Gems from a meditation retreat
Apparently I'm allowed to enjoy meditation (and then some)
Something self-related goes quieter, and recedes into the background; something beyond-self comes to the fore. There is a kind of turning outwards, a kind of openness; and also, a kind of presence, a being in the world. And that world, or some part of it, comes forward as it always has been—except, often, strangely new, and shining with meaning.
- Joe Carlsmith, On Attunement
Last week I went on a 7-day silent meditation retreat.
I went on this retreat to get closer to my life. That’s sort of how I see meditation: the secular quest to learn how to pay intimate attention to one’s life; to wake up from one’s own daydreams; to make peace with oneself and the world, over and over again.
I’ve glimpsed beauty in that quest before. Through meditation and related endeavors, I’ve felt forms of stillness, ease, and compassion I never knew I could feel. Those feelings whisper “don’t forget me.”
Yet, being human, I often forget those feelings. I forget how good it feels to genuinely be at peace with myself and genuinely wish others to be happy. Platitudes that once came to burn with significance after some meditation and contemplation/existential angst—the stuff about only having one life; about how we’re all in this world together; about the fullness of the present moment—flicker and fade into dusty embers.
I wanted to rekindle those fires. And strange as it may sound, sitting on a meditation cushion, in silence, for a long time, is the best (legal) way I know how.
I can’t do the whole retreat justice, so, after a short note on the practicalities, I focus on my most precious takeaways (‘gems’).
The practicalities
The retreat was at Gaia House, a meditation center in the UK. Gaia House was enchanting. The inside reminded me of my childhood Montessori classroom—furnished with care—and the outside gardens were rich with birds, benches, and walking paths in the woods. The surrounding rolling green hills and sheep pastures were just what my American mind wished of the UK countryside.
There were about 30-40 people on the retreat, of all ages and backgrounds. We could talk for the first few hours of the retreat and the last half day, but the rest was silent.1
The retreat was instructed by three teachers. If I’m honest, I was skeptical of them at first, on guard for new age-y or religious teachings. But I quickly grew fond of each. Maybe we didn’t agree on some metaphysics, but it didn’t matter. These teachers had spent decades learning about the nature of the mind, primarily via their own first-person experience, and it showed in their warmth, tenderness, and conceptual clarity.
Here’s what a typical day looked like.
On two of the retreat days we also had a ‘Practice Group’ meeting. These meetings offered everyone in a small group (~7) a chance to share how their retreat was going. A teacher was there to offer advice, if it was asked for.
Gems
We have some choice in how we see the world
The title and theme of the retreat was “Finding More Liberating and Compassionate Ways of Looking.” I didn’t know what that meant when I signed up, but I came to love it.
Here’s how the teachers explained ‘ways of looking’ practice.
We see the world and ourselves in many different ways. Even when the world around us is objectively the same as it is on other days, we can see our situation very differently. Consider grocery trips on the way home from work. Some days we can see this grocery trip as soul-crushing; the long line is yet another hurdle in our busy lives and the old checkout lady is a witch. Yet other days we can see that grocery trip as an act of kindness to our future selves, as a testament to civilizational progress, or as a humorous ritual shared by millions.2
Are any of these ways of looking objectively ‘right’? When we see the world as out to get us on a bad day, that way of looking feels ‘right.’ We tend to imbue these habitual ways of looking with a sense that ‘yes, this is how the world is and this is who I am.’ But if we can see the same objective reality so differently, is our habitual way of looking really ‘right’? What could make a way of looking ‘right’? Rather than just privileging the ways of looking that are easiest to slip into, the teachers proposed an alternative: what if we privileged ways of looking that made us nice to ourselves and others?
Some ways of looking allow us to feel more freedom and compassion than others, so let’s cultivate those. Seeing the grocery store attendants and customers as fellow humans—each with their own challenges and aspirations—allows us to tune into more kindness and less self-concern than seeing them as inconveniences. This way of looking also isn’t ‘right’ in some grand normative way, but it seems like a nicer default lens.
Of course, we can’t always choose how we look. Sometimes our mood, energy levels, and cultural conditioning get the best of us. But sometimes we can. On days where we’re well-resourced, a single prompt or reframing can radically change our experience. And on any day, we can gradually change how we look over time through practice.
That’s what this retreat was about: practice. I was at the retreat, to quote one of the teachers, to “nourish beautiful qualities of heart and mind.”
The complementary paths of cultivation and insight
The teachers sketched a distinction that I found helpful: Roughly speaking, there are two complementary yet distinct paths which we can choose to practice: the path of cultivation and the path of insight.
Along the path of cultivation, we endeavor to nourish beautiful qualities by spending more time in them. We become more compassionate by being compassionate—in the moment, over and over again. When we approach a narrow hallway at the same time as a fellow retreat attendee, smile and invite them to go first; When we feel the sunlight on your face, take a second to give thanks, and wish the same experience upon others; When we meditate, think of people who we love dearly and bask in the feeling of genuinely wishing them well. By doing this, we resculpt our minds’ habitual grooves to be more like a mind that feels compassion, often and intensely.
