What going on a spiritual retreat with your child – your own pint-sized Zen Master – can teach you about mindfulness, the hard way.
BY TRACY COCHRAN
ON THE FIRST NIGHT of my seven-year-old daughter Alexandra’s first Buddhist retreat, Thich Nhat Hanh smiled and looked into her eyes as few adults ever look at children. Although he sat very still on a stage, the Vietnamese teacher seemed to bow to her inwardly, offering her his full presence and inviting her to be who she really is.
Alexandra threw her jacket over her head.
“Children look like flowers,” said the man who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967. His voice was soft and bittersweet. “Their faces look like flowers, their eyes, their ears . . .”
Surrounded by scores of monks and nuns who had traveled with him from Plum Village, the French monastic community that had been his home since his peace activism caused his exile from Vietnam, he lifted his eyes from the little flower who was huddled, hiding her face, in the front row. Before him sat 1,200 people who had gathered in a vast white tent on the wooded campus of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in upstate New York. Thay, as he was affectionately known, had convened us for a five-day retreat dedicated to cultivating mindfulness through practices such as sitting meditation, walking, and sharing silent meals.
As the master talked about the “freshness,” or openness and sensitivity of children, I couldn’t help but be struck by the way Alexandra was ducking for cover. He extolled freshness as one of the qualities that each of us possesses in our essence, our Buddha-nature. Alexandra, shrouded in nylon, was reminding me that true freshness isn’t limited to those moments when we feel happily and playfully open. It often means feeling raw and vulnerable. I wondered if it had been a mistake to bring her here, to risk exposing her to the way we really are.
During the retreat, children and adults came together during different parts of the day. In addition to sharing meals and a daily mindfulness walk, the children clustered at the front of the stage for the first twenty minutes of Thay’s dharma talks, which he carefully framed in simple, poetic images that children could remember. I brought Alexandra hoping that contact with Buddhist practice would stimulate her imagination and awaken her own wisdom. I thought she could be inspired by the various techniques Thay described, such as listening to the sound of a bell that can call us back to “our true home.”
“My true home is in Brooklyn,” Alex whispered. She had peeled off her covering and lay stretched out on the floor with her head in my lap, jittering her foot to convey how bored and impatient she was. On the first night, most of the other children nearby were sitting cross-legged, quietly, and listening with what seemed to me preternatural attention. Alexandra was muttering to herself and writhing around on the floor like a big, unhappy baby. I wondered if she had some mild form of autism that had escaped detection.
Seventy-three-year-old Thich Nhat Hanh was sitting directly above me, embodying a mountain-like stability and compassion. A monk on the stage winked at Alexandra, a pretty young nun dimpled up in a fit of silent giggles. The people around me were friendly and relaxed. I felt like a terrible mother to be judging and comparing my daughter in these gentle conditions. It was almost as if the spirit of nonjudgmental acceptance that surrounded me was triggering a perverse reaction, drawing out my darkest, meanest thoughts. I felt like a vampire who had stepped out into the sunlight.
As we made our way back to our little cabin, the power went out all over the Omega campus. And a light turned on inside Alexandra. We stopped on the path, unsure which way to turn. I had left the flashlights behind. Alexandra took charge.
“Let’s go back to the visitor’s office,” she said, leading the way. A kindly man on the Omega staff gave Alexandra a candle and walked us to our cabin.
“You knew just what to do,” I said as I tucked Alexandra into bed. “That was good thinking.”
“I hated to think of you wandering around in the dark,” she said, beaming in the candlelight.
The next day Alexandra asked, “Mommy, is Thich Nhat Hanh a man? Like, does he have a penis?”
Yes, I offered, he was an ordinary man, but he was a monk. That meant that he lived for the happiness of others, so he might seem different.
My answer felt vague and wimpy, not as real as the question.
The following day in the dining hall, I discovered how deeply traveling with your own pint-size Zen master makes you feel aware of yourself, and how apart. The majority of the people there were moving about with a kind of underwater grace, practicing silence. We parents struggled with the task of filling trays and settling children while trying to remember to stop and breathe consciously when the mindfulness bell sounded.
Alexandra and I sat at a table in the dining hall facing a table decorated with pumpkins.
“Mommy!”
I whispered to her that we were supposed to try eating silently together.
“This is not my experiment,” Alexandra reminded me. “I don’t want to do it because I have a question.”
“What’s your question, Alexandra?”
“Is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?”
“A vegetable.”
“Why are you being so mean? Aren’t you supposed to be happy?”
The interconnection of all phenomena was a constant theme of Thich Nhat Hanh’s. He spoke often of “interbeing,” the actual state of reality that, once recognized, nurtures compassion and empathy. As people ate in silence around us, I remembered an incident that had happened several weeks earlier. Alexandra was going through a phase of pondering how she was related to the first person who ever lived and to all other people.
“Every living being is connected,” I had told her as I was putting her to bed one night. “The whole universe is alive, and what you put out in the world is what you get back. If you put out love and kindness, you tend to get love and kindness in return.”
Alexandra and I had decided to put the little purple bike with training wheels that she had outgrown down on the street for someone to take. She crayoned a sign that read, “Whoever takes this bike, please enjoy it, love Alexandra.”
She had been full of anticipation. The next morning she bolted out of bed and ran to the window.
“Mommy, my bike is gone!” she’d said, as radiant as on Christmas morning. “Somebody took my bike!”
The concept of the web of life was alive and breathing that morning. But by the end of the day, not surprisingly, she had moved past the shimmering magic and was applying the cause-and-effect practicality of a kid.
“So when do I get something back?” she asked.
TRACY COCHRAN has been a student of meditation and spiritual practice for almost 50 years. She is also a long-time teacher, as well as a writer, the editorial director of Parabola Magazine, and the founder of the Hudson River Sangha, in New York. She teaches at the Rubin Museum, the New York Insight Meditation Center, and in schools, colleges, and at multinational corporations. Her writing has appeared in Parabola, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Psychology Today, O Magazine, New York Magazine, the Boston Review and many other publications and anthologies.
Excerpted from Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself by Tracy Cochran © 2024 by Tracy Cochran. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.
www.shambhala.com
