So I just attended my first Buddhist retreat. Here’s a report. It’s long. Perhaps that’s a testament to how much I got out of it.
As retreats go, it was kind of different. Most are “residential retreats”, meaning you go live somewhere for the week or month or whatever, and you stay there the whole time. CIMC is a non-residential, urban center, so this wasn’t a residential retreat; each night we went back to our own homes to sleep.
It was also what they call a “sandwich retreat”, which they do once a year. The sandwich retreat is organized into intense, day-long practice on two consecutive weekends, plus evening sessions during the intervening week. That allows people to participate in a retreat without taking time off from work. But it also means you have an unusual opportunity to integrate your retreat work with your real-life workaday world.
The hours were 9am to 9pm on both Saturdays, 9am to 6pm on Sundays, and 6:30pm to 9pm Monday through Friday. That means 21 hours of meditation each weekend, and a total of 55 hours of practice over nine days. You’re also going to miss most evening meals, and accumulate a guaranteed sleep deficit! Fortunately, the daylight savings time change took place on that first weekend, so we got an extra hour of sleep early on.
My orientation going into the retreat was to simply sit and observe whatever happened. Other folks had warned me to not have any particular agenda or expectations. I’d also heard from others that retreats often follow the bell curve that’s typical of the forming/storming/norming cycle: a good start, then hitting a wall, then coming to resolution and closure. That’s pretty much what I experienced, so at a high level, the retreat met those expectations.
So from here let’s take it day by day.
Saturday
I guess the first surprise I had was how many people were there. I’d expected maybe twenty or thirty people, but my initial head count was around 75. That decreased to about 45 by the end, but even that was a larger group than I’d expected.
I had some trepidation about starting the retreat by sitting for 12 hours in one day, but the time passed, and overall it wasn’t bad. I learned rather quickly that I’ve got a substantial supply of patience, and I’m nowhere near as susceptible to boredom as most people. I did have some physical discomfort, especially in my knees and shoulder, but it was tolerable. Perhaps atypically, I find it much easier to still my mind and stop thinking than to sit without moving my body for long periods of time.
It didn’t take long to figure out the routine. Even before sitting, the first thing I did was get assigned a “yogi job” for the week. Fortunately, I got an easy one: polishing door handles in the tea room. Hey, it beats the hell out of the poor woman who had to peel and slice six bags full of onions!
One of the things I had expectations about was the food. Although I eat vegetarian one day a week, I figured they’d feed us totally inedible vegan crap. I was a little surprised on the first day when we got this odd sorta vegetarian shepherd’s pie thing. It wasn’t bad. But it had a base of legumes, and I really didn’t think feeding people beans on a twelve-hour day of a silent retreat was an especially wise idea.
One thing I should mention is that it’s not all sitting. The usual schedule alternates between 45-minute sittings and 30-minute walking meditation. Rinse, and repeat ad nauseum. The walking meditation was actually one of the more amusing aspects of the retreat; watching dozens of people standing in a cellar, walking along at a creeping pace with their heads lowered, all I could think of was “Braaaaaains….”
On Saturday and Sunday, the small handful of us who were at our first retreat had a brief group discussion with Maddy, one of the junior teachers. It was pretty uneventful. Probably the most noteworthy thing was one young woman who complained of restlessness and impatience. Throughout the retreat it became obvious that she had chronic “Type A” disease: striving, planning, and compulsively filling her time so that she wouldn’t have any down time. She talked about how she kept raising the bar on her expectations, which immediately brought to my mind the image of a hamster on a treadmill, never reaching the destination it’s striving so hard to achieve.
She was very frustrated that her old habits—which she had discovered at a previous retreat—hadn’t just magically disappeared as soon as she intellectually understood them. When several of us told her that habits of mind take time to undo, she pouted that she hadn’t had any insights at this retreat, at which point I felt compelled to point out, “No, you’ve had several great insights; they’re just not ones you *like*.” But that’s the way retreats go; you can’t control what comes up and what you learn, and it’s not all pretty.
I really feel for her, because she’s got a lot of very strong habits to break. On the other hand, she’s still young, and that kind of wisdom tends to come with age and experience. But I really hope she sticks to it, because I think the dhamma could save her a lifetime’s worth of self-induced suffering.
The only other item of note on Saturday was an idea I’ve kicked around for a while. Think of the “self” not as your thinking mind, but as kind of a formless symbiont. It sits there, with its only input coming from your six sense organs (the sixth being the thinking mind). That self then lives with its host body/mind, and dies with the death of either the host body or mind. Doesn’t make much real practical difference, but it’s one way to separate your sense of identity from the thinking mind.
