Introduction
At my home university, University of Auckland, students study a twelve-week semester with a two-week mid-break holiday. On exchange at Tsinghua university, it was sixteen weeks with a five-day Labour Day national holiday, 五一节 – and makeup classes the following weekends. These five days are precious. Many of my international Tsinghua friends visited their Chinese hometowns, travelling to China’s hotspots, or flying to wider locations like Thailand, Japan, and South Korea.
Read everything you need to know about Tsinghua University as an international student here.
As fun as travel is, it can be stressful too, especially if it’s during one of China’s biggest holidays that falls in April, China’s best month of weather. Imagine trying to swim in a fish tank stuffed with all the fish in the ocean. Tourist attractions turn into mosh pits and millions of Asian aunties fight to the front of queues, elbowing you with one arm and holding a child’s hand in the other. You’re putting in far more effort to travel with far less return. Hearing my local friends describe it, I started to wonder about alternatives.
After a stressful first eight weeks of study, it would be nice to have an opportunity to slow down and relax. It crossed my mind how Buddhism and Daoism are a significant part of China’s culture and history. These types of cultural and spiritual knowledge and experiences are fascinating. I found out Tsinghua has a Zen and Tea club that happened to be joining a Zen meditation retreat for the five-day holiday.
As I closed my eyes, I envisioned myself atop a mountain, a breeze fluttering through my hair while being encompassed by lush green treetops. My eyelids would flutter open to gold reflecting on the mountains as the sun vanished into the horizon.
Four weeks later.
Day 1
It feels like a there’s a colony of ants travelling up my thighs biting me as they scurry. I am sitting in an oven being cooked alive by searing heat, writing in my diary as we speak (or, well, meditate). So far, meditation has successfully cleared my mind of distracting chatter about life’s stressors, the past, the future. Instead, I’ve had one line that has grounded me in the meditation like an anchoring mantra: “when will the pain be over?”. It works like a charm.
Meditation helps you become mindful. And I have learned mindfulness, okay? I am mindful of my body filled with millions of darts right now. It only took eleven minutes to summon them this round. I am mindful that the room smells like smoke – luckily not from old Beijing men, but from a Chinese traditional medicine called Ai Jiu He. I am mindful of the stillness in the room.
I check my wrist and subtract the four hours of New Zealand’s time difference. It’s the first time I’ve used my watch as more than an accessory. One more minute until we get a break. I try to reposition and breathe to look like I managed to complete the past thirty minutes unbothered.
Day 2
The retreat location is within some mountains, which surround us beyond the simple concrete buildings. Our hotel room has a rustic, natural feel to it with a wooden ceiling and a bathroom door that doesn’t close properly. The meditation is also a simple room with mats and tatami cushions. There’s about ten Tsinghua students and ten adults, as well as three of their primary-school-aged children.
Each day we follow the schedule of waking at 6.30am to the sound of two pieces of wood clunking together, doing dynamic qigong (动功), eating breakfast at 8am, then doing one hour chunks of sitting meditation (静坐), walking meditation (行禅) or watching learning videos from teacher Sun until 9pm. It’s nine hours a day of activities.
The food is vegetarian – we have rice or a bun with simple vegetable dishes and clear soup. We have fruit and a few Beijing snacks on the side. We get a break of two hours after lunch and five to ten minutes break each hour. During the long break, I nap, read, or do homework. It’s lights out at 10pm.
This meditation retreat would be a great opportunity to interact with Tsinghua students, I’d thought. It would be like a school camp throwback – telling stories at night, sharing invasive secrets, and laughing at weird inside jokes. Well, we’re not allowed to talk.
The silence during the first dinner after everyone had arrived at the camp was shocking. Just clinking steel bowls and the Beijing chef slurping his egg drop soup here and there. It felt like I’d been dropped into a video game world of NPCs.
I suppose, this place is kind of an introvert’s haven; you get to be around people without the pressure of socialising. Maybe the lack of communication amplifies a sense of introspection and stops us from having external distraction.
Day 3
This morning after breakfast I came across a beautiful metaphor from the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and philosopher, Thich Nhat Hanah, about savoring a cup of tea to teach mindfulness.
