Ornoth

Over the solstice, I attended an 8-day silent meditation retreat with Bhante Gunaratana at his Bhavana Society retreat center in West Virginia.

Buddha in Bhavana's main hall

Bhavana Buddies

Is this a dhamma talk?

My Kuti

What Eighth Precept?

Bhante G. is a well-known Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, the author of the widely-read manual “Mindfulness in Plain English”. To be honest, I didn’t know he was located so close. When I learned that Bhavana is a three and a half hour drive from Pittsburgh, I was immediately motivated to go do a retreat, especially since I wouldn’t be inconveniencing Inna, who has been out of town for months on business. And at 90 years old, Bhante G.’s advancing age gave me an added sense of urgency.

Last spring, when I looked at the Bhavana Society’s schedule, one event immediately stood out: a jhana retreat planned for the end of June.

What’s “jhana”? Jhana is an intensive concentration meditation practice which predated the Buddha, which presumably leads to four increasingly subtle and esoteric mental states.

The jhanas comprise Right Concentration: the eighth component of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path leading toward the ultimate goal of practice: the cessation of suffering. Once you have developed a high degree of equanimity through the jhanic concentration practice, you can use it (and the impermanence of those states) as a tool in Vipassana practice: the development of insight/wisdom through the internalization of the Three Characteristics of Existence (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self).

That sequence—practice concentration, then use it to develop wisdom—is one of two ways that people approach Buddhist practice. The other approach, called “dry” or “pure” Vipassana practice, does it the other way around: meditators work directly to realize the Three Characteristics, and let their concentration skills develop as needed. Meditating on the Three Characteristics through Vipassana meditation comprises the seventh element of the Noble Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness.

Virtually all modern western Insight Meditation centers go the latter route, teaching Vipassana meditation exclusively. They rarely talk about the jhanas, and often discourage jhana practice, believing that the preoccupation with mental attainments is an unnecessary diversion from the development of wisdom… if those presumed attainments even exist at all! Having “grown up” in that Insight tradition, I dismissed jhana practice for years as little more than legacy Asian mysticism.

But ten years ago I decided to read some of the original Buddhist suttas, specifically the Majjhima Nikaya: the Middle-Length Discourses (my 2007 blogpost). There I discovered that there’s a passage describing how a skilled meditator enters the jhanas as a preliminary part of practice. Moreover, that standardized passage is repeated in a lot of suttas: about 30 percent of them, IIRC. Appearing so frequently, it was clearly something the Buddha considered extremely important. From then on, I knew I couldn’t simply dismiss jhana practice; I needed to give it a fair and openminded trial.

I bought books and did online research, but couldn’t get past my confusion. On one hand, the “jhana factors” that arise are familiar to me: applied thought, sustained thought, single-pointedness, happiness, bliss, and equanimity. But on the other hand, the four jhanic states are subtle and difficult to judge, and I certainly hadn’t experienced any of the mental imagery (nimitta) or magical powers that supposedly precede them. Were they merely metaphorical? As an avowed empiricist, I had difficulty reconciling the presumed importance of these concentration practices with the mystical bullshit that accompanied them.

As a followup to his best seller, Bhante G. also wrote a book about the jhanas called “Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English: An Introductory Guide to Deeper States of Meditation”, which I also read. So when I learned his center was nearby and that he’d be leading a jhana retreat, I figured the time was right to go and try to resolve my longstanding confusion. That’s why—due to an unfortunate scheduling coincidence—I decided to stay home at our Tuscan villa on the day the Giro d’Italia bike race came by: so that I could guarantee my spot in Bhante G.’s jhana retreat as soon as they opened online registration.

To conserve Bhante G.’s strength, activities like dhamma talks, Q&A, and teacher interviews were shared, with three different monks taking responsibility for two days each. As a result, my understanding of the jhanas changed and evolved over the course of the week.

The first two days we were in the care of Bhante Jayasara, a young American novice. He addressed the groundwork for jhana practice: specifically, suppressing the negative mental states called the Five Hindrances: a straightforward and familiar practice.

During his Q&A, he shared his personal experience of a nimitta: a sign of deep concentration that’s often perceived as a bright light. I found his sharing informative and inspiring, especially his confirmation that the nimitta is not a visual perception, but a purely mental one.

Interestingly, he could only share this with us because he’s not yet a fully-ordained monk, since the Vinaya—the Buddhist monastic rules—forbids monks from contradicting the canon or discussing their own personal experiences and attainments. So if you’re looking for practical advice based on personal experience, don’t bother asking a monastic!

During his Q&A, I asked which of the Five Hindrances compulsive planning fell under and how to practice with it. Of course, the answer was somewhat nuanced. Planning is often useful, but could also be an expression of anxiety and discomfort with uncertainty. In the moment when the compulsion comes up, one should consider three things: what is the appeal of planning, how it might be problematic, and how to reframe one’s habits of mind to avoid following that pattern out of compulsion. As Bhante Jay summarized: “The gratification, the danger, and the escape.”

