Category Archives: Religion / Spirituality

Day two of a ten-day silent meditation retreat, and my mind was a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. Thoughts exploding with obsessions and cravings and aversions. Inner monologues chattering away unabated. Each bright flash capturing flickers of my attention. So much for the serene state I’d imagined achieving by now. As I sat there, legs cramping and back aching, a sobering thought crept in: after all these years of practice, was this really the best I could do?

Over the years, six silent retreats adding up to about 60 days of silence. Hundreds of hours of individual meditation practice. A small library of books I’d read. Countless evening dharma talks, evening sits, and episodic mini-retreats with dharma friends.

And what did I have to show for it? Was I really that much of a better person? Was my attention and peripheral awareness so refined that I could actually be more in control of what I think, free of clinging and greed and delusion? If I could not, on a retreat with physical seclusion and perfect silence, achieve an above-average level of quiet in the mind…what hope is there for me in the real world?

These are no small questions. Our minds are all we have. I believe training it is of the utmost importance, as Sam Harris points out: “Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.”

So I felt discouraged, reflecting on my progress, as I entered the meditation hall for the Dharma talk that Sunday night on retreat.

The senior teacher Kamala Masters opened her talk with these words: “Good evening. Tonight I want to talk about faith. And this faith is about trusting our potential for transformation, our potential to purify our hearts and minds.”

In the Vipassana meditation context, “faith” is not about faith in a God or deity or any particular teacher. “Blind faith” is explicitly discouraged; “verified faith” is espoused. It’s about faith in yourself and the instructions of the practice.

Masters went on to quote a Tibetan teacher: “Spiritual awakening is one humiliation after the other.” Faith is what allows you to survive the humiliations.

Near the end of her talk, Masters paused, looked at us all, scanned the room, and then said softly — just above a whisper: “I know you have wholesome qualities of heart inside of you” — qualities that can be cultivated. The feeling of her belief in me and in all of us — traveled from my head to my heart. As we sat in silence for a few minutes afterwards, eyes closed, I felt a surge of emotion.

Being Proud of Being Aware

In most domains of life I’m self-motivated and fairly unmoved by words of positive reinforcement relative to average person. The circle of people whose words rev my engine has shrunk over the years.

But it turns out that in the domain of meditation and spirituality, I need it more. I needed Kamala Masters’ talk on faith that night.

And because of her encouragement, I was able to take a step back — in my mind — and evaluate my progress a bit more charitably.

There was one thing in particular I should have been proud of during those first couple days of struggle: I was aware. I knew that I wasn’t concentrated at repeated intervals during my sits. That, itself, requires skill — to catch yourself in endless loops of mind, be it on the cushion or walking around off the cushion. The average person isn’t actually aware of the extent of their daydreaming. Their unconscious is running the show and they’re mere puppets in a puppet show.

Beginning meditators will report that their mind wandered 2 or 3 times the course of a 20 minute sit. Advanced meditators will report their mind wandered 10 times in a 20 minute sit — because they’re aware.

These moments of awareness are glimpses of freedom; they are moments of personal agency because you can exercise choice about what to do and think next.

The next couple days of retreat, rather than self-criticize, I gave myself credit for noticing. My mind was fairly active during sitting and walking meditation but I commended myself when I noticed the gyrations. I gave myself extra credit when I also noted the feeling tone (pleasant/unpleasant/neutral) of the gross and subtle sensations.

Joseph Goldstein — who co-taught the retreat — made the point that we’re deeply conditioned to equate “pleasant” with good and “unpleasant” with bad. But that’s mistaken. The measure of a sit isn’t about how pleasant it was but by how mindful you were while meditating. If you are mindful of the mental chaos — even if mind wasn’t very relaxed or balanced — then it was a good sit. (Can you imagine how powerful it would be if we dissociated “pleasant” from “good”?)

Under this framing, I had a few good sits in a row, and my momentum began to turn.

Oh, the Stories We Tell

A few days in, we were assigned to small groups. Each group met with a teacher for an hour. It was a rare break from the silence because each person is expected to speak. My group consisted of some highly experienced meditators — mostly folks in their 60’s and 70’s who’ve spent a lifetime on the path.

One of the guys in my group was named Robert. I noticed him earlier in the retreat. In the main hall, during Q&R (“question and response”) after one of the instructional sits on metta, Robert prefaced his comment on the microphone by saying, “I teach metta.” I found that an amusing and unnecessary detail to share in front of everyone in the meditation hall — clearly he was a student on the retreat, not a teacher, and announcing that he teaches metta did not serve the purpose of his question.

Anyway, in the small group, Robert prefaced his comment to the teacher with a bit more biographical detail: “I usually do month-long or 6 week retreats, so I’m still wrestling with the fact that this is only a 10 day… I’m experiencing first jhana and it’s no big deal [a deep state of concentration usually inaccessible to beginners]…I usually just meet Guy Armstrong [a famous dharma teacher at Spirit Rock] one-on-one, I’ve been doing so for 10 years, and I don’t usually join group interviews so this is really uncomfortable for me.”

