“I entered the café feeling freakishly Zen”

WHEN people ask me whether I’ve visited Dogzchen — the Buddhist retreat centre on the tip of the Beara peninsula — the tone of the inquiry is hard to pinpoint.

Let’s just say it’s different to the tone of a question like “have you been to Mahon Point?”

When I answer “no,” the tone of their response is also hard to pinpoint; ‘dismayed’ comes close but it has something else colouring it — that I can’t quite put my finger on.

“Why not?” they gush, “you must go. It’s amaaazing.”

This is when I mark a mild inner resistance to the idea, which I suspect might have something to do with the fact that Buddhism, for some reason, gets on my nerves.

Sometimes, however, I’m in the mood to overcome inner resistance — it’s my version of jumping out of an aeroplane — so this week, I headed to Dogzchen, thinking ‘Bring. It On.’ (Besides, I love the Beara.)

Swinging left out of Glengarriff onto the peninsula, the mist cleared for the first time in weeks and watching big patches of blue appear felt as bizarre as glimpsing the Aurora Borealis. Driving down, the landscape registered in a series of fleeting images on the retina; the same elements of water, moss, sky and stone appearing in different frames round every bend, making me shout and bang the steering wheel in total awe.

By the time the Dogzchen prayer flags came into view, the Beara had worked its usual magic, emptied my head of the worries that go round and round it like washing that’s stuck on a spin cycle (kids… college rents… damp in the bathroom…bald tyre…) and I entered the café at Dogzchen feeling freakishly Zen.

I was starving but they were out of soup, so I ate a scone, solid as a discus and read a leaflet about meditation, in my freaky Zen state.

‘Can we experience inner peace and contentment in the midst of difficult circumstances, is there a way to train our minds and change our perception — or is that wishful thinking? Universities in the US have been conducting tests on experienced meditation practitioners. Results demonstrated they’re more happy and self-disciplined, more able to reach a state of inner peace, even when facing extremely disturbing circumstances.’

I read about how ‘our external situation is created by our internal mind’ and the concept of ‘always living utterly at peace in the moment’ and finally, how ‘Buddhism isn’t a fixed package of beliefs which is to be accepted in its entirety but more a teaching which each person uses in their own way.’

Oh good. Because I have a problem with ‘always living utterly at peace in the moment,’ just for starters. I mean what moments, exactly? What about the billions and billions of moments I spent fragmenting into tiny pieces on intensive care when my child was sick?

I leave the café to find the meditation room; my Zen is gone. A kindly woman shows me to an airy room in which there are a few others sitting in cross-legged silence on orange mats. I assume the same position, in preparation for a one-hour guided meditation practice. The guide urges us to close our eyes, rings a gong and begins the mantra, ‘be safe, be happy, be well,’ which makes me think about my children immediately.

After the kids have resumed their usual worry spot in my brain, college rents drift in and resume theirs, followed by a new, urgent worry: vicious cramp in my foot. I toss these about for a while and then another thought creeps in. ‘Buddhist monks lead lives of seclusion, childlessness, celibacy and solvency.’ The thought bounces along, ‘what do they worry about? I doubt it’s damp in the bathroom… oops …forgot all about damp in the bathroom and what was the other thing again? Oh yes, bald tyre on the red car… my brain’s on spin cycle again.’

I spend a half-hour with a dead foot, while trying to button down an elusive, unfamiliar feeling, which I identify as crashing boredom just as the gong rings to signal time’s up.

I leave. Driving up hills and round bends, a rhapsody of green rises all around me, frame after frame of water, moss sky and stone. I stop the car by the sea and get out. It’s a landscape to which only Yeats could do justice. So beautiful, in fact, that it makes the spin cycle stop — no gongs, no mantras, no philosophy. Just like that.