After that, the middle two days were handled by Bhante Seelananda, a middle-aged monk who was born in Sri Lanka and became a monk at age eleven. As a lifelong academic scholar, he has exceptional knowledge of the Pali canon (the Buddhist scriptures).

His talks covered Buddhist academic theory relating to the jhanas in unrestrained detail, reciting a litany of passages in Pali and lists of theoretical esoteric mental states. Less of a dhamma talk and more of a collegiate lecture, it was the first dhamma talk I’ve ever attended that included a slide deck presented with an overhead projector and laser pointer!

With a straight face, he reported the magical powers the canon associates with the jhanas: the abilities to fly, read minds, recall past lives, and clairaudience.

At no time did he share any personal reflections or practical advice, limiting himself to reporting the content of the Pali canon as if it were literal truth. I’m not sure whether that was because the monastic rules prohibited him from contradicting the Buddhist writings, or whether his childhood upbringing within the monastic community rendered him an indoctrinated faith believer incapable of critical thought.

In either case, he had zero practical advice to share that would have benefited his audience of lay practitioners. As you might imagine, his circular reasoning and arguments from false authority didn’t sit well with an objective materialist like me.

After coming into the retreat with an open mind and specifically looking for practical help, I was getting discouraged and felt that I was wasting my time. I was ready to conclude that the jhanas are simply not a useful concept. Sure, concentration practice is important in habituating oneself to meta-thinking; the Five Hindrances are things we can all relate to; even the “jhana factors” I listed earlier make sense in the context of quiescing the discursive mind. But the four jhana states themselves sound like abstract, magical mumbo-jumbo.

And even if they are real, someone has got to find a better way to teach them. One doesn’t learn how to whistle by being told “Just blow long enough, and it’ll happen”; and one doesn’t learn how to swim by being told “Keep splashing around on your own and one day you’ll magically become a master swimmer”. You need someone to directly show you the techniques of how to whistle, how to swim… and how to meditate, achieve, and recognize these abstract, theoretical mental states.

For me, no matter how much of the official doctrine Bhante Seela cited, the jhanas simply don’t pass the Kalama test. In the Pali canon’s Kalama Sutta, the Buddha tells the Kalama tribe to accept as true only those teachings that one has personally verified are skillful, blameless, praiseworthy, and conducive to happiness; and to expressly reject teachings that derive from blind faith, dogmatism, and belief spawned from specious reasoning. And the jhanas demand a whole lot of the latter.

After Bhante Seela’s academic theorizing, the final two days’ talks were given by Bhante G., and I was eager to hear how he would follow up. Thankfully, as a non-academic, Bhante G. is more personable and more encouraging than Bhante Seela, which was reassuring in itself.

In the meditations he led, he ended each sitting by reciting verse 372 of the Dhammapada, one of the earliest Buddhist texts:

There is no concentration without wisdom,
Nor wisdom without concentration.
One who has both wisdom and concentration
Is close to peace and emancipation.

This is the central theme of his teaching. Here “concentration” is a reference to jhana practice, and “wisdom” is shorthand for Insight or Vipassana practice. While the two are often considered completely separate practices, Bhante G. says they are parallel roads, different but complementary ways of reaching the same destination. After all, Vipassana constitutes Right Mindfulness, the seventh element of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, while Right Concentration (the jhanas) comprises the eighth. That helped me put concentration practice into a better perspective.

But where I most benefited from Bhante G.’s wisdom was in the group interview I attended, where I was able to ask “How can you tell you’ve reached a jhana state if you don’t experience something as unmistakable as those bright-light nimittas?” His answer was packed with insightful nuggets.

First, one should look at those factors that co-arise with jhana: applied thought, sustained thought, single-pointedness, happiness, bliss, and equanimity. Those are a lot more concrete than the four abstract jhana levels. He said that entering the first jhana isn’t that hard to do for an experienced practitioner, but it’s a subtle and difficult thing to see. He said I might have achieved it many times, but who can say? You just have to judge for yourself. The important thing is to just practice. Concern yourself with your own mind, not the esoteric theories about signs and levels.

His advice was personal, immediate, practical, and encouraging… way more useful than any of the infographics Bhante Seela had presented. I’m so glad that I got into this retreat and had the opportunity to have an exchange with him, while he is still well enough to teach. It was touching when, on the last day of the retreat, I ran into him on his daily walk and we exchanged smiles.

So where did I wind up as far as jhana practice? While I didn’t get confirmation that jhanas exist or not, I did get a degree of practical clarity. Taking Bhante G.’s words to heart, I’m not going to pay a lot of attention to the jhanas. I’ll continue to practice meditation of various flavors (Vipassana/Insight, concentration, and samatha/calmness), with the main focus on evolving my relationship to desire, aversion, impermanence, ethics, and renunciation.

With that, let’s dump all this philosophy. “How was it?” I hear you asking. Well, lemme tellya…

Long retreats hurt. Despite their obvious benefit, I dread them. Even though I use a meditation bench, long periods of sitting hurt both my knees and back, and my knee pain turned severe this time. On top of that, my yogi job was washing dishes, and their sinks are definitely not at a height for normal-sized humans.

