Tony Bates stepped off western life's unrelenting threadmill to allow time in a French monastery to "come home to himself"- its approach is helping to redirect mental healthcare.
This July, I spent three weeks on a summer retreat at Plum Village monastery, in the south of France, with Zen master, poet, peace activist, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Thich Nhat Hanh, whose writings on mindfulness are the basis for newer psychotherapy approaches.
There has been an explosion of interest among psychotherapy practitioners and researchers in mindfulness. Its value in helping people with chronic physical illnesses, severe personality problems, recurrent depression, and certain anxiety disorders has been demonstrated in repeated controlled studies.
As a mark of this growing interest, the conference centrepiece at the next World Congress of Cognitive Therapy will be a dialogue between Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, and his holiness the Dalai Lama.
One of the most prolific modern writers on mindfulness is Thich Nhat Hanh and it seemed to make sense to spend some time in his company and learn what this apparently simple practice was really about. In spite of this eminent logic, my announcement that I had enrolled for the summer retreat in his monastery in rural France evoked a startled response in some friends and silent sympathy in others.
I had my own apprehensions as the train snaked its way through the vineyards east of Bordeaux towards a small town in the Dordogne, Sainte Foy la Grande. I had travelled a day early for the summer retreat due to heavy booking on Air France, and had given no indication of my time of arrival.
But as I stepped off the last train onto a deserted platform, I spotted a lone monk, dressed in brown, standing by a small white hatchback. He bowed, and I realised he was there to pick me up for the last leg of my trip to the Plum Village monastery. A good omen, I thought. The outer journey was ending, the inner journey had just begun.
The monastic community is spread across a number of separate hamlets, each comprising about 100 acres of farmland. Each has its own distinct atmosphere reflective of the brothers or sisters who live there. I pitched my tent under the shade of the woods surrounding the Upper Hamlet, close to a distinctive bell tower that echoed classical Zen architecture. Its dominance on the landscape conveys the reverence given to the symbol of the bell in this tradition.
Each morning, at 5.30 a.m. a young monk would "invite the bell" with plaintive Vietnamese chanting, reminiscent of our own sean nós. The deep resonance of his bell ringing for 10 to 15 minutes accompanied retreatants and monastics as they walked silently to the main meditation hall and took their places to greet the day with guided meditation practice.
Mindfulness is the central practice of Plum Village. Footballer Paul McGrath was someone who could be described as mindful on the pitch. His gift was the ability to hold in his awareness a sense of where the game was at in any moment. Knowing how the game was unfolding, he could place himself with an incredible economy of movement right in the path of the ball. Mindfulness practice is about developing this quality of attentiveness to what is happening around us and in our inner lives.
We can be mindful of a piece of music and all it evokes, or the sensation of wind touching our skin as we walk. It's harder to bring our attention to what is troubling and painful. We are afraid. There is a lot of internal suffering and conflict that we would prefer to avoid. We complain that we do not have time, but we try to kill our free time by not going back to ourselves. We escape by turning on the TV or picking up the phone.
We run away from ourselves and don't attend to our bodies, feelings, or thought processes. The pain and conflict we ignore in our inner lives often become expressed in conflicts in our relationships with family, friends and work colleagues. Mindfulness is about coming home to ourselves and learning to take care of ourselves.
Besides formal sitting practice, there was encouragement to bring mindful awareness to our everyday activities, like walking, washing, and preparing meals. Twice daily the monks led us in "mindful walking" where we walked slowly and peacefully through the woods and orchards around Plum Village.
Everyday at noon, Thich Nhat Hanh led these walks, taking the hands of the children and leading us silently. In the evening, we walked to the edge of the village and sat in a field overlooking rolling valleys and hills of vines and sunflowers, and enjoyed the sunset. The instruction was simply to enjoy our breathing in and our breathing out and to rest in the present moment.
Meals were eaten outdoors in small "family" groups to which we were assigned for the duration of our stay. For the first 20 minutes of each meal, we remained silent and took time to practice "mindful eating". This was one of the hardest practices. The idea is simply to become aware of the food you are eating and enjoy it for the gift that it is. This practice was a long way from the eating rituals of my childhood where I ate fast so as to hit the finish line before my dad, thereby escaping any comment he might direct at my imperfect table manners.
In his morning talks, Thich Nath Hanh frequently returned to the challenge of dealing skilfully with emotional and relationship difficulties. The afternoons were spent in helping with the routine chores that were critical to the smooth running of the retreat. Some cleaned toilets; others helped chop vegetables and prepare delicious vegetarian meals. I volunteered for the recycling and composting department, and worked with Brother Jim, who was gardener and general groundsman.
It was humbling to discover how much of our garbage can be recycled. Despite a population of 300 people in the upper hamlet, the disposable rubbish we left out weekly for the bin collection didn't exceed three large bins. Scraps and skins were piled high in our compost heap and turned from one corral into the next.
A week in the sun and heat of Southern France produced dramatic changes in its texture. We transferred the mature compost into life-giving manure for the vegetables and flowers grown in plum village.
Composting and recycling expressed beautifully a truth at the heart of the Zen tradition. It is often our willingness to work with those elements in our lives that we most want to get rid of, that makes us most interesting as people. Our acceptance and struggle with these very elements is the way we become our true selves. Mindfulness offers a different way of relating to our suffering, encouraging acceptance rather than resentment; approach rather than avoidance, patience rather than impatience.
Plum Village was possibly the most restful holiday experience I've ever had. It was gentle and non-imposing. It was not trying to sell anything, to sign you up to some alternative religious cult, or to imply in anyway that you should embrace the Buddhist tradition.
The ethos of the village reflected the simplicity and freshness of its teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, but these qualities were evident in each of the young monastics who were great fun and extraordinarily helpful. Far from being an escape from your life, it was an invitation to come home to yourself. The words of Thich Nath Hanh, "I have arrived, I am home", reflected the essence of Plum Village.
Each step we took in our walking, each breath in sitting meditation became a radical choice to come home to the present moment and engage with whatever it held for us. That coming home can be quite painful at first, when you've spent a long time dodging your demons, but its gets much easier if you give yourself half a chance, and if you have the support of others, as we did on this retreat.
Re-entry to the adventure of 21st century living was something of a shock, but I soon remoulded myself to its pressures and challenges. What remains is the invitation that was extended daily in Plum Village, to live the present moment with appreciation, to take time to breathe and, above all, to remember to smile.
There is extensive information on Plum Village, including full transcripts of selected talks given by Thich Nhat Hanh, available on their web site, www.plumvillage.org
Dr Tony Bates, principal clinical psychologist at St. James's Hospital, Dublin, writes the MindMoves column with the Health Supplement fortnightly.