reflections from 12 weeks of meditation retreat
and contemplating the next one :)
In a few short weeks, I will be at the Boundless Refuge retreat for 2 months of all-day-every-day meditation practice! To try to explain why I might do such a thing, I thought I might share here some writing (edited and curated) I did after returning from the 3-month retreat that I attended at IMS in the Fall of 2022. 3 months after returning home, I hosted an AMA on the subreddit r/streamentry, and received many wonderful questions that helped me describe the experience.
At the bottom of this post, I share more thoughts about my upcoming retreat. (You can also skip to that part and treat it as a standalone short essay, if you wish!)
Introduction
I’m deeply grateful for everyone in my life who helped support me so that I could attend this retreat, as well as to all of my fellow yogis who sat with me for 6 or 12 weeks, my teachers on retreat, and the amazing IMS staff, as well as donors to IMS.
I’m grateful for my teachers’ teachers, and their teachers, and theirs, and all who have kept this tradition alive dating back to the Buddha, and even before him. We benefit from the accumulated wisdom and goodness of 10s or 100s of thousands of years of humans, their care & love.
And indeed, the wisdom and goodness of all life that surrounds us, the whole ecosystem is collaborating in a project of creation, generosity, love, wisdom, and freedom. We're all just walking each other home.
Did you get any permanent perceptual shifts, or mental benefits, and could you describe them?
I’d say so! I think in comparison to before the retreat, I’m quicker to notice suffering states than I used to, and I have more clarity around if greed or hatred (in the wide sense) are present, or delusion around the sense of self. And there's also more facility in letting go of these states, more familiarity with the embodied and intuitive move to more spaciousness, less selfing, more surrender, more acceptance. I also simply have a lot more experience and familiarity with a whole range of afflictive emotions - so I’m not quite as thrown by them as I used to be, and I think this is also part of why I notice them sooner. I've gotten to know them better!
What was your main obstacle/hindrance while in retreat and how did you overcome it?
One big obstacle was my tinnitus, and the aversion to the tinnitus. It didn’t bother me much for around 10 days, and then all the sudden the aversion to it EXPLODED and at one point I almost thought I was going to have to go home, it was so hard to practice. I switched to doing metta or karuna phrases all day and that was helpful, both for the states it helped engender, and for it being an object of focus that was more abstract and separate from my aural experience.
Eventually I noticed that even though the tinnitus sound was pretty constant, my aversion to it actually fluctuated. So I started rating how strong my aversion to it was on a scale of 1-10, to help me intuitively learn that the aversion (and thus suffering) was not constant. This started to take energy out of the cycle that was feeding the aversion, and eventually my practice was able to develop in other ways that weren't as determined by this phenomenon, although it did continue to be a significant part of my retreat throughout.
In terms of the classic hindrances - sloth and torpor wasn't a big one for me. Restlessness was, for sure! I found several possible responses to it to be helpful: investigation of the restlessness, at times changing postures (lying down is usually helpful), maybe making a stronger determination at times, or also maybe examining “what emotional states are beneath this, wanting to be felt?”
Sensual desire showed up in a huge way in the form of sexual desire. Partially it was seeing other yogis, but also it would show up just in my own mind, wanting to go into sexual fantasies. I would note these, I would give in to them at times rather than fight, I would try to notice the suffering. Sometimes when there was enough well-being in the mind, I would see the habit start to engage, a thought of sexual desire start to form, and then I would see the mind's wisdom kick in, like "Oh, why do that? Why attach to that pleasant thought, when it only brings suffering, and I'm content already?" Seeing that renunciation was beautiful and encouraging (even if it didn't always last!). Eventually, I realized that actually refraining from looking at any other yogis whatsoever was very helpful, too.
Aversion and its many subcategories show up everywhere - self judgement, irritation at others, aversion at the tinnitus, aversion at other bodily discomforts, etc etc. What's helpful about these is at least the suffering is pretty obvious, (unlike sensual desire, sometimes), so that makes it a little easier to examine.
And Doubt, vacillating mind, is a big one for me too. I think with various doubts, I just eventually got tired enough of the struggle with "this or that" that I was able to trust "Whatever I'm doing is ok." It also was really helpful to bring doubts to my teachers and get some reflection and reassurance.
Does retreating become easier the longer you go? Or do you have to deal with more intense hindrances/emotions?
For me, some things about long retreat are easier (and easier as you go), and some are harder.