His tone was even and reflective, and not braggy; yet, I couldn’t help feel my resentment toward him mounting.

My mind, ever the efficient storyteller, immediately went to work:

• Story: Robert thinks he’s better than us.
• Evidence: He name-dropped a famous teacher and bragged about doing longer retreats.
• Conclusion: What a prick.

For days, as I saw him walk the grounds, this narrative played on repeat in my head. Robert, the meditation snob. Robert, the humble-bragger. Robert, the obstacle to my own spiritual progress.

Lying in bed one sleepless night, another possibility dawned on me. What if Robert was simply… being Robert? No superiority complex. Just a guy sharing his experience, genuinely struggling with a shorter retreat and different teachers.

The real story? I was feeling insecure in the face of someone with more experience and potentially greater wisdom. My ego, threatened by Robert’s apparent progress, had constructed an entire narrative to protect itself.

This micro-drama was a perfect microcosm of how our minds operate in daily life. We’re constantly spinning yarns about the people around us, rarely pausing to question our own narration. We react, react, react.

The beauty of mindfulness — of remembering to recognize the present moment’s experience? It gives us the power to yell “cut!” in the middle of these mental movies. As Joseph Goldstein said, “We begin to cut through the stories we tell ourselves about experience, living less in thoughts about things and increasingly in the direct experience of the moment.”

In that moment of awareness, lying in my uncomfortable retreat bed, I experienced a tiny awakening. The Robert in my head dissolved, replaced by curiosity about the actual human being I’d barely interacted with.

This is the premise of mindfulness.

And, while this perspective is not unique to Buddhist meditation practice, I’m fairly persuaded that taking in the idea of mindfulness as mere knowledge — from a therapist, or in a book — is quite different than internalizing it as experientially gained wisdom. Which is why they call it a mindfulness practice.

Thoughts are like mini-dictators distracting us from the inevitability of unwanted experiences

What you think about becomes the inclination of the mind. The chattering mind of subtle thoughts — that non-stop string of words that make up your inner monologue — shape what you believe in and how you move through the world. Crucially, the impact of this influence goes largely unnoticed by us, even though we’re the ones thinking the thoughts. In this way thoughts are like mini dictators.

Buddhist meditation instruction urges you not to identify with your thoughts. They’re not you. They’re not permanent. You may not even believe them.

Clouds have no roots and no home. Similarly, thoughts arise due to causes and conditions, and then pass away.

This idea, which I had heard before, landed for me on this retreat, and got extended further: One thing the chattering mind does is it distracts us. It obscures the reality of dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness, or the inevitability of unwanted experiences. Everything becomes otherwise. We’re less equipped to deal with life as it actually is when we engage in endless daydreaming and delusion.

Years ago, a teacher once told me a Buddhist meditation practice prepares you for the worst day of your life. The worst day of my life hasn’t happened yet. But bad days happen. Distracting yourself from them makes them worse.

Deep concentration can arise when you don’t force it

Over the years of my practice, I’ve enjoyed occasional peak concentration experiences.

Moments of deep concentration is like happening upon a sudden clearing in a dense forest. You’ve been pushing through the underbrush of thoughts and distractions, and then sometimes unexpectedly, you step into a serene glade. The mental chatter falls away, and you’re left with a profound sense of stillness and clarity.

I can instantly call to mind the memory of the time at Spirit Rock Meditation Center when I went into the downstairs yoga room, late at night, sat in a chair, and began counting my breaths. I stopped counting in a kind of blissful awareness that I could count to 50 or I could count to 1000 — I could go to infinity — because the breaths didn’t matter and perfect stillness enveloped me and I could barely notice my heart beating and everything was so quiet and my mind was an endless blue sky stretching on foreeeever.

The most concentrated I got this year happened at an unexpected time — though I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because teachers always tell you to sit with no expectation. Trying to force a particular experience is the surest way to ensure it never happens. This time, I had just gotten out of an interview with a teacher who, in response to my reporting on my experience, suggested I stay on the breath a bit longer before moving to broader body awareness.

I went back to my dorm room, instead of the meditation hall, and sat quietly, not expecting much, given the distraction of the interview session. In the rare moments you talk (to a teacher) on a silent retreat, your energy equilibrium kind of gets out of whack. It takes time to settle back into the silence. But within a couple minutes of sitting in my room, I found myself in a deeply concentrated state. I sat for a full 45 minutes on my bench in my room: still, aware, beautiful.

The lunch hour arrived. I got up from the bench and put on my shoes and walked slowly, ever so slowly, from my dorm building to the dining hall. I got food in the chow line and sat in the quiet dining hall, everyone looking at their own plate of food. I noticed the colors of the food in a way I usually don’t. The vegetable oil spread over the zucchini was shiny. The string beans simmered with a deep forest green radiance. My attention noticed and lingered on the micro glimmers of the salad dressing oil.

