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Kannon Zendo Los Alamos, NM
(Last Updated July 14, 2011)
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DOING A MEDITATION RETREAT Home by Henry Chigen Finney August 2010 Why Retreat? If you want to experience breakthroughs to realization, there is little alternative to doing meditation retreats. Reading alone won’t do it. Talking with others won’t do it. Internet research won’t do it. Logical/rational thinking and “understanding” won’t do it. Meditating a few periods per week also won’t do it, although it can help with daily life. Even meditating one or two periods a day, five or six days a week, won’t do it, although this is enough for many to greatly reduce stress and reap many of the benefits now being documented by neuroscientists. (And it is enough, as my teacher Daido used to say, to keep the tea kettle warm so that you can readily bring it to a boil again at your next retreat.) If you really want a glimpse of enlightenment, you will have to begin doing longer meditation retreats. Even a day-long retreat won’t do it, although it is very good (and for beginners, an essential) preparation for longer retreats. What a day-long retreat can do, however, is to give you an experience of how profoundly meditation calms the mind. You may even end the day feeling a little dizzy, very open, peaceful, energized and relaxed. These are just some of the goodies that can be enjoyed and appreciated along the way. Priorities: Obviously, how much one meditates is a matter of priorities and short vs. long-term objectives. This includes how urgently you want to be free, to transcend your own suffering, to be happy, and to effectively serve others (family, clients, friends, the world) without your historical baggage getting in the way. Please give this matter of priorities serious thought, since clarifying one’s intentions and commitment are important components of embarking on the spiritual path of transformation; it is an urgent matter. This urgency is reflected in the gatha posted at the entrance of Kannon Zendo: Let me respectfully remind you. Life and Death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed! Do not squander your life! Motivation & Intention: Let me now turn to the nitty-gritty of doing retreats. Early considerations include the time required and the cost. For those with jobs, family and work-related travel or commuting requirements, time can be scarce. If you have the motivation, however, time for daily practice and retreats can usually be arranged by planning in advance – sometimes, long in advance. The key here is “motivation;” so please, once again, review your priorities and the urgency of practice (including why I keep repeating this). Time: For those who say, “My life is so busy I simply don’t have the time,” I usually translate this to mean simply that practice has a low priority on their great “to do” list; that they actually could arrange the time if they really wanted to and were willing to rearrange their priorities to make it possible. For those with “no time” I must ask: Why is your spiritual health and happiness any less deserving of time and training than your physical condition? Why do you have time for workouts at the gym but not for meditation? I suspect that you’d have no trouble finding time to schedule heart surgery, if your doctor said it was essential. Well, why is your liberation in this one precious life any less essential? I’ve noticed over the years what a remarkable rearrangement of priorities can occur after an experience like a life-threatening accident or illness, or after the shock of losing a loved-one to death. So why not start earlier and be better prepared? Then, instead of bringing your life to a stand-still, the shock could serve instead as an impetus for deep spiritual growth, for a deepening of wisdom and compassion. As teacher Steven Levine says, “Don’t wait for the terminal prognosis to begin transforming your life.” Cost: Another barrier for some is cost. Usually this is not a real barrier, considering how much we spend on other activities and “stuff.” Sometimes what we’re willing to pay merely reflects the priorities just discussed. Spending $1000 for a week’s vacation somewhere nice seems OK, but spending $500 for a week-long retreat seems exorbitant. Why? Because of our priorities, obviously. But for a few whose incomes are low, cost can indeed be a problem. Fortunately, many Buddhist retreat centers offer scholarships to fill the income gap. Be sure to ask. These initial barriers are initially the hardest to cross. Once you’ve arrived at a new determination to “not squander your life,” the more concrete challenges of doing a retreat become more manageable. Let me mention a few that sometimes give people trouble. Silence & the “Precautions: For instance, take the rule of silence and the “precautions” to avoid eye contact, non-verbal communication, reading, phone calls and outside communication of any kind, and to turn off your cell phone. All of these involve ways that we habitually avoid looking inward. A lot of us can’t bear silence, instead talking endlessly and filling the rest of our day with radio, TV, phone conversations, reading