Along the path of insight, we endeavor to nourish beautiful qualities by recognizing truths about the nature of mind. We try to feel these truths, not intellectualize them. I know that every sensation is impermanent, at an intellectual level. But my relationship to my experience can drastically change when I feel that this experience, like all experiences, will pass—that’s the liberating part of the ‘Finding more liberating and compassionate ways of looking’.
Aside from impermanence, the teachers guided participants to recognize two other insights in this retreat: the tendency of our minds to seek lasting satisfaction in perceptions yet never be satisfied, and the tendency of our minds to construct a self and a narrator around our experience that we imagine to be permanent.3
. . .
When I sat down to meditate, I found it helpful to ask myself whether I would practice cultivation or insight. The two paths are intertwined, though. Even if I oriented towards insight practices, for example, I found it helpful to spend the first 10 minutes of a sitting cultivating more sensitivity and compassion.
I’m allowed to enjoy meditation
The teachers offered many different practices in the retreat, alongside the classic ‘observe your breath’:
Along the path of cultivation, they offered practices like visualizing someone for whom it’s easy to feel love for; putting our hand on our hearts as a gesture of tenderness towards ourselves; and imagining loving-kindness flowing from the ground, through you, and into the world with every exhalation.
Along the parth of insight, they offered practices like noticing the impermanence of single sensations involved in breathing; noticing the impermanence of the entire space of awareness; and listening to sounds while recognizing that there doesn’t need to be a listener who does anything.
Had there not been some advice on how to choose between practices, I would’ve been disoriented during long unguided meditations. Thankfully, there was: choose the practice that resonated; choose the practices that open up enjoyable states.
The idea of choosing how to meditate based on how much I enjoyed that type of meditation was subtly radical. I, like perhaps many meditators, see a complicated relationship between meditation and enjoyment. Enjoyment feels closely linked to craving, and I thought I was supposed to resist craving?
The teachers helped resolve this tension. Rather than viewing enjoyment as the goal, they framed enjoyment as the symptom of meditation that was going somewhere. As we calm the mind and tune into our present experience, we can find a surprising amount of tenderness and ease already present in awareness itself. Those are qualities to rest in, not resist. (I actually found it helpful to lean into enjoyment, more on this later).
Permission to enjoy became a welcome antidote to harsh self-discipline vibes I sometimes impose on my practice. I’ve been using Sam Harris’ Waking Up app for the past 6 years (highly recommend), and I’ve implicitly used it as if there’s some ‘right’ type of meditation I should be doing. When there’s a meditation I don’t enjoy—like Sam’s daily meditations—I mentally tag it as ‘too advanced for me’ or grit my teeth and do it. Similarly, I've gritted my teeth through some concentration practice, like those taught in S.N. Goenka retreats. The Gaia House teachers didn’t support any teeth gritting. They encouraged qualities of playfulness and lightness.
To paraphrase one of my teachers, “you cannot remove harshness from your experience by being harsh on yourself.”
As was often the case though, the teachers offered their advice on enjoying meditation with a caveat. When choosing what way to practice, try not to bounce around too much. Cultivate some resilience to whimsical ebbs and flows of interest. To borrow a parable from S.N. Goenka, ‘if you want to strike gold, don’t dig many shallow holes—dig a few deep ones.’
Finding ‘moves’ that resonate
The idea that open-hearted enjoyment was a sort of measuring stick for how my practice was going empowered me. I knew when I felt enjoyable qualities of ease and tenderness. I was the dependent variable.
A dance began. What moves allowed me to feel more compassion and ease? What moves dissolved barriers and contraction I was holding?
I remember a few ‘moves’ that worked particularly well for me: worshiping the bunny, ‘can I try less?’, and ‘enjoy it.’
Worshiping the bunny
I saw a bunny on the third day of the retreat and it blessed the rest of my retreat. I was sitting on the front lawn, eating dinner, in the orange glow of a sunset, when I saw THE BUNNY. All the compassion and gentleness I had been cultivating for the last days came gushing out, radiating towards this bunny. It was so easy to love. It sat there, licking its front paws and stroking its ears, pausing, perking up, relaxing, nibbling. All the retreat attendees on the front lawn watched it, and I suspected they were doing the same thing I was: genuinely wishing it well.
For the rest of the retreat, bringing to mind this bunny and its fanclub became a way to open myself up to loving-kindness. The move felt silly, but whatever. There’s no ‘wrong’ way of inviting in compassion.
‘Can I try less?’
On the third day, in my first small group conversation with a teacher, I mentioned how I was often lost in thought. (It’s funny I brought this up as a problem because it has to be the most universal retreat experience). The teacher responded that getting lost in thought can, unintuitively, be a symptom of trying too much, not just insufficient resolve to actually meditate.
I came to recognize that I was indeed trying too much. By exerting some active effort to meditate, I was getting my mind worked up and obscuring the delicate qualities of ease, patience, and surrender that would help my practice deepen.