After lunch, I wandered over to an outdoor bench in a meadow near the food hall and continued to meditate on a bench. I wasn’t in my proper posture position, but I just sat there with my eyes closed and felt pretty connected to everything. It was a blissful and non-ordinary state of being.

Metta: Cultivating an inner garden of kindness

Metta (“loving-kindness”) meditation practice, it is said, inclines the heart and mind for kindness — to yourself, to others in your life, to all beings everywhere.

Basic mindfulness practice facilitates compassion almost indirectly — when you’re present, you’re able to have the awareness to draw upon your noblest values more than whatever base emotion might be the reactive impulse. But metta practice explicitly seeks to create grooves of kindness in your mind.

At peak form, as practiced by masters, metta is non-verbal and manifests as vibrating flow of loving-kindness in your heart, mind, and body. “Everything in your awareness turns into a white light,” a teacher told me, reflecting on her 20 years of serious metta practice.

Metta is frequently introduced as a side practice at Vipassana retreats, and frankly it has never really worked for me. The phrases you’re supposed to verbalize in your mind and then direct to other people — “May you be happy” “May you be free of suffering” etc. — are dry for me. I do not overflow with lovingkindness vibrations when repeating the phrases. Nor do I achieve deep concentration through metta, which many do, because I seem to lose interest in repeating mantras. So on Vipassana retreats I often ditch the instructions given and just sit in open awareness or stay concentrated on a single object of mindfulness. Perhaps not coincidentally, I can’t say I overflow with loving kindness in the real world, in my day to day life.

I confessed this to a teacher on the retreat and to an expert friend after I got home, and I was given three tips. First, I should note metta when it’s alive in real life off the cushion — i.e. not-forced, just naturally arising feelings of loving-kindness — and try to harness and replicate that energy when practicing metta meditation formally.

Second, even if the phrases are dry in the moment when doing the standard meditation practice, you’re planting seeds of intention in the mindstream that may come to bear IRL when you encounter that person later. For example, if you send metta to a difficult person now in a mediation sit, when you see him in actuality months later, you might be inclined to kindness based on the seed previously planted.

Third, when doing metta meditation, try multiple ways to arouse the feeling of goodwill. Don’t just repeat the stock phrases. Think of anything that promotes good vibes: memories, plans, funny movies, etc.

Here’s an analogy that resonates with me based on the above advice. Metta practice is like tending to a kindness garden. When you repeat phrases like “May you be happy” or “May you be free from suffering,” you’re planting seeds of kindness in the soil of your consciousness. Each time you practice metta, you’re watering these seeds, giving them the attention they need to grow. Gardens don’t bloom overnight; it takes time.

Directing metta to loved ones could be like nurturing hardy perennials that bloom easily. For difficult people, you might be cultivating thorny roses – challenging, but potentially beautiful.

As you tend to this garden regularly, you begin to change too. You become more attuned to the needs of each plant (person), more patient with the process, and more appreciative of the beauty in all forms of growth.

Eventually, your inner garden of kindness becomes so lush and vibrant that it naturally starts to affect the world around you. The fragrance of your cultivated kindness wafts out, influencing your interactions and relationships.

That’s the theory. I’ll try it.

Enlightenment = Lighten Up

Joseph Goldstein, the venerable 80-year-old meditation teacher, chuckles as he recalls watching a video of his younger self. There he is in the video, a serious 20-something, expounding on the intricacies of Buddhist philosophy at Naropa University with all the gravity of a Supreme Court Justice.

“Oh my God, I was so serious,” Joseph says at our retreat, his eyes twinkling with a mix of amusement and embarrassment. It was a funny moment: One of the West’s most respected meditation teachers essentially facepalming at his own youthful earnestness.

These days, Joseph emphasizes a key element of “enlightenment” is lightening up. Being less serious. Joking more. It’s as if after decades of rigorous practice, he’s discovered that the path to profound wisdom is paved with… laughter.

I can’t help but see parallels in myself. A criticism of a version of myself from 20 years ago is that every thought was A Very Important Idea. Every opinion was A Hill To Die On. The intensity was for real.

Fast forward to today, and I find myself a bit more playful. More willing to hold my views lightly, to see the humor in life’s absurdities, and less likely to arrive at strong moral judgments about people one way or the other. Don’t get me wrong – I’m definitely more intense than your average joe. But there’s an increasing lightness.

So I found provocative the framing that to wake up, we need to lighten up. That enlightenment might look less like a stern monk on a mountaintop and more like a wise old friend with laugh lines around their eyes.

On the meditation instructions themselves

My previous three retreats were a tad more specialized in terms of the practice emphasis: open choiceless awareness; concentration; and a mindfulness-of consciousness retreat. This year’s was a “classic” generalist Vipassana retreat, the standard instructions.