There’s also an odd kind of discomfort associated with heightened mindfulness. I would spend all day building up my mindfulness, only to find it difficult to relax and fall asleep at night, because I was so busy noticing and observing everything. Once you’re in that mental state, you can’t simply shut it off, which in my experience leads to a particular kind of retreat fatigue. I find that far more uncomfortable than the more-frequently reported discomfort returning to mainstream society following a long retreat.

Rather than being put up in a dormatory, for the first time ever I got my very own kuti, a tiny one-person cabin off on its own, used as a living space by monastics. It was little more than an uninsulated wooden shed, with a twin mattress and just enough space to squeeze around it on three sides. No electricity, but two windows. I guess it fit the modern idea of a “tiny house”. Thankfully, there weren’t too many insects inside, though I was still glad to have brought bug repellent. I was assigned the cabin named “Panna”, which is Pali for “wisdom”.

The weather. The first three days were hot and sunny, which I enjoyed, despite the lack of aircon. Although the heat was supposed to hold all week, the weather turned very rainy and cold from Wednesday through Sunday. Several times so much rain fell that the short, grassy downhill path to my kuti spontaneously turned into a rushing brook!

Flora and fauna everywhere. Poison ivy. Fireflies. A deer outside my kuti one morning. Termites or something loudly trying to bore into the kuti all day and night long until the rains came and drove them off. Ridiculously loud and annoying tree frogs that trilled back and forth to one another from 8pm to 11pm, sounding for all the world like dueling car alarms. Great for practicing equanimity, but not so great for actually sleeping.

And Buddy. We were told that we’d see Buddy, their tabby cat, who might come and sit in your lap. Monday evening, during a ten-minute break between sittings, I ran into him outside the main building, introduced myself, and made friends. I sat cross-legged in the driveway, and he climbed into my lap and promptly fell asleep. I saw him a couple more times, but he too disappeared once the rain started. I mused that although I hadn’t experienced the Buddhist concept of “no-self”, I did understand “no-Buddy” (nobody).

Other oddities, for your amusement…

Bhavana’s retreat FAQ suggests bringing earplugs, and those were key! I’ve already mentioned the nightly amphibian car alarm chorus and the termites or whatever was chewing its way into my shack. On top of that, the kuti came with a battery-powered clock whose second hand ticked louder than its built-in alarm; I yanked its batteries on the second day. Then the pounding rain on the kuti’s roof topped it all off. Without my earplugs I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep at all.

There’s always one… Normally people claim a spot in the meditation hall and have one zabuton (mat) and one zafu (a tall cushion) or meditation bench. One guy sitting a couple rows in front of me built and sat atop a ziggurat composed of no less than three zabutons, a square cushion, two zafus, and another square cushion, with a bench nearby, just in case. He was perched more than two feet off the floor! Which I think is a violation of the vow we took on the first day to uphold the Eight Precepts, specifically the vow to refrain from using high or luxurious beds and seats. Ridiculous!

The food. Normal people always crow about how great retreat food is; I’m too finicky for that, but I found everything surprisingly palatable. Plus there were a couple treats, such as Nutella, Gatorade, and one day we got orange juice. They also provided Sriracha sauce, which I found helped many dishes, except loading up on it wasn’t always the best idea, since I usually didn’t fetch anything to drink with my meal! Still, when the retreat ended, I made a quick stop at Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar, then grabbed a cola and potato chips to enjoy on the drive home.

My yogi job washing dishes provided some entertainment. I’m used to turning dishwashing gloves inside-out to dry, which is difficult to do unless you know this secret: blow into them like a balloon to reverse the fingers. But somehow I managed to explode two gloves by blowing too hard into them! They blew up with impressively loud bangs during an otherwise silent retreat!

At one point (for some unknown reason) the cook pulled me aside to tell me he thought I looked like Frank Zappa. “Maybe it’s the ponytail?” That’s a new one on me. In the past I’ve drawn comparisons to David Beckham, Steven Seagal, Fabio Lanzoni, and (in a swipe from the ex-wife) Star Trek’s emotionless Mr. Spock.

Even with all this zaniness, it was a good and productive retreat, although three weeks later my knees are still recovering. I was able to meet and practice with Bhante Gunaratana, a cherished teacher whose career is nearing its conclusion; and I gained some clarity about how to practice with and relate to the jhanas (or not). It gave me what my practice needed, and was quite a memorable experience.

Upon coming home, I felt a huge sense of relief. Not because of the retreat, but because I had concluded four months of frequent travel: two weeks gallivanting around Asia in March, a week in Italy in May, and another week on retreat in West Virginia in June. It’s nice to visit new places, but home will always be home, and I was eager to hole up for a while in a familiar place. I wouldn’t mind if there were a few less-eventful weeks in store for me now!

