Month: August 2018

My First Retreat

Even for a brief period, say five minutes, meditation is difficult for a beginner. The first thing one notices is all the thoughts swirling around in the mind, not all of them pleasant. If the meditator makes an effort at placing the attention on the breath, frustration and self-criticism arise almost immediately. Pain in the body will inevitably follow, not only because of the classic seated meditation postures. As one teacher put it, “We could all be on BarcaLoungers and we’d still notice pain.” The longer the session, the more these things can plague us, until the timer goes off or we give up, whichever occurs first.

People can take two approaches: either build up their practice gradually, or jump in with both feet. It may be easier to get oneself on the cushion for a brief sit, but over the course of daily, frequent, and lengthy sits things will eventually start to settle down, and the meditator may experience a calm bordering on bliss. Gettting through the early stuff to what Kenneth Folk calls “escape velocity” is the key. It may be difficult to carve out the time to do this in daily life, especially when most people have jobs, families, and other obligations competing for their time and energy, and so for many people the solution will be to undertake a meditation retreat.

My first retreat was at a local, rural retreat center, where I went for a long weekend, Thursday evening to Sunday lunch. Retreat life is an opportunity to derail the preoccupations and assumptions of ordinary life with a view to focusing on practice. The type of retreat I attended was a structured retreat, with a daily schedule and rules for getting the most out it. I was enough of a rule-follower to obey the instructions to the letter. We arose early, began the day with an early sit, and then proceeded to breakfast. After breakfast there was a work period, followed by guided mediatation, led by the teacher. The rest of the morning and afternoon, broken by lunch and rest, consisted of alternated seated and walking practice.

Each day there was a group meeting, including about 12 people and the teacher. Each of us was allowed to ask a question or make a comment, after which the teacher would spend a few minutes giving remarks pertinent to what the retreatant had said. While there might be some give and take between the teacher and student, other group members were instructed to avoid responding, either verbally or through glances or body language. In the evening after supper there would be a dharma talk, with some time reserved for questions from the entire group. On the last day of the retreat the teacher left time for 10 to 15-minute individual meetings for whoever wished to sign up.

We observed Noble Silence from the ending of the introductory dharma talk until lunch on the final day. This meant that, apart from the scheduled meetings, there was no talking and very limited eye contact except for necessary communications (for example, at one retreat I left a message for the retreat director to ask people not to use the wood-burning fireplace because it was setting off my asthma). We were also discouraged from reading or even journaling, although there were some people who took notes during the dharma talks. The purpose of these directives was to minimize opportunities for distraction and turn attention inward.

I won’t mince words: it was damned difficult. My brain was like a squirrel in a cage a lot of the time; I waited all day for the group meeting, rehearsing endlessly what I would say, only to find that the opportunity for voicing any of these thoughts was next to nil. When I was sitting I waited for the chime to go off, at which point I’d be walking, waiting for the chime to go off. Music played in my head relentlessly, as well as imaginary conversations with people at home, or with the teacher. People I didn’t know drifted past me or sat next to me, and I’d surreptitiously glance at them, trying to get a sense of what kinds of people they were. I built up scenarios in my mind, developing responses of attraction or antipathy to them based on nothing at all.

On this particular retreat I practiced mindfulness of breathing, combined with awareness of the Five Hindrances: desire (I want to get up and have some lunch!), aversion (this pain in my back is killing me!), restlessness and worry (thinking, thinking, thinking), sloth and torpor (sleep), and skeptical doubt (why am I doing this?). I was aiming for a state called access concentration, where all of the hindrances finally settle and the mind is calm. Following access, there is a series of beautiful concentration states called jhanas that bring the mind more and more deeply into peace. Depending on the level of practice, a person can experience anywhere from light to extreme absorption.

My practice over the previous four months had been constant and focused enough that I had already experienced some of these things to a very modest degree. The retreat deepened the practice in spite of all the mind noise, and I was able to carry that momentum home with me afterward. Since that first retreat in the spring of 2011, going on retreat periodically has been a mainstay of my life, although retreat life continues to be a challenge: as the inner chatter and restlessness have diminished, other difficulties have arisen to take their place.

What makes retreat life difficult is the ego’s resistance to being set aside. In daily life, our ego reigns supreme, directing our activities, opinions, relationships, and self-image. On retreat, without its usual stage for strutting, the ego has a tantrum, played out entirely inside the mind. Underlying its agitation is the fundamental terror of annihilation and death. Even the beauty of the jhanas can’t quite compensate at first. It takes a long time even to access this terror, much less face it down.