On this retreat, I drew upon both the offered instructions and other instructions I’ve received over the years. At the start of each sit, I began by counting my breaths until 10. This instruction comes from the wonderful book The Mind Illuminated. Counting breaths is a useful way to figure out how settled you are. (In regular life, I usually can get to 2 or 3 breaths before my wind wanders.) Then, I would scan my face for sensations. Pulsing, heat, cold, itching, vibrating. Etc. Then I would scan the rest of my body for sensations. These instructions come from the Goenka teachings, although I don’t do a systematic body scan head to toe — instead, I opportunistically notice sensation wherever on the body it appears.

It was a privilege to have Joseph Goldstein teaching at this year’s retreat. I’ve been a longtime listener, first time caller. Few people are as responsible as he for bringing Buddhism to the west. The clarity of his thought was exceptional. At 80 years old, he still radiates energy and genuine passion for all things dharma. Joseph says that training the mind is like training a puppy. You tell a puppy to sit, and a moment later it’s jumping up again licking your face. With gentle persistence and training, eventually, the puppy does learn to sit and stay. “Our minds are very much like this puppy.”

A few tactical instructions this year that resonated as I tried to train the puppy:

• Call to mind the phrase “This is a body” at the beginning of a sit to create a wider container for initial breath focus. Later in the sit, ask yourself, “What’s happening now?”
• When noticing thoughts, notice when you’re in the thought pattern. At the beginning, middle, or end of the thought? Can you notice it pass away?
• Celebrate wakefulness! Commend yourself when you’re awake to the present and you notice you’re lost in the thought. Celebrate the fact that you noticed.
• Discern between wholesome thoughts and unwholesome thoughts (greed, anger, or delusion). Discern between pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral sensations.
• “Sadness is being felt” (versus “I feel sad”) is a way of describing sensations that doesn’t center the false notion of a singular self.
• “Be simple and easy about things” — advice Joseph heard thousands of times from his teachers, speaking to the importance of taking a relaxed attitude to the whole endeavor.
• Notice the “about to” moment — the moment just before you move your body or say something. If you can notice the about to moment, you can be more intentional about your words and actions.

Physically posture-wise, I’ve learned a lot (the hard way) about how I can sit comfortably as tall man living in a short person’s world. One new innovation this year: I brought a nursing pillow! To rest my hands on and support my shoulders. After dozens of hours of meditation, your shoulders get sore from your arms hanging low and still. A nursing pillow that wraps around your waist is a perfect resting device for your arms and shoulders.

For more tactical instructions and reflections, book excerpts, etc. on meditation, you can see my full comprehensive compendium of all my posts on the topic.

Being a student in a long lineage is powerful

On Theravada Buddhist retreats you’re frequently reminded that you’re following instructions the Buddha laid out personally 2,600 years ago. You hear a lot of quotes from the suttas — the original discourses of the Buddha. You hear live from teachers who heard the instructions from teachers of their own, who in turn had teachers (“my grand teacher” you’ll hear referenced from present day teachers), and so on and so forth, over millennia.

Via this great lineage of instruction, the material finds its way to you, the present day yogi. And you then embark upon a practice that millions (billions?) of people have undertaken to see for themselves if the instructions resonate.

The whole enterprise feels more credible because you’re situated in this vast tradition; when you remember the longevity and durability of the ideas being taught.

And the gratitude that flows from teachers, to their teachers, is inspiring. In no other sector or setting have I heard so many sentences begin, “My teacher so-and-so once told me…” In the Gratitude Hut at Spirit Rock, which is an actual physical hut on the property, photos of the teachers and grandteachers to the senior teachers in the west line the walls. It’s pretty touching.

It would be cool to see everyone’s intellectual lineage — yours and mine, everyone’s — as we all have had teachers (be they formal or informal) who’ve shaped the way we think and act today.

By the way, the senior teachers in the west — who brought this style of meditation to America — will soon be dead.  This will change the dynamic of the modern dharma community. Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg can talk about their personal experiences meditating with Goenka, Ajhan Shah, Sayadaw U Pandita, Munindra, etc. The younger teachers today talk about learning from Joseph, Jack, and Sharon.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing — sometimes the modern re-interpretation can shape the dharma to better resonate for folks in the west. Sometimes grand-students can be better teachers than themselves than their grand-teachers. Age doesn’t equal teaching quality. Still, quoting a meditation master in the east with whom you studied first hand will always sound more credible than quoting an American in the west.

Sleep can be elusive but that’s okay

You’d think you’d sleep well on meditation retreats — all that silence. But it’s not often the case for me. Trying to sleep after a day of intense meditation is like operating a dam. All day, you’ve been carefully controlling the flow of thoughts. But when you lie down to rest, it’s as if the floodgates suddenly open, and all the pent-up thoughts rush through at once, making sleep elusive.

One night on this retreat, I was up for hours. Tossing and turning. Giving myself a scalp massage; massaging my eyes. At one point, I rolled out of bed, grabbed my notebook, and had my Jerry Maguire moment of middle-of-the-night scribbles, only about half of which were decipherable to me later. An example of a profound 2am scribble? “The breath is my friend.” (LOL, but also — it’s true?)