magazines, etc.. (Imagine! No “texting” allowed!) The question, however, is what’s going on in one’s head and in one’s body that leads one to be distracted in these ways? You won’t find out until you turn all the distractions off, and that you can begin to do at retreat. No Eye Contact: Especially difficult for beginners is the experience of being cut off from eye contact with others. We often don’t realize how profoundly we crave and depend on such visual contact for feedback, affirmation, approval, orientation and direction. If others don’t look at us we instinctively assume they don’t like us, or that they’re snobs, or that we did something wrong. Such reactions are profound distractions, and at retreat you’ll have the chance to find out what in your mental and emotional life makes them ordinarily seem so necessary. Indeed, all of the rules of retreat (the “precautions” at Zen retreats, or “sesshins”) are designed to help us stop all the external distractions and chatter so that we can be quiet and discover who we really are internally. When such distractions are cut off, at first, as you may already know, you discover how extremely busy your mind typically is with chatter, judgments, reactions, emotions, plans, beliefs, analysis, and so on. After two or three days at retreat (yes, it takes that long!) all of this inner commotion may begin to calm down, allowing you, at last, some insight and some peace of mind! Seeing the Chatter: But all the chatter is not just something to get past. On the contrary, more in some traditions than in others, learning to simply observe it all without buying into it, without identifying with it, is a powerful way of learning about our own delusions – our hang-ups, tendencies to judge, biases, preferences, dislikes, triggers, “stories,” and patterns of rationalization and avoidance. (What? Me? Some don’t learn about their own mental life until they learn a technique like insight meditation.) None of this means that your values, skills and knowledge will be destroyed or necessarily abandoned. Learning to see your own mind without reacting to what you see merely provides you with another skill that you can use to more clearly locate problems and stresses, and then decide more insightfully what you want to do about them. In the meantime, you can benefit from the calmness, insight, concentration, performance-enhancement and happiness that meditation makes possible for so many. Submitting to the Schedule: As part of this mind training (in my tradition we call it “Zen training”), it is very important to submit entirely to the retreat schedule. Your little mind may protest, screaming “I don’t want to!” But to gain maximum benefit you should agree always to “show up,” as Roshi Halifax sometimes puts it at Upaya Zendo in Santa Fe. And this includes the things your little self says it doesn’t want to do. Sometimes the gut reaction of beginners at retreat is so strong that somebody on the staff has to come and wake them up for dawn sitting, or fetch them for work practice. Our resistance at such times usually reflects deep habits of avoidance, so being someplace that doesn’t allow such avoidance is a very fortunate opportunity. Some people are reluctant to commit to a schedule of meditation because they fear they won’t be able to get through “long” periods of sitting. At Kannon Zendo, meditation periods almost never exceed 30 minutes, and sometimes are a bit less. At Zen Centers generally a standard duration is 35 minutes. What people seem to worry about is both their ability to remain focused for (what initially seems) so long and the possibility that pain may turn the period into an ordeal. Retreats are made-to-order to deal with the problem of staying focused, for once the bell rings there is no choice but to just keep doing one’s best. This is not really difficult, once you make a commitment to the retreat, because whether or not your mind is focused, all you have to do is to sincerely keep trying. As I sometimes point out to beginners, there is no such thing as “success” or “failure” in meditation; instead of such self-judgments, we just do our best. As for pain, the best precaution here is to have experimented beforehand with the various meditation postures (chair, kneeling, and the various of cross-legged positions) and to select one that for you is manageable for 30 minutes. It is also helpful to be familiar with several workable alternative postures so that you can “cycle through” them from one sitting period to the next during retreat. This makes ordinary pain manageable. But as with staying focused, the discipline of sitting periods is extremely helpful for dealing with mild or moderate pain. I will have more to say about pain in a moment. Work Practice: When work practice rolls around, sometimes people say, “Why should I work? I paid good money to be here; I didn’t pay to do your chores!” Ah, well, actually, you did. Although sitting meditation is the most common activity during waking hours at retreat, other activities, like walking meditation, silent meal-taking and work practice, teach us how to bring the beneficial effects of sitting meditation (in Zen, called zazen) back to ordinary life again, and to do these ordinary