Ten months ago, I went out to the Insight Meditation Society for their 9-day New Years retreat. It was my first time doing a retreat of that length, and I found it vastly more dramatic and emotionally challenging than any retreat I’d ever experienced.

When I came home, I hoped to share my experiences in two separate blog posts: one public, the other friends-locked. Although I completed the first draft of the public post, I never shared it, because I was unable to adequately express the more personal stuff in the private post. And external events interfered, as well.

Nearly a year has passed now, and so much has changed since then. I guess I probably won’t ever complete the private half of my account, but I thought it appropriate to clean up and share the bit I’d planned to post publicly, for those of my friends who are interested.

So here’s my report on last year’s New Years retreat, albeit belated and edited for privacy.

Back in December, three women and I shared a car ride out to the Insight Meditation Society in Barre for their 9-day New Years retreat with guiding teachers Yanai Postelnik, Catherine McGee, and Pascal Auclair.

This was only my second time at IMS, the prior visit being a 5-day retreat two years before. After reviewing my blog entry from that first visit, I made damned sure to bring more than a single pair of socks!

As you might imagine, the weather in the Worcester hills at the end of December provided a spectacle of its own. The first three days were fairly mild (35-42°), and the ground was bare, so I took the opportunity to familiarize myself with the miles of walking trails through the woods behind the center.

That was followed by five straight days where it didn’t get above 22°, and dipped below zero for several nights. Thankfully, our rooms were kept comfortably warm, although I noticed one space heater being used to thaw some frozen pipes in the basement of one of the dorms.

We had two snowfalls of about 3 and 6 inches, neither of which stopped me from regular trudges through the wooded paths out back, as you can see from the photos at right.

While walking outside on New Years Eve (before the snows), I realized that the long hedge in front of IMS was made up of large holly trees. Having grown up in Maine, I have a deep affinity for holly, which thrives in similarly cold and desolate places. So I gathered a handful of holly leaves and berries from the ground and placed them along the windowsill in my room (see photo).

The cold weather peaked on day eight of the retreat, when I took what could be conservatively called a brisk 3-mile trek around Gaston Pond. The sunrise above the snowed-over pond was lovely, but I nearly lost my fingers taking the accompanying photograph in air that was seven degrees below zero! Ironically, that was during perihelion, the time of year when the distance between the Earth and the Sun is actually the shortest!

Then the temperatures miraculously shot back up to nearly 50° on a misty morning on the last day of the retreat. The fog only thickened as the week’s snows rapidly sublimated and completely disappeared.

I definitely didn’t sleep well, and heard similar reports from several others. My theory is that the amount of time spent each day with eyes closed, observing the mind, builds up so much momentum that it’s difficult to shut it down to go to sleep at night. But that’s just one theory.

On New Years Eve, the teachers led us through a ceremony that included writing something we’d like to give up or leave behind on a piece of paper, then depositing them into a container to later be burned. I was sitting next to the container, and it was interesting to observe how most people emphatically threw their unwanted attributes into it, often ritually ripping the paper into bits beforehand. And then a very few folks (including myself) were much more reluctant to drop theirs in, as if they were letting go of a safety blanket.

The second Saturday—day eight of the retreat—was the day that all hell broke loose.

After returning from that long, frigid sunrise walk I mentioned above, I noticed that my throat was really sore. I had come down with a cold. I had taken lots of careful precautions, knowing that retreats are ideal breeding grounds for disease, but it had still caught up with me. Thankfully, there were only two days left before we headed home!

But that was nothing compared to what followed. At the start of the midday sitting, the teachers asked us to immediately go and check our rooms and secure our valuables, because someone had gone into several meditators’ rooms (there were no locks on any of the doors) and taken all their cash! Eventually we learned that eight to ten people in one particular dorm had been robbed, and some prescription painkillers had been taken, as well.

Having spent an entire week opening their hearts and allowing themselves to work with their emotional vulnerabilities, it would be difficult to describe the sense of violation that my fellow retreatants felt. However, with the wisdom of the teachers, the group found some ways to respond to the invasion that helped people heal.

First, the entire retreat—more than a hundred people—took up the “om mani padme hum” chant and walked in a procession from the main building’s meditation hall, through my dorm, then across a passage to the affected dorm, and back again. The chant was moving and powerful, and the combined strength and goodwill of so many people helped the meditators in that building feel that we had “taken back” the space.

Then arrangements were made for small groups of people to voluntarily take shifts doing walking meditation in that building all night long, so that the residents would know that someone was awake and present at all hours to protect them in case the thief returned. I would have volunteered, but I knew that getting a good night’s sleep was imperative for fighting my oncoming cold.

I wasn’t particularly concerned about my own safety. My room was near the main building, and no one in my dorm had been robbed. I was mostly concerned for the others. But as we went to bed that night, everyone was on edge and emotionally primed to respond to the potential return of the trespasser.

So it was in that state of mind that I woke up at 2am when the door to my room was opened. In the dim light from the “Exit” signs I could see the silhouette of someone slipping into my room from the corridor. By the time I was conscious enough to respond, they’d begun backing up, but that was when it hit me that this could well be the guy!

