only thing to do was work hard, climb the ladder, and feel good about myself because I was helping save the world while also picking up a generous tax-free salary…

I wasn’t even halfway up my own mountain before realising I didn’t like the look of the trail ahead. I’d been resolutely following a career map I’d half drawn, half borrowed from somewhere (or someone?) else. The map was comforting. After all, this was the way so many others seemed to be going. When lost in familiarity and absorbed by thoughts, the feet walk themselves - just as sometimes, strolling through my arrondissement in Paris, I’d find myself in front of my favourite café, with little memory of how I got there.

But this wasn’t a daily walk. It was determining how I spent the majority of my waking hours, the very contours and contents of my life.

Deep down, things felt a bit off, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. By this point I was working at the British Embassy in Paris, the culmination of having invested a lot of time and effort in a career in international relations. On paper, every box was ticked: interesting job, decent salary, good working conditions, prestige. And yet.

Something rattled in the emptiness at the bottom of my being, a visceral sense that my inner compass was trying to tell me something. It wasn’t just the wrong path: I was on the wrong mountain range altogether.

Andorra

Quitting the job and heading back down into the valley, where suddenly all directions were possible, was exhilarating. I wanted to come back to myself, to peel away all the layers of identities, diplomas and narratives and discover who was there at the core. I wanted to ask her what she really wanted - and learn how to trust her, as someone who was evidently not very good at choosing a direction. (The irony of this is I spent an entire year obsessively researching maps as part of my Master’s thesis on cartography in literature...)

The initial freedom from the job sparked a few months of great joy. Lucky enough to have savings and a supportive partner, I felt a much longed-for sense of freedom. Finally, my real life – the one I had fantasised about - could start. Every day brimmed with opportunity and buzzed with excitement.

But very slowly, the clean slate of endless possibilities began to draw ever tightening circles of anxiety around me. It was like being asked to choose a dish at a restaurant with a dictionary-length menu. I came to fully understand why the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkergaard described anxiety as the dizzying effect of freedom. Slowly at first, and then all at once, I slid into a dark, depressive hole, paralysed by self-doubt and overwhelm. The self-critical voice was intense and powerful, pinning me to my bed, leadening my muscles. Objectively, it was very clear that I was in a lucky position. Even though I knew this, it just did not feel true. The mental suffering was acute.

Zen and the Art of Skiing (and Being)

And this is how I ended up spending a week in March on a ‘snow mindfulness’ retreat in Andorra, with a group of monks and nuns from Plum Village, the mindfulness community founded by Zen master Thich Naht Hanh (known affectionately as Thay – teacher - in his native Vietnamese), the ‘father of mindfulness’. Plum Village teaches a form of engaged Buddhism that blends ‘deep ecology’ with social and racial justice, sharing the dharma (Buddha’s teachings) in an accessible way for the Western-educated mind.

I’d taken the Plum Village online course, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, last winter, and was really impressed by it: the quality of the content, the practical nature of the exercises, the inclusiveness (the LGBTQI+ sharing groups, BIPOC groups…) the sense of community, even online.

With vegan food, a 6am wake up, silence from 9pm-8am and no alcohol, it was an unconventional ski week schedule. My apprehension grew as the bus wound its way up into the Pyrenees amidst a heavy snowstorm. I was arriving late, and it had been dark for hours. I’d never even really met a monk or nun before. My anxious mind began to create a series of worst-case scenarios. What had I signed myself up for?

The gong called us out of our dorms at 6am. The monastics – four brothers, two sisters – were waiting, sat cross-legged at the front of the hostel common area around a large metallic bell. Everyone was sat on a cushion (the bell too had its own cushion), and we all looked towards the brown-robed monastics, their shaven heads covered by woollen hats. It was still dark and below freezing, but they beamed at us with intense warmth. A simple makeshift altar sat behind them: a few plants, two candles, and a calligraphy that read ‘Be still and heal’.

The altar

Each day began with a guided morning meditation at 6.30am, and then a short talk from one of the monks or nuns. Then we would all walk very slowly to breakfast, eaten together in silence. In fact, all meals were eaten in silence. The first day, I struggled with this. I always eat and do something else. Whether reading on my phone, watching a film, or talking to my partner, I never allow myself to concentrate fully on the experience of actually eating my meal: the texture, taste, consistency. I chew quickly and rush to get finished so I can move onto whatever needs doing next.

I sat next to one of the monks and decided I would match his pace. Putting the fork down with each mouthful; closing my eyes to directly feel into the experience of eating. It felt unnatural and forced at first, but as the week progressed, these moments of silence – always introduced by three sounds of a bell – became wonderful pockets of respite from the constant forward motion of life, the never-ending doing. How many other flavours and sensations did I miss by wilfully distracting myself?

This deeper connection with food also became a way to experience the interconnected and interdependent nature of all things, their interbeing, as Thich Naht Hanh calls it. The carrot on the plate could not exist without the sun, air, or soil. A short contemplation was read before each meal to remind us of this. It began: This food is a gift from the whole universe: the earth, the sky, and much hard and loving work.

With each bite, we were invited to not only really savour and experience our food, but to look deeply at it – to see the hands of everyone who had made this moment possible. From the servers and the chef to the delivery driver, the distributers and farm workers. Experienced in this way, eating became a moment of wonder and awe, rather than fleeting pleasure or mundane necessity. Those 15 minutes of silence at the beginning of each meal created an oasis of gentle peace that punctuated otherwise busy and active days and left me wondering: what else was I missing by rushing through life?

On the first morning, the monastics called on us all to cultivate joy as we skied, to imagine being a child discovering snow for the first time. Having fun was so important, they said. By cultivating joy, we create space to be able to be with the full range of human emotions, particularly the more difficult ones, like anxiety or anger.

Having only ever skied three times in my life, I was put in the blue (novice) group. Brother Kindness, a French monk, was our companion and leader for the week, sometimes accompanied by Brother Phap Li. (Several people have asked: no, they didn’t ski in their long brown robes! I too was slightly disappointed…)

Brother Kindness

My mind had been dark for so long at this point, I struggled to remember what joy had felt like. Shakily gliding (and falling) down the beginner slopes, my body slowly recalled what to do, but troubled thoughts did their usual dance through my mind. But on the very first ‘real’ slope - a highway of snow suspended in a clear blue sky, surrounded by the snowy peaks and troughs of the Andorran Pyrenees – I noticed something shift in me. The raw beauty gave me my breath back: deep, nourishing gulps of gorgeous cold air. They awoke something that had been dormant in me for so long. Falling, getting up again. Falling some more. Smiling.

Facing fear as the slope steepened, my body tensing, rejecting, apprehending. Brother Kindness told me to “Breathe out going into a steep turn, breath in as you come out. Trust your body, it knows what to do.” Coming back to the breath, an anchor in the present moment, is a core Plum Village practice.

The monastics told us we were gardeners, needing to take care of the many seeds of emotions inside us. Every possible seed, from joy to jealousy, anger to contentment, is already present, deep within our consciousness. What is important is to cultivate and water the ones we want to see blossom, and to take care of those that are more challenging.

I had spent months watering only the darkest corners of my soul. As we snaked down the mountain, led by Brother Kindness, I felt the first, delicate shoots of joy begin to stir in some long-forgotten corners of my being.

*

Part Two coming soon