The great thing about long retreat is it takes some of the pressure off of, like, GETTING ALL THE MEDITATING DONE GO GO GO. Because you just can't sustain that kind of forcing energy! So what I found was the subtle ways in which I was forcing myself eventually made themselves known, and I had to find kinder ways to go forward, which ends up being more beneficial practice, in the end.
It starts to feel less like this rarified experience in a new place, and more like “Ah, I just live here, and this is what I do.” I became really familiar with all my routines, I knew all the rooms and all the food and all the forest paths and back country roads to walk on. So that kind of ordinariness, mixed with the retreat conditions that really let me see experience more clearly, was helpful.
I would say some hindrances did really calm down over time, and then that new layer of stillness and peace allowed for the deeper and more subtle hindrances to make themselves known. Sometimes it seems like the more deeply buried hindrances can come up with more intensity. I definitely went through cycles of both purification and ease.
I will say one specific benefit of long retreat is that after many weeks, my body became much more comfortable in sitting. Not perfectly comfortable all the time or anything, but in general there was more discomfort in the body in the first weeks, and even the first month or so, than in later parts of the retreat.
I mentioned how intense sexual desire was for me at times in a reply above this one, and I can actually say that I saw, over the course of weeks and months, more ease and less reactivity around that specific hindrance, as time went on. I never reached a state where I just didn't have any difficulties with sexual desire for days at a time though.
The long retreat definitely afforded me opportunity to go deeper into consciousness than a short retreat would have. At times it was almost reminiscent of plant medicine ceremonies I've been in, although what's nice about retreat is you're still sober, and you can always just get up and go for a walk outside or something if you want.
Does IMS seem to care about awakening/stream-entry?
It definitely got air time here and there in various questions and in some Dhamma talks. I wouldn't say they harped on it constantly, I think that would be counterproductive for most people. All kinds of elements of practice and the path came up in the Dhamma talks, and they all were in the service of helping our practice deepen, and ultimately lead to stream entry and awakening, yes.
Guy Armstrong mentioned in a talk once that, yes, people do attain stream entry on long retreats like this. He was one of my individual teachers, so I asked him once, how often did he think that happened? He said he thought in a typical long retreat at IMS or Spirit Rock, maybe 3 or so people would probably become stream enterers. And he said that usually it wasn't their first long retreat, but there's a momentum that builds with more experience.
Guy also said in a talk that it's not always easy to tell, either for the practitioner or for their teacher, if a certain meditative experience constituted stream entry, or some other stage of awakening, or not. He thought the most reliable indicator was, after some months have gone by, if your life seems qualitatively different in a meaningful way that aligns with the descriptions of the fetters weakening or dissolving, as described in the Pali canon.
How did you practice? Was there a theme to the retreat?
At some point or other I did just about every technique I'm familiar with! I did metta practice for about 3 weeks at one point. Other times I would stay with the breath, or attend to the whole body, or emotional sensations specifically in the body, or open up to all sense doors, open awareness, or even take the mind itself as an object of focus sometimes. I used noting a lot as a technique, although not all the time. I find counting breaths to be helpful as well.
Basically I just tried to maintain continuity of mindfulness to whatever degree conditions allowed, using whatever technique seemed or felt appropriate for the particular session. I had the opportunity to work with all kinds of afflictive states, get to know them better, sometimes being able to let go to whatever I was clinging to.
There wasn't exactly a theme to the retreat. People did many different kinds of practices. I think many did Mahasi-style noting a lot, but I know some folks did brahmavihara practice the whole time, or jhana practices, or awareness of awareness practices, or probably other things I don't know, too. They did offer the Mahasi instructions from the front of the room though, so that was kind of the default instruction.
Has your attitude to practice changed since coming home?
I’ve felt a greater sense that my practice is pervading the whole day in subtle ways, since coming home from retreat.
I perhaps have a greater sense of how valuable practice is, now that I've seen more stillness from being on retreat. I still might feel resistance to practice at home at times, but generally when I practice I'm pretty happy to have the opportunity to do so. It’s an even more reliable refuge than it used to be.
What feels like the most significant learning from the retreat?
Hard to pick what has been the most significant thing learned - in the end, it may be something like a deepening faith in practice, as faith (or the "willingness to do" as Carol Wilson put it) is the precursor to all progress. "The beginning of all good things," I believe I’ve heard the Buddha quoted as saying, about faith.
