Last year at this time, I reported back from my first Buddhist retreat,
CIMC’s “Sandwich Retreat”, so called because it has all-day sessions on
two consecutive weekends, and three-hour sessions every weekday evening
in between. If you care, last year’s length summary can be found here.
It’s now been a week since this year’s Sandwich Retreat, and it was just
as rewarding—and exhausting—as last year’s.
Like last year, I intentionally set my expectations low. I anticipated
that we would sit a lot and walk a lot, and I wasn’t disappointed. I
knew I was right on the money when I arrived on Saturday morning and
read the following agenda for the day:
sit
walk
sit
walk
sit
lunch
|
sit
walk
sit
walk
sit
tea
|
sit
talk
walk
sit
|
At a high level, the retreat is all about bringing the practice into
your regular life. As such, there’s a weeklong exercise that you are
asked to bring into your daily activities during the work week. This
year’s homework was to exercise full-body awareness.
The first couple days, I thought I did pretty well. I went back to
first
principles, which state that one can only know something through the six
sense stores. However, most of the senses provide little insight into
the body. Taste and sound are pretty worthless, and thinking more so.
You can smell other people, but it’s hard to smell yourself. Sight is
okay, but again there’s no major revelations to be had by gazing at your
navel.
So my first understanding was that we primarily know the body through
feeling. This was confirmed at that evening’s debrief, when everyone who
talked about their experiences throughout the day started their
description with “I felt…”
What are some of the things I observed? Well, you can feel things on the
surface of your body, but there’s much more going on internally. There’s
also a difference between what someone might be feeling (pain,
discomfort, pleasure) and what might be apparent to an observer (calm).
Feeling can also be really subtle. Somehow, this sense tells you when
you need to blink your eyes, when a sneeze is coming, when you need to
crack a joint, when your belly is full, or when a pimple is forming. The
blind read braille using their fingers, a feat of bodily sensation that
has always amazed me.
But perhaps the most interesting feeling I observed was the innate
human sense of balance. Walking is often described as a perpetual fall,
and even standing still requires constant adjustments based on this
innate sense. I spent one whole walking period standing on one foot,
observing how rapidly my body adjusted to my sense of balance in order
to keep me balanced and upright. And I had the opportunity to observe
myself
and several of my fellow meditators as our heads bobbed, on the verge of
falling asleep. Even though our conscious minds were already asleep, the
sense of balance caused us to start every time the body started to droop
and tip. It’s amazing that such a sophisticated sense can operate even
though the operator is unconscious!
The other thing I noticed is that it’s really difficult for me to
observe the sensations of the whole body at once. Most of one’s other
senses take in a small field: there’s only a limited number of things
you can taste, smell, hear, or think at one time. But the sense organ
for feeling is the entire body, and while it’s easy to observe discrete
parts (my knee hurts, my nose itches), it’s very difficult for me to
attend to the entire body’s sensations simultaneously, as a single
sensation.
So all that—and a lot more that I’ll spare you—was what I learned
from my first two days’ exercise in whole-body awareness. Then came
Tuesday night’s debrief with Larry, one of CIMC’s three teachers. Almost
the first thing out of Larry’s mouth was that we weren’t doing
whole-body awareness practice in order to gain insights into the body,
but as a way of using the body to ground our attention in the present
moment, as opposed to endlessly drifting off to fears and plans about
the future or reverie about the past. Doh!
So midweek I had to make a big correction, paying less attention to the
body for itself, and focusing instead on using the body as a reminder to
be present with what is. Unfortunately, at first I didn’t find
whole-body awareness made me any more present than I was before. While
it was good when I was doing something physical like walking or perhaps
cycling, I found it less useful when sitting or conversing.
Wednesday I had my teacher interview with Michael. I told him about how
I’d started out being too analytical about the full-body awareness, and
how I was struggling with the body as too big a field to deal with at
one time.
I also told him about my two other current practices, which are also
both analytic. The first is just observing the vedenas, the feeling
tones of pleasant/unpleasant/neutral that come up in response to every
stimulus. I’ve gradually come to believe that the feeling tones aren’t
absolute, but conditioned and somewhat arbitrary, such as a
country-dweller finding a police siren jarring, when a city-dweller
might not even notice it.
My other practice is to try to notice every volitional movement I make—even down to where my eyes track—and examine the motive
and the quality of the intention behind that movement. And on the
cushion, where you’re not doing any real volitional movement, you can
examine the movements of your mind, and the motives behind them.
After hearing all that, Michael concluded that I was too much in my head
and needed to be more grounded in the simple act of observing the
present moment. What he suggested was to simply periodically check in
and consciously relax the eyes and the muscles of the face. I expanded
that to include my shoulders, which I’ve known for years carry a lot of
tension, as well. For years I’ve futilely tried to consciously relax my
shoulders while I’m cycling, where the tension induces a lot of neck
pain.
For the remainder of the week, in trying that practice on, I found it
made a huge difference. From the shoulders up is a convenient subset of
the body to work with, and for me it feels like the base of where my
thoughts and my feelings reside. As such, relaxing the face seems to
produce a general relaxation, improving my mood, receptivity, and
empathy, all attributes I’ve wanted to cultivate for some time. It
reminds me somewhat of cognitive-behavioral therapy, where you model the
way you want to be, even if you don’t feel it, and then it gradually
starts to feel real to you; similarly, relaxing the face and shoulders
might help me become truly more relaxed and receptive overall.
