meditation wrapped, 2024
kinda practiced a lot this year!
it would be super fun (and kinda useless, and potentially ego-feedy) to have stats like total hours meditated, in various postures, doing various techniques, “ur top hindrances,” books read, teachers listened to, etc etc. i don’t have any of those stats but i thought it could also be fun to just look back at my year in terms of what my practice has been like and what i’ve been focusing on.
january
finished listening to rob burbea’s famous 2019 retreat on jhana practice, in preparation for a week-long online retreat with jhourney, jan 22-28. this retreat gave me a new approach to metta practice, a handful of really useful technical moves, and a widened frame of the possibility space of what retreat practice can look like, all of which continued to develop and serve me all year. it also gave me my first replicable tastes of what i’m relatively comfortable calling light jhana experiences.
i wrote a long thread all about what i learned and my experiences on that retreat. some highlights include: focusing on the actual emotional activity of the heart as the center of metta practice (rather than say, phrases), using a smile on the face as a way to generate positivity and also reveal where there is tension in the heartmind, deliberately relaxing the body when the mind wanders before returning to the object of attention, forgiveness practice, and lots of freedom to experiment.
february and march
i don’t remember much specifically about my meditation practice these months, it was probably mostly in a daily-maintenance kind of mode, probably 45 mins most days. i continued practicing in the jhourney way for a while but didn’t keep deepening in it, and i think basically went back to my default which is just kind of breath and body awareness and/or open awareness and/or emotional awareness in a way that is nourishing, collects the mind, and maybe notices little new insights here or there.
the main task of february was of contemplative discernment. do i decide to leave my apartment in august to begin nomad life? (spoiler, yes.) this took a lot of soul searching and being listened to by wonderful generous friends as i reached the same conclusion again and again.
i also did some IFS sessions with theo during this time, who i can certainly recommend. the most memorable of these had me basically in an altered state, completely suffused with a gratitude more powerful than any i had known, grateful to be existing, grateful for this life, grateful there is something rather than nothing. the gratitude points at a great mystery, for who or what is to thank for this? “god” can be a convenient shorthand to gesture at it if one wishes, but does nothing to lessen the mystery. the urge to place my body in a bow was unmissable. contact with the inexplicability of the gift is part of what creates the virtuous cycle of gratitude
april and may
in these months i spent 8 weeks at boundless refuge, where i followed this schedule:
north’s teaching introduced me to a soto zen influence for the first time in a strong way. in a lot of ways, my practice looked a lot like it did at the 2022 IMS 3-month retreat. there was a lot of open awareness, a lot of body awareness, and at one point i focused almost entirely on breath meditation for 3 or 4 weeks. but surrounding and suffusing all of this was north’s continual pointing at the direct experience of awakening being available here and now, being nothing other than exactly what is already here. sometimes i found it maddening, sometimes i found it inspiring.
here’s a tweet from shortly after the retreat that captures the vibe of how i was understanding practice from that time. i still like it a lot
another focus of north’s teaching was to spend some time every morning reflecting on one’s deepest intention. through this practice, and through the zen style of teacher-student interviews, i came to realize that authenticity is a really really good word for pointing at my deepest value, and deepest intention.
for me, many words, taken to their apotheosis, meet at the top of a diamond at a point that might be called enlightenment or awakening. some of these are: honesty, humility, love, freedom, peace, authenticity. there are sure to be others, as well. but i came to realize that this word, authenticity, (or sincerity, sometimes) has a lot of orienting power in my heart and mind. it feels like what i am practicing for, it feels like my internal motivation, and i have trust that it is leading to the same place all the buddhas and bodhisattvas are pointing. but after all, even if it isn’t… who cares! where i want to go is definitionally where i want to go!
