Interview with Sydney and Chris Jay
June 18, 2011
Vancouver
Sydney and Chris Jay, long-term Buddhist practitioners, are a married couple from the United States, who decided in 2002 to participate in a traditional three-year retreat under the guidance of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. The retreat took place at Vajradhara Gonpa in New South Wales (Australia) and, according to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, lasted three years, three months and three days. According to individually set retreat rules and boundaries, family contact was strictly regulated and shopping, novels, television and any other distractions of the digital age were prohibited.
Sydney and Chris speak openly about the benefits, as well as the challenges of being in a closed three-year retreat situation, with family as well as jobs in the world outside the border of Vajradhara Gonpa.
GV: So you have been together on a three-year retreat in Australia? When was that?
Sydney: Actually the retreat started in January 2005 and lasted until April 2008.
GV: How did this idea come up? How did you come to the point where you said: ‘Yes, we are doing it’?
Sydney: We met some people from Canada, who had done a three-year retreat. I didn’t even know that it was part of the tradition in Tibetan Buddhism. However I was very intrigued and started asking a lot of questions.
This was way back in 1998. I remember thinking, ‘Oh I could never do that.’ But I was curious and the seed was planted.
In 2002 we went to Australia, because Rinpoche was there doing a Ngöndro retreat. We heard that Rinpoche was planning to do a traditional three-year retreat and so I kind of sat there and simmered with thoughts of this … I then went to Chris and said “I think we should do this retreat.”
Chris: I couldn’t believe it when Sydney said, “Let’s do the retreat.” I thought, that there was a snowflakes in hell chance that I’d ever be able to interest her in doing that.
And it was her idea!
When we walked into Rinpoche’s house, I was sure he knew, what we were going to ask. He had this big grin on his face and when we said “Okay, Rinpoche, we want to do the three-year retreat.” Rinpoche replied,” GOOD! You are the first ones. You are in!”
GV: But this was not your first retreat?
Chris: No. We had done some retreats of one month, two months or three months back in the early 2000s. However we have never done a really long retreat. The longest we had ever done was for three months.
GV: For people with a western cultural background, how would you describe the importance and the benefit of a retreat?
Sydney: I don’t think there are enough words or the right kind of words to describe the benefit. You start your retreat the moment you say, I am going to do it. A woman who had just come out from a retreat told me, that it’s like the “you”dies. It’s a process. That “you”before you made the decision is very different from the “you” that’s moving forward. It’s this process of discovering who this person is that’s getting ready to go into retreat and then who this person is during the retreat. That’s one of the benefit’s in doing a three-year retreat. Also when you do a three-year retreat, you have the structure of the whole place, the structure of your room, the structure of everybody else there doing the same thing, and it’s a tremendous benefit to live in that kind of atmosphere.
GV: For someone who is 25 years old reading this may scare them. Because they think, this time I could go surfing on a nice island or have parties……
Chris: There is a kind of karmic connection aspect to this. When you hear the words three-year retreat or when you meet a three-year retreatant and talk about it, some people think that, “Oh gosh, I could be surfing, I could be sailing through the Greek islands” . However other people could be intrigued to the point where they see that there actually is a path where they could go as deeply as possible and as quickly as possible in this life. Also there is a timeliness to it, you know. We couldn’t do it until we were a bit older due to issues of money, children, so on and so on.
Sydney: But for everybody who goes in – no matter what the time in their life – something gets sacrificed. For me when I went in, I had one grandchild and that was a cause for a lot of my pain during the initial stages . When I talked to Rinpoche about this he said: “ Don’t worry, when you are in retreat, within six months the way you feel about that baby, you will feel about all sentient beings.” And I was like, Super! It is a beautiful thought and it really motivated me. As a result it kind of happened and I do feel differently about people. Probably not the same heart passion that I feel for my family but I do feel more open, more caring and not quite so willing to smash people with my temper.
Chris: At the end of the retreat we did a Drubchen and Rinpoche invited the media. During an interview they asked Rinpoche about the purpose of this kind of retreat. Rinpoche answered, “ Until this retreat the students, these practitioners have been dependent on the outer guru and the purpose of this retreat is that they can find their inner guru. Their inner guru will be what teaches them from now on. In the context of the guru that’s what this kind of retreat is about.”
GV: What about the boundaries that are set? Was there for instance , Skype?