My heart racing and barely aware of what I was doing in my panic, I threw off my bedding, grabbed the door, and screamed “HEY!!!” The interloper was backing off hurriedly, then cowered on the opposite side of the corridor from me, saying “Imsorry Imsorry Imsorry, I got confuuused!”

That wasn’t the response I would expect from a thief, so I froze in mid-leap. That gave me enough time to scan what I could see of the person’s features in the darkness. Out of a hundred complete strangers at the retreat, I thought I recognized one of the women I had shared a ride with… “Claudia, is it?”

Apparently it was. She apologized again, and I think I just said “Okay” and closed the door on her. I would have flopped right back to sleep, except my heart was pounding and I was chock full of adrenalin. No matter how still I laid or how much I tried to calm my mind, there was no more sleep that night.

The next day—the last full day of the retreat—the teachers held a a small session for people who still felt they needed to work through some of their reaction to the burglary. I decided I would go and just ask how to deal with my body’s response, because no matter how much my mind had settled, my heart was still racing along in fight mode.

Claudia also appeared at that meeting, and we talked through the event. Apparently she had been one of the people doing walking meditation during the night, and in returning hadn’t realized that the passage from the second floor of one dorm led to the first floor of the other. She had walked into what would have been her room if she had been on the second floor, but because she was mistakenly on the first floor, she’d walked in on me instead.

People going into the wrong room by accident isn’t unheard-of there, since the doors all look the same, and there weren’t any locks on them (there are now). Of course, having that happen to me at 2am the night after a burglary was pretty much the worst timing imaginable. Since it was conceivable that something like that could still happen again, the following night I slept with my bed frame blocking my door from opening at all. I didn’t want to go through that a second time!

The final day brought the closing feedback session, where I spoke a brief piece about how the retreat had affected me emotionally much more than any previous retreat. And Claudia and I and the other two women in our car were the last ones out of the center after the retreat ended.

So, that’s a good bit about the body of the retreat. Now I’ll talk a bit about some of the ideas that came to me while spending all that time in silence.

Everything we experience, which feels so personal and unique to us, isn’t; it’s actually just one instance of sensations that virtually all humans experience at some point in their lives. Viewing them as universal phenomena makes it easier to hold one’s own pain lightly and feel a lot more compassion for others.

I thought up two interesting metaphors for how we relate to time. One can only see what’s happening clearly by being fully engaged and aware in the temporal present. Our past experiences can be like the film on a dirty window, making it more difficult to accurately view what’s going on in the present; our histories leave a residue that obscures or filters one’s view of the present. One need to try to see through or beyond the obscuration, or somehow clean the obstructions away. Similarly, focusing on the future can cast a shadow that darkens and obscures one’s view of the present; you can either spend all your time planning for and living in the shadow of an as-yet unrealized future, or step out of the shadow and experience the present moment in its full, vivid brilliance.

There’s an old instruction that goes something like this: never miss an opportunity to make someone else happy. I had some opportunities to play with this during the retreat, and the results were rewarding. I’d like to remember to do this more often.

When dealing with strong emotions (positive or negative), the best way to relate to it is with curiosity. Trying to suppress it isn’t healthy, and conversely one can easily lose perspective by self-indulgently wallowing in those emotions. The correct prescription is to explore one’s emotions with a sense of curiosity, because then one can understand, see the value of, and learn from those feelings.

In meditation, we cultivate a separation between the observer and the observed. In that way, the part of the persona that is observed can experience an emotion like anger, while another a part of the mind is at a slight distance from the experience, observing it, and learning from it. This separation of the observer from the observed isn’t just useful to help us see ourselves more clearly. Conversely, for those of us who have difficulty with our emotions, or are afraid of giving them free rein, it’s also a good way to free part of one’s persona to be fully absorbed in our emotions without the fear of losing control or being overwhelmed by them.

The common conceptual framework we inherited tell us that the heart is the place where we feel emotion. But saying that the heart is the seat of emotion is no more accurate than saying you hear sound through your kneecaps. If the heart was truly where emotions were located, people with man-made artificial hearts would never feel emotion, and doctors would perform cardiac surgery to cure depression, rather than prescribe drugs that impact brain chemistry! It’s time to stop referring to the heart as the seat of emotion, which is merely fossilized lore from a distant time of human ignorance.

There’s a huge amount more to say about that retreat, but I’m afraid the rest of the story will have to wait.

It took me eight years to do it, but I’ve finally sat my first silent residential meditation retreat out at the Insight Meditation Society in rural Barre, Mass. Here’s a report from the front lines…

My first hard-won insights actually came before the retreat, when all my prospective rides bagged on me, and my postings on IMS’ ride board produced nothing. But two guys said they were planning on taking the commuter rail to Worcester and biking the remaining 25 miles to Barre, so that’s what I did.