“You must be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea. Only in the awareness of the present can your hands feel the pleasant warmth of the cup; only in the present can you savour the aroma, taste the sweetness, and appreciate the delicacy. If you’re ruminating about the past or worrying about the future, you’ll completely miss the experience of enjoying that cup of tea. You’ll look down at the cup and the tea will have vanished. Life is like that. If you are not fully present, you will look around and it will be gone. You will have missed the feel, the aroma, the delicacy, and beauty of life.”
If you skimmed that, go back, and read it again – slowly and mindfully. Take it in.
The sound of clunking wood cut off my reading; I jumped up and headed to class, ready to embrace the just-been-hit-by-a-truck feeling. The room had a light atmosphere this morning. The leaders were brewing tea across the room; we would be drinking tea this lesson.
I never knew tea-drinking had rules, but we were taught a Chinese method. You have a small teacup. After the tea is poured, you can exhale onto the tea to let the heat and aroma grace your face, then breathe in as you drink. You swirl the tea around your mouth to fully savour the taste. After swallowing, you exhale through your nose. You should drink the tea in three mouthfuls, the first being small, the second the largest, and the third to finish it off.
This was a marvellously cathartic experience. My mind was clear because all my attention was on noticing how the tea smelt, tasted, felt (not because of pain this time, but delight). It didn’t just feel like a sensory experience, but also felt spiritual, like a light was shining into my head. The power of mindfulness hit me – that it wasn’t just something people say, and that this concept could be applied to anything and everything. Somehow, it was only at the end of the day when I hit the pillow that I realised the connection with Thich Nhat Hanah’s metaphor, and I fell asleep pondering the coincidence.
Day 4
We’re doing an exercise of choosing poetry and improvising singing it to the class. The purpose is to be free in expressing yourself impromptu without worrying about trying to impress others. The blood rushes to my face and the shits reverse back up my intestines. While others choose longer poems, my whole body shakes as I sing my two Chinese lines.
I have done hours of stage performances, so why is this so hard? I initially reread the poetry trying to devise a melody in advance. The irony is, if I’d followed the exercise properly feeling free and relaxed, my singing voice would have probably revealed itself naturally (despite this not being the purpose).
Day 5
We finally got our phones back last night. Two days ago, we were allowed our phones for one hour; apart from this, they’ve been locked up in a suitcase that looks like it could also hold a bomb. At first, not having my phone made me mad. My family and friends needed me to be able to reply quickly to them and there might be important emails. I checked my phone and there was a “check out the latest posts” message from Instagram.
If I wasn’t getting notifications, why was I on my phone all the damn time? As soon as we got our phones, I was onto reels, mindlessly scrolling and judging. Being more detached this time after not using it for so long, I could observe it happening from a higher perspective, like I was floating above myself watching these thoughts flow. I’ve questioned before what is the point of social media, but seriously, what is the point? I kept scrolling.
Reflection
These past five days, I’ve learned how to breathe, walk, and drink tea. I feel like a baby again – also due to my contribution being equivalent to the 8-year-olds here. Nevertheless, the biggest value I’ve gotten from this retreat is learning the power of mindfulness.
I have learned to become more comfortable in silence and lack of stimulus, like listening to a pop song turned acoustic or a rock song stripped back.
I have learned to focus on the present instead of living in the past or the future – neither of which exist, except for within our minds.
It has forced me to lengthen my attention span – which has become easier as the days have gone on, and easier without technology. When you’re not getting dopamine quick fixes from video games, movies, social media, suddenly homework and reading become delectable.
In daily life, phones and laptops are always the easiest option – when I return to my room I lie on my bed on my phone, during lunch I eat with my phone, replying to one message before bed invariably turns into an hour of wasted time.
This camp is showing me how much more fulfilling and healthier it feels to spend down time doing simple activities like journaling, stretching, listening to podcasts, writing, drawing. There are no ads vying for your attention, no-one contacting you about minute details, no controversial news articles.
All this being said, phones are fantastic. I love reading on devices instead of physical books or writing on notes instead of physical paper. But most of the time, our phones are providing external input into our lives – we are consuming information about how we should act, should look, should like. Taking a break from this creates space to find how we ourselves want to act, look, and what we genuinely like. Cultivating our relationships with ourselves matters.
Conclusion
You tend to remember the feelings you have from an experience rather than the details. What stands out to me is the feeling of having nothing on my mind – this feeling was certainly worth the physical pain during meditation.
Did I get what I was looking for? Not exactly. I think what I’d actually been imagining with the lush treetops and sunsets was a spa retreat. But did I get something that added value to my life? Absolutely.
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