Sunday
Day two was good. Although I was a bit restless at first, I settled down throughout the day. The only real oddity was a series of completely and utterly random thoughts that ran through my mind. At one point, I thought up a quote that I attributed to Henry Ford: “All systems are basically all right… except religion.” I have absolutely no idea where that came from, since it’s completely fictitious.
Sunday was a lot more of the same kind of thing that we’d been through on Saturday. Lunch was a vegetarian chili that was surprisingly good, and the confidence that I’d be able to eat the food greatly increased my comfort level. I noticed that I had blown a hole in each of the knees of my jeans, which weren’t that old. During one of the 30-minute walking meditation sessions, my joints cracked 18 times in my feet, 55 times in my knees, five in my hand, and once in my arm, yielding an average 158 cracks per hour. Who needs to spend time learning to tap dance, when you can already Crackdance (tm)!
We also had our second newbie group chat with Maddy, where I continued to marvel at how amazingly difficult it is for some people to simply sit quietly without moving for 45 minutes.
At the end of the day, we were given the “homework” we’d be practicing with each day throughout the week, when we weren’t at the retreat. Basically, we were to note the times when our minds were particularly relaxed, and when they were particularly contracted.
Although my mindfulness waned steadily over the course of the week, I noted 15 times when my mind was particularly relaxed, for various reasons, the most prominent of which were reminders of a pleasant past, kittycats, and just general pleasant sensations like cutting my own fresh pineapple, walking home at night, and smelling autumn leaves and wood smoke. In contrast, two thirds of the 28 times I noticed my mind being contracted were as a direct result of other people. So I guess that’s a pointer to an area that might need a little more work.
Having survived the intense weekend’s practice, Sunday evening I hung around after the retreat broke up, socializing with a number of people. This set the tone for the rest of the week, when a few of us would hang around until we were kicked out by the center’s staff.
Monday
One of the ways that guided meditation sessions often start is with an instruction to “ground yourself in your body”, and use it as a stable base from which to explore. However, is that a valid technique if the body is the cause of most of your disturbance/agitation?
Monday’s highlight was my first-ever teacher interview. It was with Larry, the opinionated, former intellectual, New York Jew. I left the interview really pleased. Our conversation ranged across numerous topics, since I didn’t have any pressing concerns at the time, nor any unmet expectations about the retreat.
What I found most heartening was that at the end of the interview, Larry said that he thought I had a really good understanding of the dhamma. I felt very good about that, although I know that understanding dhamma is infinitely easier than putting it into practice. After I left the room, I thought about the Zen analogy that the dharma is only a tool, a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. In that sense, I’d say that I’ve learned how to point at the moon pretty well. In some ways that’s a tremendous achievement, but knowing how to liberate oneself is very different from actually doing it.
What else did we talk about? Well, I related my story about how I learned to quiesce the mind as an adolescent insomniac, and how that has given me a real head start in my Buddhist practice. I talked about how judgmental I am about other people, and how I really dreaded that the prescription for that would be metta (loving-kindness) meditation. Larry had a great response when he said that metta was just one tool for developing a certain mind-state, and that other techniques could achieve the same result, which I also found heartening.
I commented on what I think the magic formula of Buddhism is: that after one notices an unskillful behavior, the simple act of awareness, repeatedly invoked, causes the problem to gradually resolve itself without intervention. We also talked about how CIMC’s practical approach really serves me well, as opposed to the more dogmatic and ritualized lineages such as Tibetan or Zen. On that topic, Larry pointed me at two books by one of his teachers, Krishnamurti: “Freedom from the Known” and “Awakening of Intelligence”.
The only other item of note was that at one point I thought the teachers had noticed that I was occasionally writing in a notepad during the evening, and I got really paranoid about being taken aside and talked to about it, since they usually discourage notetaking. I noted how preoccupied I got with making up scenarios about it, and let it go, but that wasn’t going to be the end of it, as you’ll see next.
Tuesday
Tuesday evening’s sit was pretty normal, except at one point, when Larry saw me taking notes and launched into a public speech about why notetaking was discouraged. He actually was very mild about it, and in the end left it up to me to decide. I found it interesting to contrast that with the scenarios I’d imagined the previous evening.
The thing I was taking notes on was a pointer that Larry made, that some yogi somewhere used the term “the non-abiding mind” as a mind which is able to be present in the moment, without having to resort to gross reminders like the breath in order to remember to be present.