activities with a mindfulness that we didn’t have before. Furthermore, anytime a strong emotional reaction arises to interfere with scheduled retreat activities, that is an opportunity to see clearly the nature of those automatic reactions we often have that prevent us from being receptive, insightful and effective in our ordinary lives. As Pema Chodron notes, “This very moment is your perfect teacher.” And that includes all the painful, unpleasant and resistant moments too, so long as we can wake up and pay attention to them. Liturgy: Liturgical activities like chanting, bowing, and services are especially potent in their capacity to reveal the conditioned nature of our minds. “That reminds me too much of my early Catholic experience,” some say. Or, referring to bowing, “I don’t worship god anymore because I’m an atheist (agnostic, etc.).” It’s absolutely amazing how many of these automatic, conditioned reactions one sees during retreat in others -- and in oneself, if one is willing to just follow the schedule and witness what arises. So show up, observe what arises, and resist judgments and avoidance reactions. Just see your own mind! Submitting Fully: In fact, to benefit the most from retreat, not only should you submit fully to the schedule, you should throw yourself into it, giving yourself completely, body and mind, without reservation, to every retreat activity. When you chant, be the chant; when your work, be the work; when you eat, be every aroma, texture, flavor and taste of every single bite. When you sit, do nothing but meditate. When you rest, totally rest. Let there be no separation whatever between you and every action. If you can do this, you will find it transformative and the end of retreat will have arrived before you know it. (You will know that you are not doing this if you find yourself repeatedly looking at the time and saying something like, “only (this many) minutes left before I can stop doing this.” This is why, incidentally, many Zen centers cover or remove all clocks and ask you not to wear a watch.) Cultivating non-separation requires being non-separation in every moment. Physical Pain: Then there is the challenge of pain that usually arises during retreat, including physical pain (usually painful knees or hips) and emotional pain (anger, sadness, etc.). Physical discomfort is usually the first to come up. In traditional Zen, students were often required to sit without moving, regardless of the intensity of pain. This can be a strong teacher, but it can be extremely disagreeable and is not necessary, in my opinion. The “Middle Way” applies here too – neither too much pain, nor habitual avoidance of pain. Too much, and people who could benefit greatly will say “to hell with this” and abandon practice. Such a shame. Too little pain and people will continue to avoid the difficulties of their lives, not facing up to realities that must be seen and appreciated to be resolved. So, you should do your best to practice “on the edge” (as Zen teacher Joko Beck says) of your pain tolerance, learning all you can from what comes up. If, at some point during a sitting period, you need to shift to an alternative position, do so as quickly and silently as you can, and then be still again. What is not acceptable is continuing to squirm and fidget in response to the discomfort, thus not only distracting your neighbors, but avoiding the opportunity to see what’s really going on in your mind and to strengthen your own ability to face pain and difficulty in life. All of this is as applicable to emotional pain as to physical discomfort. You will find, with practice, that as your meditative concentration deepens, your ability to face and experience both kinds of pain will greatly increase. Eventually, you may even notice that you’re experiencing pain without feeling it adversely. It may even disappear, like how the discomfort of an ache or an insect bite can disappear instantly when one is suddenly distracted by some commanding event. More generally, you will find that as your resolve and ability to simply “be” with moderate pain deepens, so too will your ability to increasingly be with emotional pain and the difficulties of life without responding dysfunctionally. One of the hardest and most counter-intuitive lessons in Buddhism is that to transcend suffering you have to face your pain. No wonder some lineages of the Tibetan tradition so explicitly cultivate the “warrior spirit” for effective practice. Emotional Pain: Which brings us to emotional pain – anger, grief, jealousy, fear, and so on. Anger is a common one that my root teacher used to joke about. Just a day or two into sesshin, he would say, and people begin finding all sorts of things to be dissatisfied with: the guy sitting next to me fidgets too much; I don’t like not having meat to eat; I hate getting up so early; I shouldn’t have to pay money to do someone else’s work; the chanting sounds awful; this feels like some kind of cult; why can’t I talk back after dharma talks? it’s too hot; it’s too cold; there are too many insects; the dogs next door bark too much; etcetera, etcetera! Furthermore, many of these observations are accompanied by strong emotions, including physical sensations, that