To coursecorrect, I played with a prompt: “Can I try less right now?” When I asked myself that question, I could feel a letting go. Some contraction released. I could literally feel my shoulders relax and my jaw and face muscles soften.
Over and over again, conventional effort proved to be the wrong tool for the job. I came to appreciate how the teachers used those seemingly new age-y suggestions to ‘allow yourself to’ do something; to ‘invite yourself to’ or ‘tune into.’ They were nudging us away from treating our experience as something we had to control—from playing a game we would never win.
‘Enjoy it’
I mentioned enjoyment as a heuristic for how to meditate and as something I had to allow myself to feel. But, the heartfelt prompt ‘enjoy it’ also became a move of its own to deepen my practice. Like prompting myself “can I try less?”, the prompt ‘enjoy it’ unclogged some contraction. It opened up a feeling of ease and freedom. I think this is because enjoying the current moment helped replace my desire to control it.
The advice to lean into enjoyment came from my teacher on the fifth day of the retreat. I had come to the teacher with a problem. When I dropped into deeply absorbed states—states where I was mere witness to the constant stream of perceptions and thoughts rather than a narrator caught up in that stream—I got greedy. I knew I was close to even deeper experiences I hadn’t felt before, and I wanted those experiences. I urged myself to try different moves: ‘what if I now focus on sounds and a sense of spaciousness? Ah no, wait, shift attention to the silence between sounds. Damnit, I still haven’t lost my sense of self. Try breath sensations; breath now.’ At the same time that I frantically threw thoughts at my experience, I knew trying harder wasn’t the answer, and that franticness signaled a wrong turn. (But, you know, thoughts, hard to control).
The teacher advised that when I feel the meditation state deepen, just enjoy it. Bathe in it. That helped (although I could never fully let go of my desire to control or narrate my experience).
Radical self-forgiveness
Sometimes I beat myself up on the retreat. ‘You’re daydreaming, again?’ ‘If you had done more concentration practice you’d find this easy.’ ‘That person to your right is probably enlightened by now and you’re still lost in thought.’
These thoughts, like all thoughts, crave to be taken seriously. Thoughts want to be answered with more thoughts, especially when it’s the inner-critic talking. On the teachers advice, however, I strived to do the exact opposite of what my thoughts demanded: rather than intellectually scold myself, I tried to emotionally forgive myself.
The thoughts I had after recognizing I was daydreaming were something to be grateful for. They signaled I had recovered some meta-cognition—before that I was as distracted, I just didn’t know it. If I scolded myself, I would be choosing to board another train of thoughts, rather than welcoming an opportunity to watch the trains go by.
In the words of Adyashanti, a meditation teacher I’m fond of, “[The self critical thoughts you have after noticing your distraction] are not true; they’re not even useful.”
Worth the challenges
I worry I’ve made the retreat sound too rose-y and myself too enlightened. Retreats are challenging. There were times during this retreat (and my last retreat) where I wanted to scream that this whole thing is monk role-playing bullshit; where I asked myself what the hell I’m doing here; and where I really really wanted a hug.
I’m lucky too. Some people in my small group had to deal with serious trauma in their life that resurfaced on this retreat. Facing that seems far more daunting than anything I faced. But from what I heard at the end of the retreat, they too had found the retreat healing. We had all committed ourselves to practice, and I think most of us were glad we did, even if some parts were hard.
I set out on this retreat to re-kindle some recognitions and convictions that had turned into dusty embers. I’m not some radically better person now—the week after the retreat has been filled with familiar judgment, frustration, and anxiety. I also didn’t have an acute experience of profound enlightenment. But I reignited my conviction in some precious, fragile beliefs—beliefs about wanting to pay intimate attention to my life, to exercise some agency over how I see the world, and to recognize other conscious beings as not-so-separate from me and deeply worthy of compassion.
I’m enormously grateful to Gaia House, for offering me this space to get closer to my life.
btw, Gaia House didn’t pay me to write this or anything like that.
Except for the practice group meetings, mentioned below.
As I sat listening to the teachers introduce ways of looking practice, I couldn’t stop thinking about David Foster Wallace’s ‘This is Water’ commencement speech. It’s a personal favorite, and the inspiration for the grocery store example. Here’s a quote:
“Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
In Pali, the language of early Buddhist texts, these three insights or "Three Marks of Existence" are known as anicca (impermanence), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), and anatta (non-self).
I liked the emphasis on enjoying meditation and self-forgiveness. I think I don't especially enjoy meditation, nor particularly dislike it, and the lack of movingness of my experience of it makes me think I am doing it poorly, but yes perhaps aiming/letting myself enjoy it more is a good move.
If you don't like Sam's daily meditations what part/s of Waking Up do you prefer? Adyashanti I assume, but maybe others.
Wonderfully well written! I really resonate with the "can I try less?" move you mentioned. I've been trying to incorporate it more in my practice as of late, trying to cultivate a gentle curiosity rather than bring my problem-solving-mind. Looking forward to reading more of your posts!