Fortunately the weather was an un-April-like mid-70s, and the ride out went well. The route featured a very sharp 3-mile climb out of Worcester, 13 miles of gradual downhill through Paxton, Rutland, and Oakham, and ended with another steep 3-miler up to the meditation center. Here’s the GPS log. It was marred only by one of my companions flatting only a few miles in, and the heavy backpack I had to carry.

The weather had been one of my concerns, since April can still be below freezing in Central Mass, but four of my five days in Barre were in the 70s.

Contrary to some other fears, the accomodations were quite reasonable, and the vegetarian food was quite satisfactory. There was only one meal where I really couldn’t eat anything, which is quite surprising, given how finicky I am.

One of the things my friends rave about is the setting at IMS. It’s rural, so it’s a big old house surrounded by farms and woodlands. Apparently that’s a big deal to my friends, but having grown up in Maine, it didn’t strike me as anything special. Like any other rural place, it’s generally quiet except for the insects and the birds. I walked one of the woodland trails and the Gaston Pond loop, which were indeed pleasant, but nothing exceptional.

But the majority of the time (from 5:15am to 9:30pm each day) was spent in silent meditation, either sitting or walking. Although this was my first residential retreat, I’ve done many non-residential weekend retreats and five 9-day “sandwich” retreats at CIMC. On top of that, I’ve got a healthy daily sitting practice, and I’ve been meditating for eight years now. So I was pretty well prepared for this short 5-day retreat.

The first couple days went well; I find I can settle my mind into silence pretty quickly and can stay there for quite some time. It wasn’t until Friday—the third day—when I found my mind going off on its own. And for two days, that’s what it did, in a series of four half-day bouts of preoccupation with one topic.

The first topic started quite accidentally. After three days without it, Thursday night I figured that I should use my cellphone to check the weather to learn whether I’d be biking home in 75-degree sun or 45-degree rain.

While I read the weather, my phone downloaded my email. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a notification that I’d received an email from a friend with the subject line “gonna miss you…”. I didn’t think anything of it at the time and went off to bed.

The next morning’s meditation began like this: “She sent me a note saying she misses me while I’m on retreat! How sweet is that?” From there my mind continued making up stories. “I wonder what she wrote… She’s been friendly to me lately. Does she like me? What if she does? What would that be like? What would we tell our friends? And how?”

I let this train of thought hurtle along for a couple sitting periods before curiosity finally got the better of me and I checked to see what she’d written. That was how I learned that she hadn’t emailed me directly, but posted to a mailing list we were both on. What I’d embellished into a love note was really just an apology that she’d be unable to make an upcoming group event!

So that wound up being a very amusing and timely lesson in both humility and how much of a story the mind can make up out of nothing at all.

Friday’s other preoccupation was with a bit of land that had been cleared in preparation for IMS’ construction of a new dormatory building. They had felled a couple dozen mature trees, leaving dead stumps and branches, and three big piles of wood chips in a torn-up gravel area.

This didn’t sit well with me, partially because I view it as a violation of the Buddhist precept to “refrain from destroying living creatures”, one of the vows the center had asked us to take on the first day of our retreat.

I was also personally affronted by it, partially because of the reverence for nature that was instilled in me growing up in Maine, and partially because I view trees as embodying the Buddhist principles of non-harming, equanimity, and noble silence, as I discussed in a prior blogpost. I took two wood chips from the piles of remains and brought them home as mementos.

But this story has a more satisfying ending, because I later learned that IMS had showed respect by having some monks conduct a formal ceremony before killing the trees, and the wood will be used in the construction of the new dorm, as mentioned here. So at least it wasn’t done callously.

The next day—the last full day of the retreat—also featured two major preoccupations. The first was just a whole lot of repressed sexual energy. Spent half a day watching that.

The other half of the day was spent wrestling with work anxiety. Although that stress had a lot of energy and persistence, it was easy to set aside because it came up on my last precious day at IMS, a place I’ve wanted to visit for years. The importance of being “in the moment”—rather than lost in thought—was never clearer!

Then it was Sunday and time to go home. But not before the guy who flatted on the way out had another flat as we were leaving. The ride back to Worcester wasn’t as pleasant as the ride out: it was cold and it poured for the second half of the ride. We were very glad to get to the commuter rail station where we dried off and changed into dry clothes before the train ride back to Boston.

In addition to all that, there are a few brief observations I’d like to share…

When I was packing my bag, I initially pulled out 6 pairs of socks to bring, but having very limited space in my backpack, I decided to take only 3 pair and do double-duty. So as I was leaving, I left a pile with half my socks behind. Unfortunately, those were the ones that were left after I’d already put the other pairs away, so I only had one pair of socks for six days…

The highlight of the center’s short orientation tour was seeing the single-lane candlepin bowling alley in the basement underneath the meditation hall… where the Dalai Lama once bowled!

Surprisingly, none of my friends from my kalyana mitta group nor anyone that I know from CIMC attended this retreat. Actually, I think that was a good thing, in that it meant I could practice without thinking about that extra contact. I did, however, receive a very warm welcome from my friend Shea (who works in IMS’ kitchen) on the arrival day, before we entered into silent practice.