come from “believing” or “buying into” our angry opinions. Amazing! Is this what goes on for you during your ordinary day? No wonder there is sometimes so much stress! Retreat offers a unique opportunity to watch all this arise and to gradually free oneself from it. The challenge is to just observe it all without judgment or reaction, without analysis, without “doing anything about it.” (You can do that later, after retreat.) At first, we may want to ask the guy sitting next to us not to fidget; or to skip the parts of the day we don’t like; or to open the windows so it won’t be so hot; or to use earplugs to dampen the barking dogs. Do you see the problem here? Reacting in these ways simply moves our attention back again to the outside (which, as often as not, is beyond our control), reaffirming the separation we usually feel between ourselves and everyone and everything else. At retreat we have a rare chance to not react, but instead to see all of these arisings as internal mental activity that eventually subsides on its own, dissolves, resolves itself. How are we going to be “one with everything” if our habit is to understand the problem as always lying outside ourselves? At retreat we have the opportunity to get acquainted with our own mind, and more fundamentally, to see who or what we really are without separation. Staying at Retreat: Please agree to follow all these guidelines and instructions for the duration of the retreat. Also, you will be asked to remain at retreat for as long as you’ve committed in advance to do so. You can see why. All the resistance and inner reactions that arise during retreat may lead to an impulse to bolt. A moment’s reflection reveals that such a departure would be a classical avoidance maneuver that would simply reinforce the patterns of avoidance involved; so, you are asked to see your commitment through. Doing so will not only strengthen your own integrity, but will empower your life. Barriers: As you gain some meditation and retreat experience, it will be helpful to learn about the various classical “barriers” to practice. In Vipassana, these include desire, aversion, tiredness, doubt and restlessness. As you learn to recognize these as they arise, you can mobilize various traditional antidotes and learn to defuse their power by silently saying something like, “Ah, you again. Come on in by the fire and have tea.” Working with a spiritual teacher can help one recognize and penetrate the numberless forms such barriers take as one’s practice unfolds. Interview: Many retreats will offer an opportunity for “interview” with the teacher (if there is one). You should make a point of taking advantage of interview every time it is offered. The common excuse, “I don’t have anything to say,” often means “I don’t want to get down to brass tacks” in my practice. Go to interview even if you feel blank. The reason why interview is so important is that talking one-on-one with a qualified teacher is a powerful tool for understanding what’s going on for you during retreat. And there is always something going on for you at retreat; so talk about that. The teacher acts like a mirror. For beginners especially, the usual instruction is simply to raise any question or problem that has come up regarding your meditation practice. You can ask: what does this (or that) mean? How should I handle this (or that) problem or distraction? Thus-and-such is a big problem for me now during the retreat; how should I handle it? At interview you want to focus on what is real for you now, not before or after retreat, or at other times. It’s OK to refer to outside matters so long as they are relevant to your experience now. It is not an opportunity for life review, book critiques, abstract philosophical theorizing or intellectual analysis. Rather, it’s an opportunity to better see, with help from the teacher, what is true, what is going on for you right now. It is also a good time to ask the teacher what form, in their opinion, your practice should be taking, and to discuss where you are in the process of your own developing meditation practice. Ending Retreat: Let me close with a word on ending retreats. For relative beginners, the time immediately following the end often involves a dizzying release of energy. You can’t stop laughing, or talking, or being amazed. The emotional release can be a bit like the champagne spurting out of its bottle once the cork is removed. All of this can leave you a little spacey, furthermore, so that special care should be taken when driving home. As you drive, summon back the mindfulness you cultivated at retreat so as not to lose control or drive too fast or recklessly. Depending on the length of your retreat, it may be a good idea to take a day off, if possible, to regain your balance and rest up. I often found that, although my energy level often sky-rocketed during the last days of retreat (what kind of alchemy is that?), when I returned home I would experience a few quite tired days as I caught up. Each person is different, so just be aware that some continuing mindfulness is very useful for getting back home safely and returning to your ordinary life routines.
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