Interview with Sally Walker, Three-year Retreat graduate

Ngejung: How did you make the decision to leave your life in science and do this three-year retreat?

Sally: Well, it was kind of made for me. In 2011 I took a trip to India and my two travel mates were good friends of mine who had done the three-year retreat. I always said I would never do it but I started talking to them and I said, well maybe I would like to do the one year where you do Chakrasamvara and Vajrayogini. And this person said, well, if you’re going to do only one year, you should probably do the foundation year. Then when I got back to Halifax, about a month later, I got laid off from my job. I thought, well, maybe I could, since it was already in my mind and I did my little budget and I thought, yeah, I think I could swing it. So for me, it wasn’t a lifelong dream or anything like that. 

When I first got to Sopa Chöling, I remember feeling like, oh my God, what were you thinking? This is crazy. You can’t do this. I really did feel like that. Everybody else was saying, oh, I’ve been wanting to do this for so long, and I’m like, I don’t even want to do it now. But Nancy (Huszagh) said,  just wait, give it some time, wait and see. So I did, and I was really glad I did.

I was a Chakrasamvara practitioner and I had become a student of Thrangu Rinpoche because I sort of realized I wasn’t going to do the whole Scorpion Seal thing. That just wasn’t going to be my path. So I was looking for a path, and certainly, the retreat provided that, a full-time path for six years.

Ngejung: You mentioned looking at your budget. This retreat also takes a considerable investment of time, in addition to money. Did it feel like an investment that you were making?

Sally: At that point I just felt like, what else was I going to do? In hindsight, I think you could say it was an investment because when I ended the retreat I got all these health problems. I think that without having done all that practice, I don’t know that I’d have been able to deal with them. I was kind of blind for a few months before I got to see an ophthalmologist. I was really not able to function at all, for about a year actually.

Ngejung: What kind of a practitioner do you think can really benefit from the retreat?

Sally: I think mainly someone who has a very strong shamatha practice. I remember when I got there, I had been so busy packing up my whole household, buying things for retreat and everything, and I got there and I thought, wow, I should have done a weekthün (week-long retreat) before this. That would’ve been much more helpful than all of the gathering and all of that stuff I was involved in.

Ngejung: Do you have any advice for people who are considering the three-year retreat?

Sally: I think a lot of sitting practice beforehand would be really good. A couple of people gave me two or three-page lists of things that you needed to take to retreat with you. So I had all that stuff and I kind of became the store for everybody. Anytime anybody needed something, they would just come and ask me and usually, I would have it, whatever it was. I think that’s really unnecessary. And by the third year, we had a liaison person who, if you needed something, she would get it for you. People could be a little more relaxed about having to have everything that they might possibly ever need.

…from a Western point of view, it’s kind of an unreasonable schedule and so forth.
So there’s a lot of surrender involved.

Surrender

It’s rigorous. I remember one friend of mine, she said to me, can you be rigorous? And I said yes, but it wasn’t really true. That’s the other thing I would say is that from a Western point of view, it is kind of an unreasonable thing to do, and it’s kind of an unreasonable schedule and so forth. So there’s a lot of surrender involved. I think the more you can surrender the easier it is. If you’re trying to get around the schedule or see how many things you can get done in the next minute because you have a lot of duties and the schedule is very tight… sometimes you really have to work to get everything in. 

Most of my insights actually came from rubbing up against my
expectations and other people’s expectations.

I really think that’s why I say most of my insights actually came from rubbing up against my expectations and other people’s expectations. I think a lot of that is about surrendering. I think people really need to look at the schedule and think, am I going to be able to do that day after day? You have one day off a year, which is Shambala day (Losar). I think really, really looking at the schedule seriously and picturing yourself in it is a good thing to do. 

The other thing that I would say to people is that once they’re on the retreat, to really trust yourself and respect your own karma and your own path, because you’re all doing the same practices together. And obviously you’re discussing them, sometimes in a group, sometimes just one-on-one. For me, it was too easy to get into comparing myself to others. For some of the practices, this is very traditional stuff, and in the manual it will give you signs. There are signs, like you’ll see smoke or something, and that’s a sign that your practice is successful, which is very, very different from how we were taught, (as in the approach of )Journey Without Goal and all that. I found that part very difficult. 

Another thing was that during the first year, you do all these guru yogas, and that was really amazing because then when you do go through a lot of stuff, things come up obviously. And when I was having a really hard time, I felt like, wow, this is a teeny, tiny glimpse of what they went through, Milarepa and everybody, the hardships that they went through. I also think you need a lot of devotion for this retreat. I felt that very strongly. I felt like my root guru Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was right there all the time. Also Thrangu Rinpoche, who I was studying with. I used to go on these walks and I would feel like they were right there with me, like I was actually holding their hands. And Thrangu Rinpoche, I wrote to him once, and he wrote back, he was right there for us.