People do various forms of bowing at the start and/or end of sittings. But this was the first time I’d ever seen anyone bow toward the back of the hall. Or perhaps they were showing their butts to the Buddha statue? Very odd.

One of the most discomforting images you can witness is seeing a teacher or practice leader bobbing and weaving during a sitting, on the edge of falling asleep. If they do fall asleep, there’s no one to ring the bell and end the sitting!

It was kind of gratifying that one of the teachers lost her place while leading the first metta chanting.

It was really pleasant doing walking meditation on the Annex porch, especially around sunset or in the darkness after the sun had gone down.

I did two or three sessions of mindful movement (yoga). It was okay.

My “yogi job” was dinnertime pot-washer, which worked out well because it meant that I had the traditional 7:15am morning “work period” to myself. I also made friends with a woman named Margot from JP who shared my job.

Since the retreat is conducted in silence, people often leave notes with questions for the teachers. I left a note that read, “Thank you for introducing me to this group of people. –The Unconditioned”.

Sometimes people have to take a little time re-integrating with the pace and furor of the regular world. I had no such problems—and it’s a good thing, too, considering I had to bike through the city of Worcester—but I can see how it might happen to people on longer retreats.

Lessons learned: Bring cocoa mix. Bring a rag to open doors with to avoid getting germs from commonly-used surfaces.

Finally, I think Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book “Full Catastrophe Living” must be a reference to what happens in the bathroom when you eat vegetarian…

So overall I’d say it was a very positive experience. I don’t think it was qualitatively different from the non-residential retreats I’ve been on, but the amount of unbroken practice time does seem to have a profound effect in terms of one’s ability to quiet the mind enough to examine one’s stuff in the light of wisdom.

I do expect that I’ll do additional retreats, and I’m not particularly concerned about doing longer ones. I certainly think I am ready and capable of a 14-day retreat. Whether that’s a practical aspiration or not remains to be seen. It’d certainly be easier if I were working for myself or unemployed (although then I probably wouldn’t have the funds).

But, as ever, the practice continues and life unfolds as it does.

This year’s birthday wasn’t the greatest piece of work I’ve ever experienced. Woke up with a sore throat that presaged the cold I’d deal with for the following weeks. Made the usual pilgrimage to Foxwoods (where I lost for the first time in three years) and visit to Purgatory Chasm, which was cold and grey but pleasant enough, then a big grocery run, since I had free time and a rental car. Got myself Thai takeout from Montien, which was nice, but it outta be, at $21 for an app and one entree. Then watched some anime on Hulu. Woo-hoo.

The following morning I was in full-on head cold, and off at 8am for the first day of my annual “Sandwich Retreat” at CIMC. The “sandwich” means 12-hour meditation sessions on both Saturday and Sunday of two consecutive weekends, with 3-hour evening sessions on the five weekdays “sandwiched” in-between.

Sudafed FTW, baby. That’s the only way I got through those nine days of head cold hell. I was a coughing, drooling, snotting, sneezing, gagging, nose-blowing, mouth-breathing ball of unhappy. Highly recommended way to spend a long meditation retreat.

In the middle of the week I somehow managed to convince myself that it’d be a good idea if I biked 20 miles out to the Pan-Mass Challenge office to pick up the sneakers that were this year’s premium for people who reached the $6,300 Heavy Hitter fundraising level. The next day (Thursday) I had such a massive relapse of sinus pressure and headache that I skipped that evening’s retreat session, which was actually okay, since there were no group discussions that night, only sittings.

This was my fourth Sandwich Retreat, but it was the first time I stayed at CIMC the whole time. In previous years, I spent periods of walking meditation roaming the streets near the center, whereas this year I stayed indoors and stuck with the formal walking practice. I also spent this year’s 90-minute lunch breaks napping in CIMC’s lower meditation hall, rather than going out and sitting on the steps of Cambridge City Hall.

In fact, the only time I went outside I just sat on a bench in the yard, captivated by the bizarre moire patterns made by passing cars’ hubcaps, viewed through the gaps in CIMC’s slatted wooden fence.

And unlike prior years, when I’d pick up food from outside, this year I actually stayed and ate the vegetarian meals CIMC provided. Depressingly, all four lunches were some form of vegetarian stew, but they were paired with brown rice and bread, which I was able to fill up on. And please, people: raw green beans aren’t tasty or elegant; for chrissake cook those suckers!

The biggest challenge I had was with my “yogi job”. This year I was again assigned to end of day cleanup. It’s a two-person job, and my good buddy Mark signed up to be my parter. Except on the first day, he didn’t show up for it. And the second day, he left early. Then he didn’t even show up for the second Saturday and Sunday. I was kind of stunned that he’d stiff me like that, but some of it was misunderstandings that were later clarified, and thankfully other yogis stepped up and helped me out.

One of the things that makes the Sandwich Retreat unique is the “homework” we are given: something to practice with throughout our regular weekdays, which we can then share with others during the evening sessions. This year we were asked to notice when we were feeling resistance to life as it is, note what conditions caused it, what emotions and mind states it manifested as, and how it evolved and changed once we noticed it.

