In full retreat

Went to my first Buddhist "retreat" at the Benalmadena stupa over the weekend and it was totally Ying / Yang as you´d expect.

First evenings session very good, second day session close to being a waste of time.

Talk about not being able to organise a p-up in a brewery. They had posters up showing two different start times, but then started later than either of them specified; there were people wandering in and out as they felt the need (literally, as the toilets are 100m away); they ran for 4 hours at a stretch (on presentation skills courses they suggest 1 hour per session max); there were no handouts and no introduction as to what it was and who it was for - and to top it all the guy spoke in English, a translator made notes, then she repeated what he´d said in (intermediate) spanish. Craziest thing was he was working from an iPad, so it would´t have been hard to give her some notes in advance.

Most (all except me?) were spanish, and what they got out of it is definitely problematic. The concepts are hard enough to understand in English, but loosely translated into spanish they´d be "mystifying" I would think.

There was something in stuff I read beforehand about dress modestly, but the women obviously missed that bit as most were skimpily clad and some even had to resort to knee-shawls to preserve their modesty due to short skirts, "tights" or short shorts. If one of them spent the session playing with their hair (shaking it out, winding it up into a bun, combing it out with their fingers), then a dozen did. One spent an hour giving her boyfriend a neck-massage.

To my surprise, there were a similar number for the second day´s session, but amazingly a good number of the attendants were different people!

The subject was supposed to be the Four Dharmas of Gampopo (which I had found and read up in advance), but the guy only managed to cover the first two. I was obviously not totally au-fait with the sanskrit words and Buddhist terminology, but felt that my personal readings and practice had me ahead of most of the content (ah, pride!) I went up afterwards and asked about a part he´d missed about mantras and got a definite put-down, with his offhand comment about me being a long way from even getting near that stage.

Part of the session was about what not to do, but I think I just about broke every karmic law there is during the sessions with my pride, arrogance, cynicism and judgemental attitude. Didn´t quite commit murder, but if I could have got the fly buzzing around me, I probably would have.

Think there is a long way to go for me (but it has at least got me going into a lot more depth about buddhism). Perhaps the most quotable thing I learned was "find your own way". I think I will have to.