What else? The noise in the meditation hall brought on this observance: If you have any doubt about whether humans are a changing process or permanent and unchanging, just put seventy of them in a room and tell them to be absolutely quiet. Then listen to all the gurgles, coughs, sniffles, cracks, digestive noises, blaffatwind, scratching, sighs, belches, tummy rumbles, breathing, wheezes, sneezes, creaking, tapping, twitching, shifting, etc.
At the end of the evening, as we were figuratively closing the bar, a buddy and I had a conversation with the woman running the retreat about her name, which is very Amerind-ish. I shared the story of my name, which is something I usually don’t reveal to people.
Wednesday
Wednesday evening was pretty productive. As we did each weekday, we broke up into three subgroups to discuss our observances of relaxation and contractedness during the day. On this day I was in Narayan’s group. She’s the one female teacher at CIMC, and she’s really good. Although I’d declined to comment in previous sessions, she seemed very intent on calling on me. But rather than go into the revelations of my day, I related the anecdote that at 11pm the previous evening I’d picked up the Buddha’s middle-length discourses that I’ve been reading, only to set it back down when I came across a comment that the sutta I’d started required careful study and attention. I commented on the irony of having aversion to reading the Buddhist scriptures, which might well have been the path of wisdom at the time, given the week’s accumulated sleep deficit.
Narayan also had another particularly apt comment during that session: “There’s nothing that isn’t supposed to happen.” Specifically, that addresses the idea that we have to accept reality without reservation, even (especially) when it diverges from our hopes or expectations, rather than support a harmful belief that some things just aren’t supposed to happen. Empirical evidence suggests otherwise.
Other observances included the following.
If everyone has the Buddha nature (a common aphorism), and “If you meet the Buddha, kill him” (a common Zen koan)…
In the past, especially during adolescence, I have often behaved with aversion and judgmentalism, almost as a default mode of being. However, I am not by nature immutably an aversive, judgmental person. Because it’s not an inherent trait, it shouldn’t be part of my identity, as it is just a set of learned behaviors that became ingrained habit, which can be changed with wise effort.
The opposite of skepticism is enthusiasm. Is enthusiasm ever unskillful?
By developing more compassion and being less judgmental, I would become a person that more people liked and enjoyed being with. If that were to happen, there would be even more demands on my carefully guarded time. How can I skillfully deal with and manage increased demands on my time?
Thursday
On Wednesday, I had been wondering if I’d ever hit the wall, since I’d had no real difficulty so far. But Thursday it finally happened. It still wasn’t really bad, as I hadn’t had any terrible revelation about myself, but I had a complete lack of mindfulness all day, followed by a lot of restlessness during the sittings.
About the only insight I had today was to wonder whether, when I was meditating, my nervous fidgeting made me look more like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles as I sat.
Friday
On Friday I wasn’t much better. An hour before I went to the sitting, I learned that I was immediately rolling off my current project at work, which caused a little anxiety about when and where my next assignment would be. My meditation was a little less restless, but also less directed, as I started to lose sight of why I was there and what value it had. Despite that, I remembered that such thoughts are not atypical in the middle of a retreat, so I stuck it out with a modicum of equanimity.
Saturday
Because I had been struggling, I approached Saturday morning with a lot of trepidation, as we entered another weekend jammed with 21 hours of meditation. Fortunately, I settled into it and immediately got back on track. For most of the day I actually meditated by listening to other people’s breathing, rather than my own. That seemed to help cultivate positive feelings towards others, although I almost broke out into laughter when one guy let out a little piggy-snort snore.
Later, our third teacher, Michael, commented that if you’re struggling with sleepiness during meditation, you should take comfort in the idea that if you do fall asleep, you’ll definitely wake up sometime later! And ironically, you’ll probably be most awake in the evening, when you’re trying to fall asleep!
Sadly contrary to the expectations that the previous weekend had set, the food on Saturday sucked: sweet and sour cabbage, and some sorta kashi with mushrooms puke. Bleah. In the free moments after lunch I went out and bought myself some potato chips.
In the end, Saturday was a really good day, and I definitely felt like I’d gotten past the block I’d had Thursday and Friday.
Sunday
The last day of the retreat was a little different. To begin with, I was struggling a lot with a pain in my chest. Although it probably was muscular, as a result of stretching too vigorously the day before, I had a terrible stabbing pain that felt like a cracked rib. That bothered me all day, but I managed to get through it.