One important piece of knowledge I learned on previous retreats is that poor sleep will happen and you can still have good meditation days the next day. More broadly, I don’t need to be so anxious about sleeping poorly on nights where this happens. I can be lucid amidst sleep deprivation. Believing this, knowing this, has been a powerful re-frame, and actually has helped me sleep better in general. Because anticipating the derelict effects of sleep deprivation as you try to fall asleep is one of the inhibitors to falling asleep in the first place.

Other random nuggets

• In many ways I’m healthier than a decade ago. Work out more, eat better, etc. But I have more gray hair everywhere now, nonetheless. One night on retreat I was looking at the mirror and noticed more gray in my beard and it kind of took me aback. Time spares no one.
• In prior retreat recap posts, I have described my yogi jobs on retreat. Pot washing. Bathroom cleaning. Sweeping. And I reflected that the year I out-witted the system to get an “easy” job was actually a lot less satisfying than the grimier work. This time, during registration, I was asked if I’d scrub toilets, and I said yes — I’d be delighted. And I did enjoy my bathroom duties. I was on my knees scrubbing toilets and floors, feeling useful, serving my fellow retreatants.
• WAIT acronym: “Why Am I Talking?” Speaking with intentionality. Share this acronym with someone who talks too much.
• In my small group there was an 82 year old who proclaimed to the teacher his purpose for being there: “I just want to be a better person.” Inspiring to hear people so late in life still so committed to personal betterment.

• Equanimity is different from being calm. It’s about being impartial to unpleasant or pleasant experiences. That’s a crucial distinction. And it does raise in my mind a question about the risk of intense meditation dulling the extreme positive emotions.
• In the mornings on retreat, prior to sitting, I did various breathwork exercises. I did the Wim Hof 10 minute breathing along with some other techniques. I found them effective for settling the mind before meditation.
• At one point during Q&R in the main hall a person asked about mindful eating and said she was practicing gratitude after sitting down to every being that helped the plate of food arrive in front of her. She said that she begins her gratitude practice by starting with thanking the dinosaurs who helped create the fossil fuels that set in motion modern civilization. Lol.
• I generally think retreats at places like Spirit Rock with live, Western teachers is a better entry point for beginners than the Goenka 10 day Vipassana retreats that most people attend. But I must say, Goenka’s retreat style has some things going for it. The mandatory 10 day minimum. Splitting up genders to deal with the inevitable sexual fantasies that emerge. Sitting only, no walking. And so forth. If you’re ready to jump in the deep end of the pool, Goenka’s retreat format is compelling. It certainly worked for me.

The Goal vs. The Path

This most recent retreat was full of inspiration and insight. And I know that it won’t last. As a teacher told us at the end of the retreat, as you walk to the car in the parking lot afterwards, you can feel your concentration fade away. Nooooooo!

I’m still ruminating on the pace of my overall progress. Have I made progress toward greater insight over these years?

On each retreat I’ve been on, I usually have a mini-crisis of faith along the way, as the sacrifice (in terms of hours spent) is so extreme, the atmosphere so austere, the payoff so ephemeral sometimes.

I do know a lot more intellectually about Buddhism. I have conceptual understandings and bits and pieces of experiential ones.

But I’m not sure I’m in the time zone of even the most generous fragments of a definition of “enlightened.” And the battery charge from a retreat in terms of off-cushion habits doesn’t last more than 6-8 months, in my experience. Hmm.

In any case, my meditation battery is recharged for now. I’ve meditated most days since coming back online. The main thing I want to talk to people about these days is meditation. Going forward, I’m interested in the following explorations:

• Metta practice and alternative approaches from the traditional mantra advice.
• A deeper understanding of not-self. I’d like to turn the attention back on the observer a bit more and more deeply understand this.
• Non-Vipassana meditation instructions that emphasize non-dualism (per the above point).

Preserving an inner life, and realizing how far one still has to go

Two months cumulatively in silence has allowed me to dive into the most private corners of my consciousness. In a world that values constant connection and radical transparency, these retreats have been a countercultural act of preservation. They’ve allowed me to cultivate a rich inner life, a collection of experiences and insights that belong to me alone. It’s not about secrecy or withholding; rather, it’s about nurturing a private garden of thought and sensation that feeds my social and more public life in subtle but — I hope — beneficial ways.

Training the mind is work, sometimes painfully difficult work. The work of transforming your inner environment to be one of peace and beauty; of harmonizing your inner values with your outer actions; of evolving your rhetorical instincts from reactive to responsive.

I aspire to these end states, to be clear; I still feel like a long way from their fully actualized peaks. When you observe the moment-to-moment contents of consciousness, you confront all the imperfections of your present state. The irony is that the more you engage in this work, the more you realize how far you have to go. And life is short, so there’s no time like the present to begin again.