During the interview, I also inquired about having more of an ongoing
relationship. I’m at a point where I’ve exhausted reading and dharma talks
as learning tools. In a sense, I know everything I need to know about
the dharma. The next step is to bring more of it into my daily life, and
that’s where someone who knows my particulars can help. Knowing this,
and knowing that opportunities to talk with the teachers are very rare,
I arranged with Michael to have periodic check-ins every 6-8 weeks. This
had been a major goal when I signed up for the retreat.
I picked Michael for a few reasons. I’ve felt some rapport and also some
dissonance with each of the three teachers, so no one of them resonated
more than the others. Larry and Narayan are more popular, but that also
means they have less time and longer lead times for interviews. As a
former intellectual, Larry might be useful in helping me overcome my
analytic side, but it might be just as good to go with someone
completely different. After a particularly good dharma talk a month or
so ago, I finally decided I’d at least start out with Michael.
So those were the big themes of the retreat. Now let me go into a few of
the smaller items, just so that they get recorded for later reference.
This year my weekend “yogi job” was end-of-day cleanup, which was great.
That meant that unlike most retreatants I had our whole lunchtime break
as free time, which I usually used to go sit in the sun at the Cambridge
City Hall. On the long 9- and 12-hour weekend days, it was nice having
that long break in the middle. I used one of those to hit the hardware
store and pick up silicone sealant for my shower, which apparently has
started leaking into the downstairs.
And, by luck of the draw, I shared this year’s yogi job with Shea, one
of my dharma friends who only recently returned to the group. So that
was a real pleasure.
In Larry’s first-day introduction, he used the “No matter where you go,
there you are” line. I wonder if he knows he’s quoting Buckaroo
Banzai…
As an object of meditation, you can choose the breath, the body,
sound… or the smell of the onions cooking downstairs!
I generally haven’t got a lot of suffering in my life, but what I do
have manifests itself as either irritation or planning. That seems to
imply that I desire predictability and control more than anything else.
Ethics and religion really aren’t anything more than a radical
acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions.
Don’t eat jawbreaker candy during a sitting.
While outside doing walking meditation in the neighborhood around the
center, I met two cats. One was a calico doing a great imitation of a
flower in a window box. The other was a very friendly longhaired tiger
cat. For future reference, they were both on Cleveland Street.
Retreatants have one teacher interview on each weekend, and one
during the week. Ideally, you’re supposed to get to talk to each
of the three teachers, but this year Maddie stepped in to help due to
the large number of retreatants. I got her, making this the
second year in a row that I haven’t had any interview with
Narayan.
There’s this Buddhist concept that the body is vague, permeable, that
its borders are fluid and ill-defined. I generally disagree with this,
but then one might ask whether dental work is part of you body. Or
glasses? Clothing? A pacemaker?
Tuesday’s sitting was interesting, because it was election day, and
everyone was on pins and needles anticipating the results. I wasn’t very
nervous, because I didn’t expect any meaningful results before we broke
at 9pm. But when they let us go, Michael noted that “Someone won
Pennsylvania”, which caused everyone to cheer.
I missed Friday’s session because I was sick as a dog with nausea and a
headache. I slept right through from about midnight to 5pm on Friday.
The food continues on last year’s pace of being edible exactly one time
in four. I know, most of you would love the wholesome vegetarian fare
cooked with love and all that rot, but I don’t. Fungus is fungus, no
matter how you chop it. The one exception was the ominous-sounding
“celery stew over rice”, which was surprisingly savory.
My interview with Larry could be summed up as “relationships are hard,
and the form of practice is irrelevant—it’s all about how it impacts
your life”. Then he got up and gave me a big hug. Larry?
I remain unclear about where the line is between practice and seeing
practice as a self-improvement project.
Sunday morning, as we began our ninth straight day of sitting, I passed
a note to my buddy Mark that read, “What’re we gonna do today, Brain?”.
He was amused. The appropriate response is, of course, “The same thing
we do every day: sit and walk, walk and sit…”
People often report that they have a hard time at the beginning of a
retreat, but that when it ends, they felt that they were just
getting on a roll. I have the exact opposite experience. I can fall into
meditation pretty easily and stick with it for a couple days before I
start getting restless. But by day nine of nothing but sitting and
walking, I’m at the far limit of mental fatigue and I’m ready for a
wholehearted binge of lying, cheating, stealing, drinking, having sex,
murdering, eating meat, and lots and lots of sleeping!
The Sandwich Retreat is the only lengthy retreat that CIMC offers, and
in my experience it’s the only place at CIMC where I got the sense of
sangha, or community. It’s kinda hard creating community when you only
get together once a week and spend those three hours together with your
eyes closed and not speaking!
This year, that sense of sangha even more pronounced, as I fostered
relationships with a number of people. Of course, I enjoyed the company
of my dharma friend Mark, and it’s awesome to have Shea back, as well. I
also met Dylan, who is a new resident at CIMC, and John, an MIT prof who
is trying to get a group of guys together to go cycling, of all things.
And it was good to see old friends like Tim and Amy and Whispering Deer,
as well.
So despite nine days of sleep deprivation and mental fatigue, I think
this year’s Sandwich Retreat was a success. I met my expectation of
sitting and walking, achieved my goal of initiating an ongoing
relationship with a teacher, cultivated more of a sense of sangha with
new and old dharma friends, and of course learned more about myself and
the world around me in the process.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
