The Land of Great Bliss
Meditation Instructor Training in my old French haunt.
My mum drives me to Bristol airport through the early morning, along the dark glossy tarmac of Welsh motorways. She drops me off at the entrance with a hug, and I wander into the hanger solo. I buy a quinoa salad and a turmeric-ginger shot from M&S, pee about seven times, and fuss about the whereabouts of my luggage and passport repeatedly until my gate is called. I used to travel lots, but these days I’m out of practice.
I make my way towards Gate 9, through stag parties and English families donned in straw hats and football shirts. I’m not feeling chatty, instead wanting to relish in this moment alone, and I eat my salad in silence with my headphones in. As the plane takes off I imagine I have eagle wings and it’s me, not a machine, that is rising up into the sky.
At some point during the flight I doze off, waking with my mouth wide open, an air hostess tapping my shoulder and telling me to tuck my tray back up for landing. I am a tiny being rattling around in the world again like loose change, feeling ecstatic to be on my way to my spiritual home. Dechen Chöling (Tibetan for ‘Land of Great Bliss’) - or DCL for short - is a meditation centre in rural France, the European home to the Shambhala Buddhism lineage, and somewhere I have spent many summers on retreats or volunteering.
This year I am here to participate in a week-long Meditation Instructor and Teaching Training programme, along with 75 participants and 13 staff, all of whom are travelling from 17 countries scattered across the world.
Hot tarmac at Limoges airport. My brother Llew meets me outside with a German man who is chauffeuring us from the city to DCL in his car. The windows are down as we speed along the country lanes of the Limousin, getting lost, breathing in the Frenchness of France, pulling into a lay-by to ask a moustached farmer which road to take next.
We arrive to find Dechen Chöling steeped in late, golden sunlight. The grass thrums with insects as Llew and I circumambulate the grounds. A chorus of frogs chirp down by the lake; a lone heron stands on the far shore amidst their chorus, unaware of our presence. Everything magical I have always loved about the place is still right here, like I never went away.
At the heart of the Land of Great Bliss is a rustic French chateau, white-shuttered and elegant, vibrating with decades of meditators shuffling through her hallways and bedrooms. The front door is never locked, the shrine room silent, then filled with chanting meditators periodically throughout each day.
The grounds sprawl away from the chateau in all directions. Various tents and outbuildings are dotted around, and I gravitate towards my favourite old haunts as soon as I arrive. The Boutique - a pretty café, strewn with Tibetan prayer flags and multicoloured garden furniture, where I help myself to ice lollies, coffees or postcards, leaving a handful of euros in the collection bowl for whatever I take. Another favourite, the ‘Offerings’ section, is a large dusty wardrobe and shoe-rack pushed into the corner of a barn, decorated with cobwebs and smelling of old feet. Inside people leave clothes, books and objects they don’t wish to travel on with. I have found amazing things in this corner! Red velvet Mary Jane shoes, a sequinned jacket, hippie skirts, romance novels, books on healing.
As I reacclimatise myself with this land over the next day, my head rings with old memories of a younger, shyer, care-free me. My succession of Augusts at DCL before becoming a mother; meditating in the early mornings, then toiling the afternoons away planting tomatoes and cucumbers, or stripping bedsheets, readying the chateau for the next set of guests. Scurrying around the grounds with my guitar on my back, writing songs in spare moments.
After this string of transformative summers I wasn’t able to visit DCL for six years, due to a concoction of these three things: birthing my beautiful babies, the covid pandemic, and strife within the Shambhala community. But, at long last, I returned again last July with my partner and sons for a long family camp, which felt like a weirdly beautiful folding of disjointed parts of my world, coming together in a loophole of time. It gave me a feeling of looking back on my life from my deathbed and seeing two of the most powerful, important events colliding in a dream.
July 2023, with my sons at the chateau.
My home this week is a tent made from army canvas. It has mouldy patches and smells of Cub Scout camping trips. It’s like a sauna inside. As I sit brushing my hair, a lizard scuttles up the fabric wall and falls back down to the ground, startled.
I am sharing it with Cailin, a friend I met right here 11 years ago. Along with Llew, Cailin and I have since founded Black Mountain Meditation, offering annual retreats in the UK, and weekly online socialising, meditation and dharma chats.