What almost no one (including me) realized was that this was the exact same homework as last year’s Sandwich Retreat! Ironically, I think a lot of what I observed during the week this year was nearly the same as things I’d observed last year!

Being unemployed and living alone, I wasn’t interacting with a lot of other people, which limited the number of opportunities I had for resistance to come up. The ones I did notice were subtle and ephemeral, like the briefest irritation when I had to wait for a line of cars to pass before I could walk across the street. Such irritations arose and disappeared so fast that I couldn’t really examine them. In the end, I decided that the source of my irritation was some kind of unmet expectation, followed by an immediate reset of my expectations. “Oh! There’s a line of cars. I guess I have to wait.” As soon as I adjusted my expectations, the resistance passed and I was much more patient with the situations.

Naturally, my cold provided me with an opportunity to practice with resistance. On Monday, when I described how acknowledging my irritation lessened its power over me, Larry commented that stopping those problematic mental proliferations actually leaves more energy for the body to fight off infection (or other maladies). Sadly, that didn’t help me during Thursday’s relapse, when mindfulness of my irritation did absolutely nothing to alleviate my physical symptoms and the misery that came with them.

During our sitting meditation periods, I spent most of my time doing karuna practice: the compassion work that I began last month and plan to continue for a full year, similar to the metta practice I did last year. I feel like it is both more meaningful to me and a more productive practice than metta, so I’m really enjoying it so far.

As if exploring resistance and developing compassion weren’t enough to work with, I spent my two teacher interviews grilling Narayan and Michael about my felt sense of anatta (non-self), free will, and the nature of the observer.

I think a lot of it revolves around whether the act of observing life as it plays out is something undertaken by some independent entity within, or whether it’s just another thought process. Because that determines who is in control.

Basically, if everything (including my feelings, thoughts, and actions) is purely conditioned, then I don’t see myself as having the western idea of free will. And that, in turn, causes the Buddhist concept of “non-self” to make more sense to me. If there’s no free will, there’s no independent actor making choices, and if there’s no independent actor making choices, how can there be such a thing as free will?

That was my basic thought process, and I wanted to run it by our guiding teachers to see if they thought it was (a) a useful line of inquiry, and (b) a reasonable understanding of the Buddhist view of reality. However, as is typical in these situations, their responses left me with many more questions than answers.

I first talked with Narayan, who said it was a meaningful line of inquiry, because it relates directly to Wise View: the first and foundational element of the Noble Eightfold Path. She also agreed that all thoughts and feelings are conditioned, but disagreed with the idea that the observer is just another thought.

She asserted that there is something within us that allows us to influence our actions, to alter the conditions that are the input to our decisionmaking process, but she described it in terms of a process, an action, a “mystery”, and a way of “be-ing”. She even described it as our innate “Buddha nature”, that seed of the unconditioned within us all.

She also didn’t think that “free will” was necessarily the best way of thinking about it, since there’s no way of definitively knowing whether we have free will or whether it’s just an illusion. Thus, the question of the degree to which we are able to make free and conscious choices is similar to the questions the Buddha described as “not useful” in the Cula-Malunkya Sutta.

Narayan acknowledged that there was a seeming contradiction in the idea that all thought, feeling, and actions are conditioned, while man still has the freedom to influence his thought patterns, make decisions, and take independent action. After the interview, I felt that contradiction was something I would have to sit with and examine at length.

I also felt it might be useful to spend some time trying out the idea that everything is conditioned and there is no such thing as free will, just to see how it differs from our default and predominant world view that we are independent actors.

After that, I really wanted to talk to Michael about it, since Narayan seemed to have directly contradicted something I’d heard from him, that the observer really was just another (conditioned) thought process. So a week later, I talked to him.

Rather than answer my question directly, Michael came back with an alternate question. For him, it isn’t the question that’s important, but what is driving the question. Why does the question need to be answered? Does it tell us something about the person asking the question? As a parting shot, Michael suggested that universal questions like this can tell us a lot about the individual’s relationship with the unknown. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was definitely more food for thought.

So when the time came for the final day’s feedback session, I talked a little bit about the scattered nature of examining three things at once: the karuna/compassion practice I was doing during the sitting periods; the homework, which concerned itself with resistance and aversion; and my teacher interviews, where I grilled them about non-self, the nature of awareness, and my relationship to it. I didn’t even mention our homework from the Long-Term Yogi group, which has to deal with interpersonal connection and Wise Speech. Still, I felt like I made progress on all those fronts.

Despite being sick, I wasn’t as mentally fatigued this year as in previous years, when I was absolutely exhausted. Part of that is attributable to being unemployed, but I also made a conscious effort to be more relaxed in my practice during the sittings, which I’m sure helped. The only day I felt truly wrung out was the final day, which was okay with me.

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:

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.

"Hey, Yogi!"

Too beat!

"There is nothing that isn't supposed to arise."

Praise!

"Beans?!?"