From an email from the wonderful meditation teacher Phillip Moffitt, who has led two long silent retreats I’ve attended (and wrote about here), on his new year’s teaching:

The theme that I’m going to be exploring this year is the importance of starting where you are and then proceeding with a commitment to starting over again as many times as it takes. I view both of these character traits as both central to Theravada Buddhism and to practical empowerment on the street of life with all of its difficulties.

Meditation teacher James Baraz played this video of Ram Dass‘s words at a recent dharma talk, and it’s beautifully done: Sit Around the Fire. When you’re in the right mood, watch it on full screen for 8 minutes. Truth.

N.B. I’ve organized all my blog posts on meditation retreats and Buddhist into this one long page. If you’re new, you can read that page for more context on my journey to date, my summary of the Buddhist argument, and my experiences at other long retreats. This post is a dispatch from my latest retreat.

The Rollercoaster of Retreat / Life

A few days into my fifth silent Buddhist meditation retreat in April 2022, I walked out of my dorm building and ambled down toward the meditation hall to make the 4pm guided sit. I noticed a half dozen people standing at the bottom of the path, staring intently out at the hills behind me. In the next moment, I smelled smoke, and turned around to face the scene that had captivated the other meditators: smoke billowing over the hills and down into the Spirit Rock campus.

Was it a wildfire? Were we on the midst of being evacuated? My first thought: “Yes! The retreat may be cancelled and I can go home early.” Despite all my time meditating on silent retreats, they’re still hard for me. Hard first and foremost physically: sitting on the ground for so many hours does a number on your knees, back, and shoulders. And of course it’s hard mentally: the endless stretch of time with no company but your own out-of-control mind.

Nobody made any evacuation announcements, so I walked into the meditation hall for the regularly scheduled sit, half-wondering if fire trucks were going to interrupt the whole retreat at any moment. Amazingly, despite the distractions, I actually had a really good sit. My mind was still. Clear. Luminous. Present. My body felt settled. I was aware. I stayed in the hall after the bell had rung and others had left to bask in the unexpected stillness. The quiet in my mind.

When I got up to leave, I thought to myself: “Oh man, this is amazing. I need more days here. I hope there’s no evacuation.”

And there would not be an evacuation. It turned out a building structure nearby had caught fire and was quickly extinguished.

The emotional gyrations of that one afternoon embody what happens in your mind over all 10 days within the uniquely barren and silent retreat container: “This is amazing!” Followed by: “No this is terrible, get me out of here.” On retreat, the task is to achieve some level of equanimity during these ups and downs, which of course is also a task in life: learning to ride the rollercoaster of highs and lows with a smile, learning to dance with the craziness of life, learning to find some modicum of inner peace in a world which is so impermanent.

The Instructions: Be Aware of Consciousness

In previous posts I outlined the basic instruction of Vipassana practice.

The fundamental instruction of this particular retreat, which was geared towards experienced practitioners, was to maintain “Mindfulness of Consciousness.” The retreat drew upon Theravada Buddhist frameworks in general and Vipassana meditation instruction specifically for the first few days. Be aware of an object of concentration (e.g. the breath) in order to collect and unify the mind. On Day 3, the teachers instructed us to expand our practice into the broader field of awareness. Then become aware of the fact that you’re aware, and then further become aware of the fact that you’re aware of awareness.

It was very meta. And very inward looking. The idea is that by turning your mind inwards, you can become mindful of consciousness itself: its steady, mirror-like qualities. Consciousness is like clear, clean water — there is no flavor. In a big sky meditation, teacher Sally Armstrong instructed: “The mind is clear and empty, like a limitless sky. To see if this is so, look within your own mind.”

“Look within your own mind” is the quintessential Buddhist meditation instruction: you are told time and time again to observe and experience stuff first hand in order to come to conclusions. Do not accept claims on blind faith. This retreat sought to cultivate in us a subtle awareness of the steady capacity of knowing — to look within your own mind not just to notice the coming and going of thoughts and sensations, but to to observe the steadiness of consciousness itself.

One way to get at the nebulous feeling of consciousness was to feel “spaciousness.” We were frequently told to imagine endless space around us. To cultivate in your mind a sense of an endless horizon. Sally Armstrong quoted this line once: “She opened the clenched fist of her mind and fell into the midst of everything.” To fall into the midst of…everything. To feel spaciousness physically can enable you, the teaching suggested, to relax the intensity of the gaze in your own mind and take in a wider frame. If you soften your focus a bit, you’re able to relax into a state of being mindful of consciousness.

In one sense, this awareness of consciousness skill is supposed to be an “advanced” skill. You work on it only after several days of more straightforward concentration practice. And it’s a skill being taught on a retreat open only to those who had been on at least a couple retreats before (and about half the group of 90 people had been on more like 10+ silent retreats). And it’s a practice that, apparently, leads one to better knowledge of emptiness, a concept that’s definitely not in the beginner Buddhism cannon.

