Introduction From No­vem­ber 14 to De­cem­ber 14 2017 I par­tic­i­pat­ed in a month long med­i­ta­tion course at Kopan Monastery in Kath­man­du, Nepal. The course fo­cused on two key top­ics: Ti­betan Bud­dhism and Med­i­ta­tion. It fol­lowed a strict sched­ule of class­es, dis­cus­sions, and med­i­ta­tion ses­sions that start­ed at 5:30am in the morn­ing and fin­ished at 9:00pm at night, and some­times lat­er. Be­fore I start I need to say that I de­vel­oped Pneu­mo­nia quite se­ri­ous­ly dur­ing the course and didn’t par­tic­i­pate ful­ly due to time spent in the hos­pi­tal and time spent re­cov­er­ing. I won’t dis­cuss the con­tents of the lec­tures them­selves as it would be opin­ion based and would lead to a very long ar­ti­cle, rather I will fo­cus on the ex­pe­ri­ence of at­tend­ing the re­treat. If you are look­ing for an in­tro­duc­tion to Ti­betan Bud­dhism then I rec­om­mend read­ing Wis­dom En­er­gy from Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa, it is an easy-to-read book that cov­ers a lot of the con­tent which was pre­sent­ed in the course. I will quick­ly men­tion the cour­ses at­ten­dance rules; you must turn in all elec­tron­ic de­vices on the first day of the re­treat, you are not al­lowed to talk be­tween 9pm and mid­day the fol­low­ing day, and you are not al­lowed to read non-Dhar­ma ma­te­ri­al. There are sev­er­al oth­er course rules, but these were the most im­pact­ful. How­ev­er, many peo­ple broke a va­ri­ety of these rules; it would be hard to find any­one that strict­ly fol­lowed all of them. For the si­lence rule in par­tic­u­lar, even if you want­ed to re­main silent it was of­ten a chal­lenge as peo­ple would speak di­rect­ly to you or a group would start a chat­ting in your room or dorm. I will com­pile a Flickr pho­to al­bum tak­en around the Monastery soon.

Kopan Monastery Pho­to of the monastery en­trance and main gom­pa - Copy­right © joshfug­gle.com To start I’ll dis­cuss the venue it­self. The monastery was es­tab­lished in the late 1960’s by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rin­poche on a hill at the edge of Kath­man­du. It is im­mac­u­late­ly main­tained and is an ab­so­lute­ly beau­ti­ful set­ting to study in. It fea­tures the main gom­pa, a stu­pa gar­den, a school for the young monks, and var­i­ous ac­com­mo­da­tion build­ings. All the ses­sions for the course were con­duct­ed in the main gom­pa; a beau­ti­ful airy build­ing with wood­en floors and Bud­dhist art dec­o­rat­ing the walls. Be­ing able to med­i­tate in such a tran­quil build­ing is one of the main rea­sons to come to a such a course; a sim­i­lar set­ting is hard to im­pos­si­ble to find in ev­ery­day life and is high­ly con­ducive to the task of med­i­tat­ing. Pho­to of the stu­pa gar­den - Copy­right © joshfug­gle.com The stu­pa gar­den fea­tures two or­nate­ly dec­o­rat­ed stu­pas, which were of­ten lit up at night. You could spend your af­ter­noons re­lax­ing in the peace­ful gar­den con­tem­plat­ing the top­ics cov­ered through­out the day or chat with the oth­er course par­tic­i­pants. Pho­to of my dorm room - Copy­right © joshfug­gle.com There were a range of ac­com­mo­da­tion op­tions to choose from, rang­ing from a bed in a dor­mi­to­ry to pri­vate rooms with their own bath­rooms. I stayed in the dorm as it was in­clud­ed in the base price of the re­treat; $510 US. I thor­ough­ly en­joyed stay­ing in the dorm, ev­ery­one who shared it with me were high­ly re­spect­ful of each an­oth­er and here I could meet some new peo­ple. For our meals, break­fast usu­al­ly con­sist­ed of por­ridge, ce­re­al, and a slice of bread (or naan) with home­made peanut-but­ter smeared over it. For lunch we had dhal bhat, em­bel­lished with soups and fruit. And fi­nal­ly din­ner typ­i­cal­ly con­sist­ed of soup and bread; the soup was of­ten pota­to soup, noo­dle soup with lo­cal veg­es, or to­fu soup. There was no re­stric­tion on the vol­ume of food that you could eat, which of­ten meant you would see plates piled with moun­tains of food; how­ev­er, this is not rec­om­mend­ed due to the amount of time spent sit­ting. In ad­di­tion to the three set meal times we al­so had morn­ing tea and af­ter­noon tea. The food gen­er­al­ly was pret­ty good, how­ev­er to­wards the end of the re­treat I be­gan to wish for some va­ri­ety. The meals were cooked in bulk for 600 peo­ple, there­fore don’t ex­pect restau­rant qual­i­ty meals. At the out­set the course sched­ule may look quite strict, how­ev­er there is quite a lot of time be­tween ses­sions and af­ter meals where you can carve out your own rou­tine; of­ten you would see peo­ple prac­tic­ing roof-top yo­ga, for ex­am­ple. Fi­nal­ly I want to men­tion sick­ness; for this course 250 peo­ple came to­geth­er from all over the world, and we all shared the same cut­lery and plates and sat in the same room to­geth­er for most of the day, there­fore sick­ness was a bit of a prob­lem. A cold went through the co­hort of stu­dents and I be­lieve most peo­ple be­came sick to a cer­tain de­gree. Af­ter speak­ing to par­tic­i­pants that at­tend­ed pre­vi­ous years this seems to be a usu­al oc­cur­rence.