In the early morning the sun is up, but not yet hot. A haziness hovers over the grasses, crystals of dew heavy on each blade. I drink loose-leaf tea with almond milk. I chat to a Dutch woman as I brush my teeth. Around us the meditators wake up. Bodies stretch into yoga postures outside of tents, their bare feet grounded on the soil. I’m hit with a strong longing for spiritual community to exist in my daily life. I feel such grief not to have this communal heart at the centre of things.
Today our programme begins, and I can feel my heart loosening up already. We start with a lhasang, a Tibetan smoke offering ceremony, skipping and chanting around the fire-pit, raising energy, rousing the protector spirits to join us for this time. I’ve done smoke ceremonies enough times to let self-consciousness fly out the window and lean into the sheer crazy upliftedness and cheer that these rituals evoke.
We spend the next few days melting from heat in a big white tent, sat upright on a sea of equally-spaced, navy meditation cushions. We are studying everything we need to know to be in the roles of instructor or teacher. The days are long, with no tea breaks as there’s so much to pack in. Between the talks we practice ‘active listening’ in pairs, sharing deep sentiments with one another. ‘Listen the other into their wisdom,’ Sabine calls over us all, as we ask one another over and over, ‘What do you fear?’
Our days are structured around The Four Dignities in the Shambhala lineage: Tiger, Snow Lion, Garuda, Dragon. Tiger is meek (gentle), Snow Lion is perky, the garuda outrageous, the dragon inscrutable. These deeply rich teachings contain so much, it is difficult to delve beyond the surface of them here. They include all the ways we can be gentle, joyful, bold, unbound. All the ways we close ourselves down, separate our hearts and play small. What happens when we open, when we trust, when we are heart-led warriors? (If this tiny summary is interesting to you, I recommend reading ‘The Sacred Path of the Warrior’ for much more information.)
One day I give my first ever Dharma talk. I didn’t think I would do this, it wasn’t planned. Seeing everyone around me open up into their vulnerability and bravery is contagious. I feel compelled to speak about the relationship between our Buddha Nature and fear - how we can forget our innate worth, and cripple ourselves with self-criticism and cruelty. I cry afterwards, and feel deeply proud of myself to do something that meant so much to me but was so outside my comfort zone.
Every lunchtime we sprawl our hot, tired bodies around the dining tent, eating loaded plates of vegetables soaked in mustard dressing. This is followed by ginger ice lollies in the boutique with new Dutch and Polish friends, before I slink off for a daily power nap in my sauna tent.
Over the days everything sinks in, everything deepens. We slow down, we forget about our iPhones. Laugher arises. We chat about our guilty trash-TV pleasures, when our heads feel like they will explode from the Buddhist teachings. (Current obsession: Selling Sunset.)
On our last evening we set up 10 trestle tables in a circle in front of the chateau, and dress them in white paper tablecloths, buddelia fronds, candles and crockery. Cailin MCs in the late sunshine in her black and pink flowery dress, calling out a list of thank yous to the teachers and staff who’ve made all this magic possible.
We are dressed up as best as campers can be, in lipstick and silk shirts and backless dresses. I tie juniper branches into my plaits with pink ribbons. ‘You look like a pagan Joan of Arc,’ someone tells me. ‘A woodland fairy,’ says someone else. ‘A solstice queen!’ We feast and dance outside the chateau to a mix of banging Euro club tunes, Faithless and Fleetwood Mac. I twirl to Britney’s Baby One More Time with people I cried with yesterday.
Shooting stars and disco lights overhead, we sneak shots of Tazio’s whisky and dance amongst the jumping bodies of 80 meditators. I feel all the magic of being alive. This is what I’ve always loved about Shambhala - at the heart of it is a desire to bring Buddhism into western life, and retreats often end with a dance party, all the pent up energy and emotion bursting out into the night. I crawl into bed at 2am when we’re finally forced to turn the music off.
The sun has paled. It’s leaving day. Rachel drives me away from the chateau, for baguettes in Limoges before dropping me off at the airport. I hear the pigeons’ repetitive cooing as I cradle my coffee in the airport lounge, and I’m washed in all the sentimentality of not wanting to leave this profound place. The mandala we have created here is now breaking apart, as it always does. We are drifting back to our countries via trains and planes, the impermanence of life overwhelming me once again. But we take our learning and opened hearts with us. Just in time for the summer Black Mountain Meditation retreat to begin in two weeks, in the magical Olchon Valley!
xx