 

 

I Get my Feet Wet

It’s hard to imagine that a woman of 57, which was my age when I began to meditate, would be in need of someone or something with ultimate authority to declare what is true and what is not, yet there I was. Daniel Ingram possessed superhuman authority as far as I was concerned. I attributed the same powers to Kenneth Folk, and to my local meditation teacher, who I assumed was as realized as the pragmatic dharma people. It thus caused me endless confusion and agitation to find them disagreeing on certain points, even more so when I found that Daniel’s online forum, the Dharma Overground, was in 2011 in the middle of a major dispute that split everyone into warring camps. Unfortunately, being a brawler myself, I jumped right in and called one poster a “groupie” for having an erotic dream about another teacher (she shot back that I was obviously sexually repressed). I finally flounced off in disgust and began posting on Kenneth Folk’s forum instead, only to find some of the same discussion going on over there.

Eventually everyone settled down and the dispute has now become about as relevant as a long-ago squabble among siblings. What I wanted at the time, though, was absolute assurance that the path I was on was right, and that there were obvious, discernible differences between the real deal and its fraudulent imitations. I also wanted the people in the know to be rock solid about everything. Over the years I have come to realize that all of us, authors and teachers included, are works in progress, engaged together in a learning process that is overwhelmingly social.

In the meantime, I began meditating, and posting about my sits. I began with concentration practice and stuck with it for about six months, until I turned to insight practice in June of 2011. These practices differ greatly in terms of their approach and effects. The aim of concentration is to focus on one object to the exclusion of anything else, in order to strengthen the mind and prepare it for insight. There are many possible objects that could work, but the main one is the breath. Some people focus on the sensations of the breath at the nostrils, while others follow the breath into the abdomen and out again. Focusing at the nostrils is the quickest route to becoming deeply concentrated, but because it places all of the energy in the head, the meditator can start feeling spaced-out, especially while on retreat.

Insight meditation is a different story. Its purpose is to break down the experience of the self in the world, and gain direct knowledge of the way the three characteristics permeate every single sensation. In Buddhist teaching there are six “sense doors”: the five that westerners recognize as sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, with the addition of thought. Thoughts are considered to be sensations just as are the flavor of chocolate or the sound of a bird. One form of insight practice involves focusing on any one of these senses, or on all of them, with a wide or a narrow focus. There is also something called vedana, translated as “feeling tone”, which can be pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. All sensations can be labeled as one of these three.

The three characteristics, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self, apply to every single sensation one experiences, a well as to one’s conception of the whole. For example, a momentary thought (“I forgot to buy bread!”) is impermanent (it arises in the mind and then disappears), unsatisfactory (it brings no lasting happiness), and not me (maybe “I” forgot the bread, but the thought arises unbidden and does not define me). The same might be true of a visual sensation, even one’s face in a mirror, which is in fact a picture of a face. It flickers in and out of awareness, doesn’t satisfy (even if it is beautiful; seeing one’s beautiful face gives only a momentary jolt of good feelings), and is not me. All of life is the same. One’s relationship, for example, is never permanent—even if it is long-lasting, the dynamics change from moment to moment. No one can gain complete, lasting satisfaction from clinging to another person, and no one can ever specify what the self that clings is in concrete terms.

This last insight is the hardest of all to swallow. We want to be sure of who we are, and of who the people in our lives are. That is why we label ourselves and others, and attribute to them qualities that are good, bad, or indifferent to us. When I was younger I became obsessed for a time with defining my “type,” according to the fashions of the times. Was I a romantic type? A classic type? And what clothes were best for my figure? What colors best complimented my skin and hair? Beyond the obvious goal of making myself as attractive as possible, I wanted to know who and what I was. The fascination with planning thoughts is another way of solidifying the self. If I can specify to the minute what I’ll be doing over the course of a day, I will know what I am. If I know my body chemistry, my ideal eating routines, my best times for going to bed at night and getting up in the morning, than I will know who I am.

Insight meditation dismantles the comfortable world we keep trying to build for ourselves, over and over again. When done skillfully with high concentration, it can be disorienting in the extreme. I know this is not a good selling point for doing such practice, but the truth is, most people arrive at a determination to do it only after everything else they’ve tried has failed.