A Year of Living Mindfully: Learning to live without a running commentary

It is now a month since I completed my 10-day retreat and I’m settling back into some old routines.

I get up at 6am, walk downstairs to a room at the back of the house and lay out my mat. I sit for 30 minutes and stretch afterwards.

The garden has come alive in the past week. Birdsong is louder and more penetrating than it has been all winter. Bare branches are now covered in fresh mint-green leaves. Blossoms have suddenly appeared on the two apple trees that I planted in 1994.

They lean towards each other at the bottom of the garden, like an old couple that have braved many a long winter together.

It’s hard to find words to describe the experience of meditation, because it is essentially a wordless activity.

All I can say is that on a good day, very little happens. My thoughts are swallowed up by silence. With each breath, I step into the present and ease back into my body.

At other times, my mind loses its mooring and I am swept away by some Micheál O Muircheartaigh style commentary in my head: “There’s Bates again, too much going on, can’t keep his head in the game, running into trouble everywhere he turns. For God’s sake, will you open your eyes.”

Knack of speaking
When I finished the retreat my intuitions were sharpened and I picked up other people's moods almost instantly.

On my first day back I met a man who talked a great deal. He was good-natured and he laughed a lot.

After 10 days of silence, I had lost the knack of speaking. So I just listened without feeling the usual pressure to respond or reciprocate. Despite his jokes and his smiles, I could feel an immense loneliness in this man.

When you return from any kind of prolonged ordeal, people look at you for evidence of significant change. At least, I imagined that they were looking at me expecting to see some difference. So I felt really exposed, like I had lost a layer of skin that kept my soul private.

Everybody from my dentist to Stephen in the Londis wanted the lowdown, but I was unable to say much. All I could describe were details of the place where it happened and the structure of the day.

When it came to what was happening inside me, I didn’t have the language. It takes time to digest any experience that is very personal. Time and distance.

I think of other occasions in my life when I’ve finished some epic adventure.

I returned full of energy, dying to tell my story and to prescribe the experience to anyone and everyone. I bored people to tears with my insistence that they should do exactly as I had done to transform their lives.

Life-changing experiences
Age has made me a little more sceptical about the possibility of once-off intense experiences changing anyone's life. I am more cautious now about assuming that something that has meant a great deal to me personally would be right for someone else.

What remains with me from this Vipassana marathon is the image of 100 people who surrendered their time and freedom to 10 days of silent meditation. No doubt there was a fascinating story as to why each of us chose to be there.

But I imagine a common longing to understand how we create (or add to) the distress in our lives and how we cope with our inner and outer lives, drew us all there.

I’m still in the shallow waters of this practice but it continues to intrigue me. I haven’t got everything “sorted”, but mindfulness is opening me to an ordinary simple appreciation of being alive. I’m learning to live without a running commentary.

I am more aware of all living things around me. I see them all as animated by the same spark of life that wakes me up every day and keeps me going.

And that’s enough to keep my head – and my heart – in the game.

Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health..