the theme of cultivating/unveiling authenticity has stayed with me since this time. chanting the heart sutra, the five remembrances, and the metta sutta every morning was also a very meaningful and impactful part of this retreat
june and july
mom picked me up and we visited karuna buddhist vihara and abhayagiri monasteries, for a few days each. it was very inspiring to meet the monastics at each center. despite both being part of the ajahn chah lineage within the thai forest theravada tradition, the two places are very different. KBV has currently 2 nuns total and no fixed schedule - abhayagiri is the oldest ajahn chah monastery in the USA, there’s something like 30+ monks there.
i had an interesting mixture of being inspired by the deep dhamma practice and commitment, being kinda ready to be done meditating so much after the long retreat, appreciating the beauty and power of the tradition and lineage, and also feeling a little confined by its conservatism. there’s been a growing feeling that, at the very least, theravada is not unambiguously my home, as a practitioner.
i went to THE BEST WEDDING EVER (my sister’s 🙂) and then vibecamp (a deeply rich field of practice and integration, itself), and came back to rochester.
next was the IMS and inward bound mindfulness teen retreats. which are always deeply deeply rich in relational practice. a highlight for me this year was holding the “extended practice” workshop every afternoon at IMS, where i was available for teens who wanted to talk more about the dharma, talk more about their own hearts, or to sit and practice together even more than the already generous practice schedule.
august
4 weeks at zen mountain monastery! see my full report here. practicing formal mediation about 3 hours a day, except for the final week which was a sesshin (silent retreat). what’s salient in my memory now is the wonderful the devotional practices of bowing and chanting, the way the culture of absolute stillness in sitting practice supported my concentration and equanimity, the feeling of entering the dokusan room and being interviewed by a living zen master, understanding my breath practice and open awareness practice in subtly different ways, and certainly the work practice — maintaining mindful awareness while painting or gardening or cooking or cleaning or groundskeeping etc etc. good relational practice there too. also fell in love with long-form eyegazing practice, holding eye contact from a meditation posture for a good 30 minutes! the five-day sesshin at the end of the month felt short and sweet compared to my experience at boundless refuge. i remember noticing i was sad for half a day or something one day and thinking how adorable that was. half a day, once?! HA, nothing.
i read the eight gates of zen by john daido loori (founder of ZMM), part of a book about shikantaza practice, part of zen mind, beginner’s mind, and all of touching the infinite by rodney smith, a practice guide based on the satipatthana sutta.
august 27 - october 20
these 8 weeks were an absolute whirlwind of travel. i stayed in 14 different places, for a minimum of 1 night and a maximum of 9. given this, i’m actually super pleased with how well i kept up the practice during this time! there was a missed day or a 5-minutes-only here or there, but i usually found at least a half hour, and often more. i practiced in the north carolina woods with my friend alex and herbal tinctures. i tried out this guided chakra kundalini ninjutsu thing my friend matt loves. i did a lot of relational/social meditations with my friend mercer. i visited a tibetan practice center in nyc.
i read opening awareness by charlie awbery, and then delightfully had the opportunity to meet and practice with charlie in brooklyn. the simple instruction to remain uninvolved with all arising phenomena gave me a lot of mileage.
i read tantra illuminated by christopher wallis, an extraordinary book about the philosophy, history, and practice of nondual shaiva tantra, a tradition that strongly influenced vajrayana and tibetan practice, and shares many deep understandings of the nature of reality and spiritual development with these, while also being starkly different in many foundational frames and assumptions.
i visited temple forest monastery for a week, which brought my formal practice back up to 2 hours a day, and gave me a lot of time for long reflective walks through the new hampshire fall foliage.
contact improv and earthdance
from october thru december there’s also been a lot of contact improv in my life, in weekly jams (dances) and two 4-day long intensives at a retreat center called earthdance (with one more 6-day jam coming at the end of december). i mention this in my “meditation wrapped” post because contact improv is very much a contemplative practice, a moving meditation, a practice of inner listening and relational attunement, an opportunity to practice with many edges of comfort and trust. on the faces and in the movements of some of the most amazing dancers i have seen, i witness an energy very akin to the meditator in certain styles of practice — completely patient, completely attuned, neither needing anything to happen nor needing anything to not happen. one dancer, who also teaches the form, told me that when she first stayed at IMS for a silent meditation retreat, she recognized “ah, this is just what i am doing when i dance.”