On the other hand, the instruction for being aware of awareness is so simple that many students think they are missing something. For example, we were told to ask ourselves: “Am I aware?” You answer yes, you rest in that awareness until that awareness breaks…and that’s it. Or, you visualize your palm facing outwards, and then the palm turning inwards toward your body. And that triggers your mind to turn inward and notice awareness. Or, you visualize a vast open sky, as your consciousness, and you notice anything hitting your sense doors or any thoughts as objects arising and falling, like fireworks, in the sky you have visualized in your mind.

I’m not sure how well I “got it” but once I sort of relinquished the idea that it was an especially difficult skill and instead took comfort in the straightforwardness of any of these instructions — I think I rested in awareness somewhat successfully. Guy Armstrong’s dharma talks in particular on emptiness were quite stimulating, but I can’t say I fully and deeply saw the connection between emptiness and awareness of consciousness.

The Pleasure of Perfect Stillness

It’s hard to convey the nature of the pleasure you feel when you’re perfectly still physically and mentally.

Sometimes, when sitting, I felt like my body was a 300 year old majestic mountain, anchored into the core of the earth and standing tall, not flinching in the wind. Perfectly solid yet with no clenched muscles.

Mentally, the majority of the time on retreat, the mind is as out of control as normal. But there are moments. Sometimes a sequence of moments that when strung together add up to an evenness of mind. Moments where whatever is happening is happening, and you’re in that moment exactly. No ambient noise or thoughts. Just the breath. Or just a specific sound or ache or a feeling.

As on previous retreats, this time, during mental stillness, I sometimes generated a visualization in my mind of my mind as so sharp, so in my control, that by merely directing the mind and my attention — as sharp as a razor — toward a glass window in my mind’s eye, the glass would shatter.

During one of Phillip Moffitt’s evening dharma talks, we were all sitting quietly and listening. It wasn’t formal meditation, but we were sitting silently in a meditation hall. There was occasional shifting of positions or sighs or coughs or what have you, as folks sat back after a long day to take in the final lecture. Then Phillip said, “Let’s all experience the next moment. Everyone just be still for this moment and then another moment.” Heeding the request, everyone in the hall ever so slightly erected their posture, froze their bodies, closed their eyes, and awoke to the present moment.

There was total stillness in the hall. It was quiet before. But now the silence was absolute and stretched perfectly taut from one end of the room to the other. After a few more moments, Phillip said, “Did you just feel that? Did you feel that wave of stillness roll through the room? I find that so nourishing.”

And I did. Stillness did sweep the room all at once, like fog rolling through the early evening of a San Francisco night, wetly kissing all its residents at once. I had never thought of stillness as nourishing before.

Deep Memories About One Place

I have now spent 30 days and 30 nights on the Spirit Rock campus. 30 exceptionally personal, intimate, intense days when time passed slowly and every little thing in the physical space around me came under microscopic presence.

The first thing you notice is the stunning natural beauty: wild turkeys, soaring hawks, salamanders, and assorted critters sharing the golden rolling hills.

Despite the vastness of the overall campus, your day to day experience mostly plays out on a finite number of paths and benches and walking paths in and around the dorm rooms, meditation hall, and dining hall.

You begin to develop associations with particular paths and benches. For example, on one of the trails, there’s a bench next to a differently shaped tree. Four years ago, during a concentration retreat, I sat on the bench and contemplated death. Really contemplated the inevitability of it. It was a powerful moment for me then. This time around I came upon that tree and that bench, having forgotten about my previous experience there, and it whipped me back in time.

Circular Habits of Mind

When you spend hours observing your mind, you notice patterns. One pattern I noticed on this retreat is that if I’m in a bad mood or if my mind gets trapped on a negative pattern, the mind inclines toward other topics for which I have built-up negativity. It bounces around from grievance to grievance, pet peeve to pet peeve, injustice to injustice. One after the other.

And if the agitated, negatively-inclined mind happens to hit upon a topic or person for whom I usually have warm feelings? The warmth is nowhere to be found, and I invent something negative.

How long do these cycles last normally? Well, in normal life, not very long. In part that’s because you have distractions. Turn to your phone. Turn on a show. Go attend a meeting in which you have to focus and put on a certain face — and push the negative thought cycle out of mind, at least temporarily.

In normal life, the most problematic time for these negative patterns to take over is at night, when trying to fall asleep. Or for me, it’s usually the middle of the night. I awaken at 2am and can’t fall back to asleep.

On retreat, when an agitated mind emerges, there are no distractions. Nothing to run towards. You have to sit there and take it. It’s the hardest part about a retreat, for me. People think it’s the not-talking-to-people that’s hard. Kind of — but not because you just miss talking so much. What you miss is the ability to distract yourself with socializing. Being alone with your thoughts is the hardest.

When you have nothing to do but observe the mental pattern, you realize its power. You wonder how often those thought patterns lurk in the subconscious, conspiring almost in secret to drag us down.