We sat as usual in the morning, but I wound up having two interviews during the walking periods. The first was with Michael, and went very well. I came into it with the following question. I’m really good at quieting my body and mind, but the teachers have repeatedly stated that once you do that, your accumulated repressed tension will come to the forefront, kind of like the idea that if you sit and wait for it, your problems will become self-evident.
Well, for me, nothing ever comes up other than the usual surface stuff: physical discomfort, planning about the future, and some completely random stuff. There appears to be no deep-down repressed or unaccepted stuff down there. Is that because I’m the only well-adjusted person on the planet? Unlikely, but possible, I guess. Or am I too deluded to see my own problems? I’m kinda skeptical about that. Or am I just not sensitive enough to see it?
After some discussion, Michael basically told me that he thought I was practicing correctly, and that I shouldn’t keep scratching around, looking for something. If there’s anything there, it will arise in its own time. He also said that most people come to practice seeking relief from some kind of present suffering, and since I’m pretty thoroughly happy, my circumstances are somewhat unique. A logical question might be whether my happiness is conditioned or unconditioned, but that’s hard to determine.
During the sitting, I started thinking about that default assumption that everyone has some suffering that they’re struggling to overcome. The instructions we’re given are usually oriented toward how to use sitting practice to alleviate negativity, insecurity, and unskillful states. Those don’t really apply to me, except at the surface level, so I began wondering if there were instructions on how to cultivate positive and skillful mind-states, which would be more useful to me.
When we talked, Michael said that I seemed to be really good at equanimity, and it got me thinking about my strengths. I’d list them as equanimity, self-forgiveness, patience, inquisitiveness, being able to abide without striving, and the ability to quiesce the discursive mind. The self-forgiveness leads to an immediate question of how to determine the difference between self-forgiveness and apathy/complacency, but that could just be an academic question rather than a practical one.
We also talked about my challenges, which seem to boil down to how I relate to family, work, friends, and demands on my time. And later I enumerated what I’m really bad at; I figure those are that I am habitually judgmental, critical, and I have a surfeit of vanity and ago.
An hour after talking with Michael, we had the final meeting of Maddy’s newbie’s group. The big thing I got out of that was the semantic difference between “seeing”, which implies passively viewing whatever is there, versus “looking”, which has the sense of actively trying to find something specific. Vipassana is about the former, not the latter. I thought that an interesting observance to combine with Michael’s suggestion not to go “looking” for anxiety that wasn’t overtly there.
Lunch was more really bad food. Some kind of apple and squash soup. So my nascent hopes that retreat food was going to be edible got shot down. It’s actually one of my biggest concerns about residential retreats, where the fallback position of finding edible food might not be an option.
After lunch, we had a traditional feedback session, and the results were predictably similar to the end of a Sapient-style consulting workshop. When my turn came, I gave the backhanded compliment that although I’d been attending CIMC for three years, looking for sangha (community, one of the three foundations of Buddhism) this had been the first time that I’d ever experienced it. Many people had vaguely similar feedback: that they’d experienced the power of “sangha” at CIMC for the first time.
Although I’ve been going to Wednesday evening sittings and dharma talks for years, not many people stay for tea and socializing afterward, so I haven’t met very many people. However, over the retreat’s week and a half I learned a lot about a lot of people, and started a number of new dhamma friendships. I’ve always felt that friends who understand and try to live the dhamma would be an important support for my practice, and I’m glad to have enlarged my circle quite a bit over the weekend. Plus I’ve now spoken—for the first time—with each of the senior teachers, which was extremely beneficial and helpful. Their time is extremely precious to me.
Among the other retreatants’ closing comments were some interesting tidbits about Larry, one of the teachers. One woman called him “the dreaded Larry”, but another quoted a statement he’d made in a private interview that “Awareness is your teddy bear”. Awww… He also related that his wife, a Russian, calls him “Godzillichka”, which is kind of a cute diminutive version of the fearsome monster.
When one of my buddies’ turn came up, he provided a wonderful, insightful, and very memorable analogy for practice. The retreatants are in a huge piñata game, all blindfolded and swinging at random, looking for the prize of wisdom. Meanwhile, the three teachers are in a group off to the side, giving the occasional verbal direction to anyone who is veering too far from the path. We all found that comically apt.
Afterward, there was tea and socializing, and my buddies and I again closed the bar.
Overall, the retreat was a very good—but intensely tiring— experience, and well worth the time. It may provide an easy segue into future residential retreats. But most importantly, it was incredibly valuable to me to get an idea where I stood, both in terms of how my mind responds to long retreats, and where I stand overall in my practice and understanding of the dhamma. And in both of those cases, the answer was very satisfactory.
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