october 21 - dec 15
i unexpectedly had the opportunity to stay in vermont at a program called the contemplative semester for 8 weeks, working only 12-15 or so hours a week in the kitchen in exchange for room and board and an hourly wage. for the first four-ish weeks, i had a wonderfully strong formal practice momentum, finding usually 4 or 5 hours of practice a day. my initial intention was to see if i could get back in touch with the practices i had learned from jhourney way back in january. i had a few sits that seemed to be heading in the direction of light jhana again, but i then became interested in how much my sense of the inner critic was making it difficult to progress.
i listened to a talk on the inner critic from rob burbea that then became the focus of my practice for a week or so, especially practicing compassion for the pain caused by the inner critic. from there, my practice moved into self-compassion more broadly, and i had a wonderful opportunity to lead a guided self-compassion meditation for tasshin’s program “saturday night metta.”
another truly wonderful feature of this month was getting to work with a consciousness medicine on a regular basis, which i guess i’ll refrain from naming directly. DM me if you wish. unlike some other medicines, this one is not very shamanic in nature, not so prone to stories and images and mythopoetic content, but rather, simply being “very precise in dissolving egoic structures,” as a teacher of mine describes it. it’s basically pure “let go” medicine. it brings dukkha and dualistic thought structures into very clear focus, which allows attention and compassion to meet them in a very resonant way. what’s also fantastic about this medicine is it is easy to titrate my dosage to only as much as i feel totally comfortable with — no need to blast forcefully through all of my egoic defenses — and it can easily be practiced for 30 or 60 minutes, and leave me back in a totally sober mind. it feels like the medicine i’ve been looking for all along. over many sessions, i’ve slowly expanded my capacity to let go in greater and greater amounts.
my last four weeks at the contemplative semester were less intense in terms of formal practice, but as my focus turned elsewhere, i kept up a healthy routine of at least one sit a day.
in the last couple weeks, i’ve become very excited about resuming the practice of ideal parent figure protocol, a practice of healing attachment wounding. more and more i am coming to appreciate how much the presence or absence of strong relationships where i feel safe to be fully authentic define the vast majority of my wellbeing. as if this wasn’t enough reason to engage in this practice, i feel a logical and intuitive agreement with the view put forward by a mentor of mine, jessica morey, that some degree of secure attachment is actually a necessary foundation for the system to feel enough safety and trust to let go into the unconditioned (aka ENLIGHTENMENT).
and FINALLY i’ll share that i’ve also been super jazzed about the connection course from ‘art of accomplishment’ that just wrapped up. it’s late and i wanna finish this blog post so i’ll just say it’s fuckin kickass experiential relational practice that i intend to keep going with. twitter thread here
closin thoughts
i actually think all this meditation stuff really helps! i see it from the inside, and i hear about it from the outside, from friends who reflect the changes they see in me. in addition to all this practice itself having good effects, i feel like i am also making good progress in one of the main goals of my nomadic wanderings, which is to experiment with different styles and traditions of practice, as well as with different locations and settings for practice, to try and find some sense of my next practice home.
ultimately, i think bopping all around to a bunch of different techniques is probably not the thing that directly leads to huge deepening. but i have been in a period for some years now where the intuition has been really strong that i’ve needed to be exploring, exploring, exploring, and i think that was right for me. now, i’m starting to feel a new hunger for really sticking with my things, and being bolstered by the knowledge that i’ve had my look around, and the shit i’m on right now, for me, is perfect.
i’m feeling really good about my current stack of practices and hoping that these will be the things i can stick with for a longer period of time. but even if they aren’t and i need to keep looking, there’s a change in my orientation from “need to try everything and understand every technique and can’t trust whatever i’m focusing on is good enough” to “longing to settle down and really sink in,” and that feels like a really good development.