Meditations The med­i­ta­tions were the main rea­son why I want­ed to at­tend the re­treat; I want­ed to learn to be­come more re­flec­tive in my life and to find new ways to think deeply on dif­fer­ent top­ics. The course it­self taught two types of med­i­ta­tions; con­cen­tra­tion, or sin­gle-point­ed med­i­ta­tion, and an­a­lyt­i­cal, or con­tem­pla­tive, med­i­ta­tion. Con­cen­tra­tion med­i­ta­tion aims to de­vel­op fo­cus in the mind; its goal is to en­able con­trol and thought mon­i­tor­ing, for by do­ing so you can bet­ter di­rect your at­ten­tion to what is im­por­tant in your life. If you have no con­trol over your thoughts and you act up­on ev­ery­thing that floats through your mind then you are es­sen­tial­ly held hostage to them. If you can mon­i­tor your thoughts and con­sid­er the im­pli­ca­tions of each one then you can bet­ter con­trol your ac­tions, you can dis­card thoughts that you dis­cov­er to be harm­ful and act up­on the ones that you con­sid­er to be ben­e­fi­cial. The pri­ma­ry con­cen­tra­tion med­i­ta­tion that we prac­ticed was a breadth med­i­ta­tion where we had to fo­cus ex­clu­sive­ly on our breadth and if any thoughts arose we would dis­card them im­me­di­ate­ly. An­a­lyt­i­cal med­i­ta­tion aims to get the mind to con­sid­er a sin­gle sub­ject from as many dif­fer­ent an­gles as pos­si­ble to help bet­ter un­der­stand the sub­ject and to more clear­ly de­fine opin­ions to­wards it. For me this type of med­i­ta­tion helps with al­le­vi­at­ing in­de­ci­sion and doubt; as you can more clear­ly gen­er­ate opin­ions us­ing the in­for­ma­tion that you have avail­able. I al­so be­lieve that it is a use­ful tool for de­ci­sion mak­ing as you can think on a sub­ject deeply, form an opin­ion about it, then ar­rive at a well-con­sid­ered out­come. There were many guid­ed med­i­ta­tions through­out the course that were high­ly pro­found to me; they got me to ques­tion dif­fer­ent as­pects of my life and to con­sid­er things that I wouldn’t nor­mal­ly have thought about, or to con­sid­er sub­jects in dif­fer­ent lights; such as death, the ev­er-chang­ing na­ture of life, and at­tach­ment to peo­ple and phys­i­cal ob­jects. I would like to one day fur­ther de­vel­op my med­i­ta­tion skills, as med­i­ta­tion can be quite ben­e­fi­cial to your life. Many peo­ple in the course had pre­vi­ous­ly at­tend­ed Vipas­sana cour­ses, which I too would like to at­tend in the fu­ture.

The People Dis­cus­sion group hav­ing lunch in fi­nal days - Copy­right © joshfug­gle.com One of the most amaz­ing el­e­ments of the course were the peo­ple. The age group var­ied quite a lot; there were peo­ple from 20 all the way up to 80, how­ev­er gen­er­al­ly speak­ing it was a younger crowd. Dur­ing my time there I don’t think I met a sin­gle un­kind per­son; ev­ery­one was ex­treme­ly car­ing and eth­i­cal­ly mind­ed. They were all search­ing for ways in or­der to bring hap­pi­ness to them­selves and to the peo­ple around them. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a more gen­uine group of peo­ple in one place any­where. At the start of the course there were 250 peo­ple in to­tal, though by the end the count was clos­er to 200. At the start of the course we were as­signed a group where we spent one hour each day dis­cussing the day’s top­ics. The dis­cus­sion groups were a re­al­ly nice ini­tia­tive of the course and through it a lot of new friend­ships were formed, it al­so helped us to bet­ter come to grips with the in­for­ma­tion be­ing pre­sent­ed. My dis­cus­sion group was very kind to me dur­ing my time of sick­ness; they helped me to get through the or­deal with rel­a­tive ease. Fi­nal­ly I shared a dor­mi­to­ry with a fan­tas­tic set of guys, they gave me a lot of ideas about my trip ahead as there were a few ex­pe­ri­enced trav­ellers amongst them. We spent many a night to­geth­er dis­cussing Bud­dhism and nu­mer­ous oth­er top­ics.