Basically if you see another retreatant having a difficult time, write us a note. It's as simple as that, very simple. But what you think is a difficult time might not be, and this is very important. Let me give you an example of two different meditators in two different retreats.
One was a young woman, about twenty years old. She'd done lots of yoga, she was very flexible, and it was her very first retreat. She sat right up in the front of the hall (this was in Thailand). She sat like a rock! She just didn't move. Inside she was a typical brand new retreatant. In the interviews she asked all the same sort of goofy questions, serious questions, any questions, you know. And she was having her ups and downs and whatever else inside. But outside she looked perfect. At the end of the retreat, when people could talk, many people came up to her and praised her for what a great meditator she was. She came to us in tears. She was really shocked that she was getting so much praise, because she knew her mind, she knew that we knew her mind, and they were praising her just from the outside. She couldn't understand and she came to us in tears.
In another retreat, we had a thirty year old man, who sat in the back of the room, it was also his first retreat. He sat in the back of the room and twisted up any way possible. Walking meditation was just the same, he kind of twisted his hands behind his back, doing all sorts of weird things. On the outside he looked absolutely terrible. "What's he doing? Goofing off!" blah, blah, blah. Only Rosemary and I knew that he had broken his back a year or so before. He couldn't sit still, it was so painful. Fron the outside he looked terrible, yet inside he was doing quite well. People with broken backs, they know quite a lot about Dukkha, so inside he did quite well. The girl was just normal, she wasn't doing as well as the man was doing. Outside she looked great, on the inside she was normal. The man, outside he looked terrible, on the inside he was fine.
So when you see another meditator and you think they're having a problem, often, there may not really be any problem. But if you're not sure, write us a note and then we'll decide, because normally we know what's going on.
This can apply to normal life, right? In normal life, sometimes you think you should help somebody, but have any of you ever gotten into trouble trying to help somebody? Yeah, sometimes they don't want the help, or really they didn't need help anyhow, they were really quite okay, and we were the goofy ones thinking they were doing something wrong.
This is something that is important to realize, that even in normal life, when we think someone's in trouble, maybe we should look at it a bit more, maybe we should look at it from a different angle, maybe we should ask somebody else first before we try to automatically help people. Now, that's with things that we're not sure about. Other times, we know we can help somebody and we go and do it, that's different. But on occasions when we're not sure, remember the old saying, "when in doubt don't, consider the task and ask", that's a good thing to remember.