Satyalila

One important aspect of the long Akasavana retreat last summer which I haven’t yet written about is The Story of the Fankle. Fankle is a wonderful Scots word, introduced to me by Jayavardhini. It doesn’t appear in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, but its meaning is “to get in a mental knot” about something. In Buddhist terms it describes “propantia” or mental proliferation – something with which I am, sadly, very familiar! During the course of the retreat I reflected on this wonderful word, fankle, and found it very useful in my practice. Time and again I found myself “getting into a fankle” about something… only to spot it and then try, patiently and kindly, to unravel it.

We had a special Vajrasattva puja one day (led by Jayavardhini and Nagarakshita) and I realised that this was a great opportunity to ritually let go of my habit of getting into a fankle. Not only is Vajrasattva the figure on which I meditate, he is also associated with purification, so I decided to make a fankle to offer at this puja. As soon as I had the idea, the visual image of the Fankle appreared fully-formed in my mind. It involved a lot of rusty, twisted wire and rainbow coloured wool (which I had, of course brought with me on the retreat…) At the “heart” of the Fankle was a glass pebble (symbolising my “essential diamond nature which is the essence of sunyata” – ie the idea that we are intrinsically pure, but that that purity becomes obscured by defilements – which in this case are tangled thinking, represented by the wool and wire) I wrapped the glass pebble in a sheet of paper coloured with turquoise scribbly writing (not unlike the original draft of this story!) Then I wrapped the paper bundle about with rainbow wool which gradually wove in and out of the big tangle of rusty wire about 10” by 12” (left over from the building work). Round and round the tangled web of the rainbow wool wove, in and out, sometimes round and round and round one single strand of wire which caught my attention – like thoughts harping on a single subject.

The Fankle was done and the next afternoon I carried it ceremoniously into the silent shrine room for the special puja. Eyes glanced, askance. “What’s that?!” Someone whispered. “A Fankle!” I replied – and the silence dissolved into muffled snorts and giggles.

After the puja it seemed that the Fankle culd not just be thrown away – tho’ I was taken with the idea of hurling from the terrace outside the shrineroom and naming the place “Fankle’s End” (“Dun Fanklin’” being another possibility…or a name for a future abode.) However, I could not, in all conscience, hurl my “essential diamond nature” (still at the heart of the Fankle) away over a cliff. (And anyway, I pretty soon realised it would have landed in Ratnadharini’s tent, a couple of terraces below!)

So a place had to be found for it. Earlier in the retreat, when I’d been fretting about (my lack of) contentment, I’d had a good talk with Padmasuri sitting on high on a rocky outcrop above the Shrine Room. As I mentioned in another post, we’d rather taken to naming bits of the landscape, so she and I decided that this, henceforth, would be Contentment Rock. Where-else, therefore, could the Fankle possibly come to rest but on Contentment Rock? And so it was that ritually, on Dharma Day (on the blue moon of July) that Jayavardhini and I (with Vijayasri in attenance) carried the Fankle from the shrine room and laid it on Contentment Rock, thereby creating “Fankle’s Rest”…..

It was breathtaking. The retreat house stands on a kind of promontory of land at about 920 metres, with 300 metre cliffs behind and a vast open vista of mountains all around, including the spectacular and monumental Masmut – seemingly one enormous rock the size of a small mountain. When I walked from the double-height porch into the equally high-ceilinged dinig room with pristine white walls, huge woodburning stove and blue-stained tables made from recycled doors, my jaw literally dropped. The retreat centre building was stunning inside as well as out. The architect had transformed the ruined farm-house and barn into a spacious and aesthetically pleasing space, utilising features such as door and window-lintels to bring character and contrast to the simple white walls and concrete floors.

The living conditions at Akasavana are basic. We only had hot running water in the kitchen and there was no heating in the bedrooms downstairs. We went to bed in our thermals & woolly hats (when we got there, in April) with hot water water bottles heated by pans on the woodburning stove in the sitting room. We had calor gas for cooking and heating water. Lighting and the water pump from the spring is powered by solar power and we used rainwater to wash our clothes. Water in scarce in Spain, so we were told at the start that our daily ration was two buckets each, to include washing self and clothes and flushing the loo. (Drinking water was fetched in big containers directly from the spring a couple of terraces further down the hillside.)

All our un-compostable rubbish had to be carried out by the 4×4 which had brought us and would bring our food supplies up the 8 km dirt track from the village, Penarroya de Tastavins. WE had a very hard-working support team of 3 women for the retreat (Padmadharini, Santasiddhi and Alokada) and they lived in the community house a mile or two away on our second plot of land. The total area owned by the Retreat Centre is 108 hectares – a satisfyingly significant number for Buddhists! (It’s the traditional number of beads on a mala, for counting mantras.)

It took weeks to grown accustomed to the scale of the place – look across the valley and we owned that hill, too! Walk up to the top of “our track” and it was a good ten minutes walk. Climb onto the lower ledge of cliff some 120 metres about the retreat house and that, too, is land we own, where maybe one day we could create a solitary retreat facility. It was hard to take in that we actually own this stunningly beautify, amazingly remote place. After six weeks I heard a dog barking and realised it was the first intrusive sound I had heard since we got there!

