On a Friday morning in October — Oct. 21, to be exact — Mark Trippetti, an advertising consultant from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, surrendered his laptop and iPhone to storage at a remote mountainside center in southern Colorado and prepared to drop out of human contact for a month.
The previous week he had begun the withdrawal process, leaving word with clients, cutting back his use of technology and giving up caffeine. Before checking out completely, he made one final call to his girlfriend, Jee Chang.
By careful design, Mr. Trippetti would not see or communicate with anyone until Nov. 20. At his spartan cabin he would rise each day at 3 a.m., sip from a thermos of tea that he had made the night before and move straight from his mattress to a cushion for three and a half hours of meditation and mantra recitation.
His days would be built around that, plus chores, repeated reading of some 200 pages of sadhana text and his own thoughts. Worldly necessities like food would be dropped periodically by the retreat center’s staff at the end of a path, 75 yards away, to avoid his glimpsing another human being. Bedtime was 10 p.m.
The silent, solo retreat, known as a lerung, is part of the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, a path that Mr. Trippetti, 54, a former advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam, has been following for six years. He says that the effect on him has been profound.
“Going into a retreat is really about breaking down the constructs of ‘you,’ ” he said. “The whole idea is for you to take a very close look at the you you have become in your mind. The you you are in your real mind isn’t necessarily the real you.”
The idea of going for more than an hour or two without checking some sort of device for a text or e-mail, never mind face-to-face interaction, is unfathomable to many people in the professional world Mr. Trippetti inhabits. But there are overworked, overcommitted professionals in big cities like New York who periodically do just that.
by Hilary Stout, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Caleb Kenna for The New York Times