Sydney: No Skype. However Rinpoche was so kind with our group. If our retreat master had decided it, it would have been nothing. But many of us had kids and some went in without their partners or spouses. Two months before the retreat started Rinpoche gave permission to have a phone. His directions were, keep it to a minimum. So we could talk, like I talked to my kids back here in the US. Nobody from the outside could come in to where we were except the doctor and the guys who mow the lawn etc. There was a house where people could go if they had visitors so retreatants who lived in Australia could have their families come and visit for very short periods of time.
Chris: I wanted stricter boundaries than Sydney did. Stricter in terms of who I could call because I didn’t want to call family members except for my mother who was 84 years of age. She was really sad when I left because she thought that she would never see me again. I wrote this in my retreat rules which are like a contract between Rinpoche and yourself. I wrote that I could call my mother every three weeks – basically to find out two things: 1) how is she doing and 2) how Tiger Woods was doing [laughs].
GV: Apart from issues with setting up the boundary and the different characters were there any other challenges directly related to practice?
Sydney: The initial practice everybody does, the Ngondro, where we had to do 100.000 prostrations was what probably gave me the most confidence in myself as a practitioner. Having the commitment of doing 400 times Refuge, 400 times Bodhicitta and 400 hundred-syllable mantras and so on within a certain amount of time, whenever you got behind, you would have to catch up. So you would never be lazy because you knew that you had to keep up. Being able to do that [keeping the commitment] gave me confidence in myself as a practitioner. But that’s only the part of the retreat where you have to count. When we moved to practices where we didn’t count it got really difficult. Settling in, doing the sadhana and doing visualization without the support of counting…..
Chris: At this point one’s neuroses are in full display: Am I doing it? Am I not doing it? oh my god I can’t do it because I am so stupid. Any kind of neurosis that one has comes right up in front of our minds. We all have these kinds of things, but when the neuroses come up we can easily project them onto other people and say ‘It’s their fault, it’s not me “ So there was a lot of self-discovery in the midst of doing Vajrayana practice. Also, a big learning for me in this retreat was to keep my mouth shut. We humans – that is, me – get in trouble with our mouths. To learn that, to see myself doing it while my mouth was open, and to develop some awareness around keeping it shut was really a great learning for me.
GV: Was there a lot of communication going on between the retreatants?
Chris: There was a main kitchen where a lot of people would get together and eat, but there were other people in cabins that would have their own kitchen. It was a very amorphous changeable situation.
GV: Was it helpful for the retreat being together as a couple rather doing it individually?
Sydney: I think for me it was really helpful because Chris is a very committed and dedicated practitioner. He was a real source of inspiration for me because I am much more emotional. I could spend a lot of time missing my children and my grandchildren and be very tearful.
I had three deaths in my family fairly quickly together from 1994 through 1997 including the death of my son (Chris’s stepson). Chris was incredibly important during that time. He took very good care of me. The most powerful learning in terms of the practice and our relationship came during the retreat because I had to take care of that stuff myself and so we learned that it is my pain, my loss just as he had his own pain and loss. Being in the retreat and having that loss came up during practice again and again–It was really healing not only for me personally but in terms of our relationship and the dynamics of that relationship.
Chris: Some people would come by and say ‘You two are so lucky that you have each other and you don’t have to go through this alone’ and it’s true (Sydney agrees). It was wonderful to be there as a couple, but I wondered if we were missing anything by being a couple… however at the end of the day I doubt if it makes any difference. I found myself by the end of the retreat appreciating how hard it must have been to go through this without a partner. But of course, as we all know, having a partner is not all that easy, particularly when the neuroses start coming up….
GV: What do you think is the essence of a retreat?
Sydney: Of course with the practice you start to become a practitioner and in the three years that’s one of the things you learn. Another thing is commitment. For me this was the biggest thing. Once I decided to go that was it and no more questions about getting up at 3:30 in the morning – that decision was already made because it was part of the commitment.
Chris: Two things. First of all to be exposed for who I am as opposed to what I think I am as a practitioner. Because it is so easy to walk in with a certain conceit about “Oh, I’m a great practitioner because I have been doing Ngondro for ten years”. But when one’s neuroses start coming up, you realise the alarming difference between who you think you are and what actually is. It’s stunning, and for me, this was really the beginning of the Path. Nowhere else can we learn this because everywhere else we get to be distracted by entertainment, or even worse, praised for being a practitioner. But here there’s none of that. You have to sit there, look at it and it can be very painful. The second thing is that as students of Rinpoche we are kind of like puppy dogs. We need our master, we wag our tail, we put our ears back and say please Rinpoche pay attention to me. To me, one essence of retreat is about moving from away that stance to begin awakening one’s own inner Guru. And, as Rinpoche told us, essentially, a 3-year retreat is a good start.