Being the first retreat there, we had the delight in participating in “mythologizing” the land. Rituals had been done from when the land was first acquired to connect with the local spirits of the place. Now we also began to create shrines to Buddhas, marking out the cardinal points with flags and cairns for the 5 dhyani Buddhas, creating a ritual space dedicated to Vajrasattva in a beautifully arched cave we own further down the mountain and even just simply naming local tracks. Not long after we arrived, wild peonies were spotted growing in the middle of the track leading up behind the retreat centre ridge. For the rest of the retreat this became known as the Peony Path.

It wasn’t until I’d been there about a month that I scrambled with Vijayasri up onto the topmost of the cliffs above our land and looked down, getting a clear picture of the lie of the land and its extent. The way our boundaries run down the shoulders of the hills, the clear path made by our new vehicle-track to the shrine-room building, a three-minute walk along a narrow short-cut path from the retreat house.

That’s a lot of words about the physical environment of the place (without mentioning the ground itself, full of fossils and crystals, the goats, the griffin vultures, the rosemary, thyme, lavender and wild roses, as well as the ever-changing mass of wild flowers.) But I guess the physical environment was a major conditioning factor right through the retreat. It’s a challenging place to live: not only remote, it’s an easy place to fall over, even just walking along on the lose stones of one of the tracks. There are scorpions to be found under rocks (admittedly I only saw one, when it was specially pointed out!) and two people saw hooded vipers. A harmless but beautiful green-blue southern smooth snake made its way into one of the bedrooms through an open door and coiled under a bed, until gently removed by Anilasri….

For about ten years I’d been wanting to take part in a long retreat – six weeks or 3 months. I think it was a part of my profound curiosity about how much it is possible for one’s mind, one’s way of experiencing the world to change through spiritual practice if one puts oneself wholeheartedly into conducive conditions.. And I’d always been attracted to quite “full on” ways of practising. In 1996-7 I left my partner, home, mortgage and career to go and live and work with a group of friends running a Buddhist Wholefood Shop in Croydon. It often wasn’t easy, but it certainly gave me a taste for how different my experience of myself – and life – could be in supportive conditions for practice.

I’d always thought my opportunity for a long retreat would come with ordination. For quite a few years, around the time I was hoping to be ordained, there were 7 week ordination retreats held in Tuscany, in an old monastery called Il Convento. However, it didn’t work out like that. When I received my invitation to be ordained in 2005, the Tuscany retreats had just come to and end and our new women’s ordination retreat centre in the mountains of Spain was not yet operational. So my ordination retreat was 2 weeks at Tiratanaloka in the Brecon Beacons. There were many great things about that – not least, being ordained alongside my lovely friend Kamalamani, with (whom I’m now in a Chapter) and being able to have lots of friends and family there. But it wasn’t the long retreat I was still yearning for.

My Private Preceptor (ie the person who ordained me) was Vijayasri and she spent 3 years in Spain working on the building project at the new retreat Centre. Not infrequently did I fantasize about bveing able to take part in the first retreat there – but it was be an ordination retreat, and when it was finally scheduled for April – July 2007, I was already ordained! I harboured a bit of a fantasy about sneaking onto the retreat as a stow-away and even emailed Ratnadharini (the Retreat Leader and my Public Preceptor) to say this. Not long after, I got an email back from her saying they thought they’d have spare places on the retreat and how great it would be if I could join them.

I spend a week or two after this invitation trying quite hard to be Sensible. Only the year before I’d found a 4-day-a-week job round the corning with a little charity that promotes cycling. I knew that if I decided to go on the retreat I’d need to give up the job. I tried quite hard to encourage myself to practise contentment with the conditions I’d already set up. But the idea wouldn’t go away. One Friday morning (my day off) I woke up and was drinking tea in bed, musing. Suddenly it felt like the alignment of the sun with the entrance of a chamber usually shrouded in darkness. I saw the complete uniqueness of the opportunity I was being offered – three whole months on retreat with two of the most important people in my life…Not just the fulfilment of a long-held dream, but, in the context of my practice – a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Knowing that I can be somewhat impulsive at times, I decided to seek the counsel of my friends, in case I was hurling off into some intoxicated orbit, from which I might make a painful and undignified landing at some point in the future. I thought they might “hold onto my ankles” to stop me floating off on a fantasy, like Winnie-the-Pooh, clutching his balloon… However, I could find no-one who did not think it a good idea. It was decided.

I bought my plane ticket the next day, Saturday and on the Monday resigned my job. I had 5 or 6 weeks in which to sort things out, sublet my flat and accumulate the necessary head torch, mosquito net, notebooks, sun hat and suitable footwear for the adventure. An added bonus to going on the retreat was that the delightful woman formerly-known-as Jo Howes (now Samasuri) was to be ordained on it. We made part of the journey together, arriving at the new retreat centre just ast the kitchen workstops had been fitted and the notice boards screwed to the wall (the latter by Ratnadharini, who was also leading the retreat!).