I also did an AMA on facebook also, and someone asked me there what I learned about myself. This is what I wrote:
I learned about kindness and how to relate to my mind with more kindness. I learned about suffering and how to let go (a little more than before) of the mental attitudes that lead to suffering. I learned about patience and the freedom that comes with not needing results right away. I learned more about some of my individual patterning around striving and comparing, around sexual desire, around shame and guilt, around anger, around self judgement and self doubt, around judgment of others, around embarrassment. I learned a lot about meditation practice itself - how different techniques might support me when I'm in various conditions. I learned a lot about the nature of attention, the nature of awareness, what it's like to experience a human mind and body with less distractions than usual. I learned about the joy and peace that comes from actions or thoughts based in generosity, goodwill, and clear seeing. I learned that I have both come a very long way and I have a very long way to go, and I'm right where I am, and that's ok.
“a deepening faith in practice”
This sounds significant & it also stands out to me because I feel that it reflects my own experience. Does that faith extend out from the practice, perhaps to any sources of authority? What do you have faith in?
The more I practice, I see the fruits of practice, and this gives me willingness to do yet more practice, which leads to yet more fruit, etc. Faith gets developed in many areas - faith in my own capacity to practice, faith in specific teachers, faith in specific definitions of meditation techniques - even faith in things like the idea that it's worth trying to keep turning towards reality rather than hide from suffering.
Regarding faith towards authority - the more I see that the Buddha's advice is good, the more willing I am to even consider some of his advice or ideas that I may have initially dismissed out of hand. That's not just taking his word for it and stopping there, it's rather being willing to examine and see for myself.
I also learned a distinction that is in the Buddhist tradition between “bright faith” and “verified faith.” Bright faith is when one comes in contact with a new idea and has a feeling like “Oh wow, there’s something special here, a new way of being I hadn’t considered.” And since that can be so powerful, almost like falling in love, people can cling to it and be unwilling to question it, and end up in a dogmatic place. But on the other hand, it can also lead to questioning and investigation, and then seeing for one’s self the value of the new idea, and that can then turn into verified faith. Both of them have this willingness-to-do quality, but the bright face is more speculative, and the verified faith is tried and true.
Now, 15 months since returning from my last long retreat, I am ready to step back into this beautiful form. It feels like my practice has matured even in the past year, since writing the text shared above from the reddit AMA.
At times I feel nervous to return to such intensity of practice for such a long time. 3 months was a kind of unfathomable length; there’s no point at which I felt I had a sense of the whole thing as one entity. I’m scared to face with the aversion around tinnitus. I can probably expect strong emotions of every variety to arise once again. There will be great peace, and at times there will also be real, honest suffering.
In some ways, there are skills to gain, seeds to plant, on this path. But as many have remarked, the spiritual path is more one of losing than of gaining. And this is because the freedom we seek seems to be being uncovered, rather than built.
All that covers the freedom is somehow perfect too - but for the sake of analogy, let’s imagine it as dirt. Going through the 3 month retreat at IMS was like getting power-washed. All the dirt that was ready to get shaken loose did so. I was able to re-enter the world with more freedom shining through. Over the past year, the new perspectives granted to me by this process have matured, have interfaced with relationships and obligations and worldly concerns, and they have informed my daily sitting practice. And now, I sense that I’m ready to let go of more. It’s like enough clay has softened into dirt that I’m ready to be power-washed again. We can imagine this entire metaphor in the positive as well — like seeds that were planted and grew and composted, and now soil that is once again fertile.
And it’s exciting! I have trust that the benefit of my last retreat would continue to deepen and serve me throughout my life even if I never got to a long retreat again — but the opportunity is here, to step into even more freedom!
I am eager to feed my daily practice (on and off the cushion) back into the retreat container. This year, I have been trying to honor what I was shown and given at IMS. I have been cultivating my faith in and practice of the good, the sincere, the honest, the kind, the free. The fruits of all that karma will be with me as I sit and walk all day. The patience, tenderness, and acceptance will resonate in the silence. It’s as though I get to speak with God again, and demonstrate my devotion, love, and care.
Being on extended meditation retreat is intense, but also gentle. It’s crazy, but also the most sane thing I’ve ever done. It’s perfectly ordinary, hour by hour, but it also has restructured my very perception of existence. It’s a process of learning and of unlearning. It brings me into contact with the radiant truth of being, and brings forth the most beautiful qualities of my heart.
See you on the other side!