I felt like my root guru Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was right there all the time.
Also Thrangu Rinpoche, who I was studying with. I used to go on these walks and I would feel like they were right there with me, like I was actually holding their hands.

I was reflecting a bit about my experience, and I thought, obviously it’s a Kagyu Vajrayana retreat, but it’s really very Mahayana. That’s where most of my insights came from, from interactions with other people. During the first year, anyway, every two weeks we would have a couple of (Lojong) slogans that we focused on, and then we’d have a little discussion group about them

One of my strongest things was … you just think things should be a certain way and you think things should be fair, and this, that, and the other. This retreat is kind of inflexible really and you have to get used to that. There was this one time when I felt like this person was being very unfair about the rota, and other people did too. And if you complained to him, then he’d make it worse. And so I complained and I just could not get through to him. I was really angry. I remember I was thinking, alright, well what does the Vidyadhara say about dealing with aggression? And the first thing I looked up, drive all blames into one. I thought, oh no, I’m not doing that. So then I looked in the Vajrayogini Tris and there it was, drive all blames into one. I looked in Crazy Wisdom and there it was, drive all blames into one. So I said, all right, all right. I started looking at it and it became clear fairly quickly that the reason for this whole disagreement was the expectations that I had. I could see that it actually is my fault, that I’m thinking things should be this way. They’re not, and then I’m getting mad. There were a lot of things like that. You’d have some kind of interaction with somebody that was very disturbing, and then you had to sit with it and look at your mind. I think it’s where a lot of the learning comes from and a lot of the joy as well, because obviously you had a lot of issues with people and your own issues. But I just really loved the community and we had a lot of good times together, as well as a lot of intense arguments. But it was a real Mahayana retreat.

Ngejung: Do you have a particularly funny memory you would like to share?

Sally: We laughed a lot. We had these birthday parties. If it was somebody’s birthday, we would all gather in the kitchen after lunch and the person would get whatever kind of cake they wanted. And then we would sing songs. We sang Happy Birthday in English, Spanish, French, Dutch. One year we had a Polish person, so that was really fun.

There was another time we had this session, I think it was 5-7:30 in the morning, and during that session I went out to go to the bathroom. Someone had left a note under my door and I picked it up. It was the practice coordinator, and they were asking me something and I was very upset about it. I had to just sit with it because I wasn’t going to go knock on her door. So I sat with it, and it was these waves of anger. And I’d write a note back, and then I’d sit for a while and I would tear that one up. And so by the end, it was all gone. Then when I walked out into the hallway, into the service area, and I saw her, I just went like, wow, that could have been this whole scene that was totally unnecessary.

One time we were doing the first fire puja and it had been snowing and you just have to do whatever it is you have to do. The snow was melting on the roof and it was dripping onto my text. There was just nothing I could do. I could hardly see the text anymore, it was so wet. We laughed a lot.

An Investment

Ngejung: You mentioned how beneficial this retreat has been afterward for dealing with your health issues. Is there anything more you’d like to offer?

Sally: I think a lot of it is the view. You just have a different view of things and so it makes it more possible to put up with things or to deal with things.

About the investment … I think it was kind of like an investment. I don’t know if I’ll ever practice that intensively for that long again, and it does leave that imprint. Andrew Holecek, who wrote the book The Power and the Pain, I remember he said when he came out of retreat that his whole life kind of fell apart. He said he didn’t want to go on a karmic spending spree. I kind of feel that way about the investment. You can’t really just live off the principle, you do have to keep putting in. That’s the thing that Thrangu Rinpoche said to us, the most important thing is that you just keep practicing.

You can’t really just live off the principle, you do have to keep putting in. That’s the thing that Thrangu Rinpoche said to us, the most important thing is that you just keep practicing.

When I came back after retreat, I just felt like, wow, do I really have to recreate this whole Sally Walker thing? I didn’t want to still be in retreat, but I really didn’t want to be out either. I think coming out is a very interesting process. Actually, I found it very shocking because in between years, you were definitely in this kind of bardo … you were still in retreat, basically. And I found that difficult. It takes a while to process … what was that?

The place was incredible. There was this one time, it was in the evening, and we were all practicing in our rooms, we weren’t in the big shrine room. This fog came up and it formed into mountains and … the sunset … everybody ran out to see it because it was so incredible. It was really powerful to be at the Abbey.