Shoshi D.
Yelp
I just attended Sylvia Boorstein's New Year's retreat. Very disappointed.
Spirit Rock billed this as a daylong retreat of instruction in mindfulness and metta meditation, with multiple sequences of guided sitting, feedback and help on individual meditation challenges, walking meditations, and other modalities. It was a pleasant day, mostly, but bore little resemblance to the program materials from which I signed up, and I have to admit for the benefit of others that I think my attention, entrance fee and goodwill were most heartily misused.
In reality all we got were two brief sits, no walking meditation, no instruction, and two very brief sessions each of excellent drumming and qigong. The first sit was a 15-minute "opening meditation" that wandered in at least an hour into the day and whose q&a followup guidance came more than another hour after the sit concluded, so long after, in fact, that Sylvia had to remind us of what we'd done. This 'guidance' was limited to offering a mike to a strictly limited five people from the crowd of 200 or so, two of whom were sycophants who wasted their 'questions' on praising Dear Leader.
The second sit was the only metta given, was perhaps 20 minutes long, and came at the very end of the day when we were mostly exhausted. I heard snoring. A lot of snoring.
Much of what Sylvia said was entertaining, interesting, or amusing, and it probably had connection to the Dharma. But this was not billed as a day of sitting at the master's feet. It was billed very, very specifically as a day of meditation instruction. It felt more like an interminable car ride with a chatty and somewhat daft, beloved older relative.
And Sylvia? Oh, there are a lot of lessons for me in why I was so disappointed. She was, alas, unwilling/unable/uninterested in giving us a structured or educational day. Given what may have been a lot of newcomers in attendance, it would have been helpful, for example, to learn before I wriggled with bursting bladder, two hours in, that there would be no planned breaks and that we should answer nature's calls as needed.
We listened to Sylvia ramble, charmingly at first, and more and more alarmingly, all day long, with just two 15-minute interludes for the drummer/qigong leaders. In a 10-4:30 retreat, we got perhaps an hour of either sitting or qigong, an excessive full hour for our self-catered lunch, and the rest was wandering Sylvia. Digressions begat digressions until my mind gave up trying to follow and let it just drone on. I hope she has the showbiz sense to learn from why she'd lost much of her audience by the end of the day.
The other attendees were overwhelmingly the chilly, shy, affluent older Marin women who clung to each other like glue and seemed to have only the slightest connection to the material. Last time I felt like this I was at an Episcopalian church on the East Coast where everyone froze in shock when the visiting minister asked congregants to greet the people to either side of them, and I received the dankest of limp handshakes by a patrician whose gaze was somewhere near my hairline.
Sylvia, bless her heart, did a great deal of exhorting people to be free-spirited, open, and full of joy, which is my natural demeanor, but every time I cracked the lid even slightly on my friendly self (like smiling at others when going down the hall on a break) they avoided my gaze.
I wanted so badly for this to be a lovely, overwhelming day, and there were positive attributes. The grounds are beautiful. The hall was gorgeous. The two brief qigong interludes in the day were creative, absorbing and unlike any other qigong or tai chi that I've ever experienced.
I wish the qigong teacher/leader, an Englishwoman with infectious enthusiasm for her very mystical, very healing and imagination-based approach, had been credited in the retreat description, or had gotten more than a fleeting intro. I'd study with her again, but an hour combing their website yielded few clues of who she was. Maybe I imagined her.
The drummer - also not credited - was a world-class Djembe improviser who accompanies her drumming with beat-poetry-like, spoken-word riffs that are delightfully silly, charming, effective and moving, all at the same time.
Sylvia's self-indulgent rambling was about 70% of the content. There were nuggets of insight and plenty of what seemed shopworn greatest-hit anecdotes, but I came here to work and learn, not worship or indulge anyone's Great Leader.
