The first mediation retreat I did was at a place called Suan Mokh in the south of Thailand. Suan Mokh is a forest wat and in the centre you are really part of nature. On the first day the abbot told us all that we would be sharing the forest for the next ten days with all the other creatures that lived there, including various poisonous snakes, scorpions, and spiders. He mentioned to be mindful and tread carefully and everything would be fine.
As it was a silent retreat, and we were also doing walking as well as sitting mediation, we weren’t making much noise, and thus got a lot closer to creatures that we normally would as we weren’t scaring them off by clattering about.
One day I was practising walking meditation along a forest path. I was pacing very, very slowly, inching my way along. Suddenly about ten feet ahead of me on the path, a snake slithered into view and stopped. I wasn’t sure what the snake was, whether it was poisonous or harmless. You only see the hoods on cobras when they are alarmed, so this could have been a cobra or a non-venomous rat snake. However, it didn’t really matter what the type of snake was, as I was no danger to it - and so it was no danger to me. I stood there waiting. I don’t know how longer I waited there for, until eventually the snake slithered off and I resumed my walking meditation.
Two years later in Japan
A couple of years later I found myself doing a different meditation retreat, outside of Kyoto in Japan. The meditation was inside, however, there was a garden in which we could occasionally stretch our legs. At the beginning of the retreat, one of the organisers explained to us that every morning he would go out into the garden and remove any snakes that were there. I felt that he was moving one of the best possible teachers of Mindfulness. I have learnt in Thailand that you can share an area with dangerous creatures, and that they are only rarely dangerous if you don’t pay attention. You could learn more about mindfulness from a single venomous snake than from hours spent on the meditation cushion.