The ultimate goal of Vipassana practice, as once framed by Steve Armstrong, is to uproot these negative habits of mind by noticing them each time they emerge. And in the noticing, you become not so lost in them, and eventually, they become so weakened, they disappear altogether.

Speaking of patterns, it wasn’t all negative. Indeed, throughout any given day, most of my thoughts are neutral or positive, as I’m generally a reasonably happy person. The one spiky positive pattern I observed on retreat: my dog Oreo! It was interesting how prominently my dog Oreo featured in any thoughts that involved joy and happiness. I mean, he is the best boy, so perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising?

Softening the Gaze with Relaxed Effort

To meditate you need to be relaxed. It’s not uncommon for beginner or advanced meditators to forget this basic instruction. Meditators often find themselves grasping too hard to “achieve” something — effortfully trying to concentrate their mind, track the breath, track other objects, make something happen in their mind. Meditation masters will say that the more you try to make something happen, the tighter you grasp, the less likely you are to have the outcome you desire. Instead: Just sit. Just breathe. Soften your gaze. Don’t try to make anything happen.

You hear similar advice in sports. In sports, you hear coaches tell players to ease up, to back off, to loosen their grip on the bat, to “let the game come to them,” to loosen up, to remember to have fun. There’s something about applying too much effort that backfires.

It’s not advice you hear as much in the realm of business or management advice and I wonder why. It seems relevant. Sometimes we can become too wrapped up in a goal, in a project, in an analysis. We can be trying so hard to solve something, to fix something, to dissect a relationship, that our very focus on the outcome inhibits our ability to succeed.

Easier said than done, of course. To relax our focus, to soften our gaze, to let some of our emotional energy around the issue arise and then pass away. Less grasping, more fluidity. It’s counterintuitive to think that if we think less about something, if we try less hard, somehow we could realize a better outcome. I wrote about this in a previous post about a retreat: “receptive effort.”

Simple Living

One of my fears anytime I upgrade my standard of living is: Will I ever be able to go back? If I become accustomed to three star hotels, can I stay again at a two star hotel? If I upgrade to a nice SUV car, can I ever again be comfortable driving a small compact?

You learn on retreat that you can, in fact, live simply. My little dorm room was perfectly adequate. The suitcase of clothes was plenty. I loved my little in-room sink for brushing my teeth, and the shared bathroom was no big deal. How or why do I sometimes think I need 5 different sweatshirts to choose from when just one will do?

Joseph Goldstein: “We feel pleasant unworldly feelings on retreat, in the renunciation of our familiar comforts. We begin to enjoy the beauty of simplicity… When I go on retreat, it is so clear that everything I need is right in my small room, and when I think of my regular life, it seems so cluttered by comparison.”

An Easy Yogi Job

When you first arrive for a retreat at Spirit Rock, you get assigned a chore on campus — your “work meditation” or “yogi job.” The chores range from cleaning dishes in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, scrubbing toilets, taking out trash bins, vacuuming rooms, and so on.

My first time at Spirit Rock I got assigned pot cleaning duty in the kitchen. I had never worked in a commercial kitchen before, so it was an experience. I washed hundreds of dishes and pots and pans and equipment every day after lunch. As I wrote about in my post about that retreat, a fellow pot cleaner wrote me a nice card and handed it to me on the last day: “Ben, it’s been a pleasure doing pot scrubbing meditation with you. I hope your time here has brought much benefit and renewed your love for practice. Many blessings to you.”

My second retreat there I got assigned bathroom cleaning duty in our dorm room. Every day for an hour I scrubbed toilets and cleaned the shower area.

Both were “hard” jobs, as far as yogi jobs go.

This time, after checking in, the staffer scanned his sheet for the available jobs: “Let’s see, it’s mostly bathrooms and kitchen duty at this point…well, it looks like there’s courtyard sweeping available too. Which would you like?”

I tried to keep a poker face. Courtyard sweeping — moving the leaves off the grounds right in front of the meditation hall, as photographed above — I could do at any time during the day, solo. It was an ideal gig, I thought. So much easier than the other gigs. But I didn’t want to seem too greedy, too self-interested when signing in for… a Buddhist meditation retreat. “Ok, well let’s see,” I told the volunteer, in an even, wannabe reflective tone, “Previous retreats I did toilet scrubbing and dish cleaning. Maybe I’ll try courtyard sweeping this time.” So it was assigned, and I was thrilled, and also somewhat amused with myself for how I felt the need to posture to the volunteer check-in coordinator about my previous good deeds.

Then something interesting happened. I found the courtyard sweeping job a dud — way less satisfying than my two previous jobs. While indeed easy and simple, it did not feel useful. There were precious few leafs to actually sweep off the courtyard. Scrubbing toilets involved grime, but I knew how much I appreciated a clean toilet in the dorm, and it felt satisfying to keep the bathroom clean for my housemates.

No Sleep, No Problem

I don’t do great on low sleep. That’s a truth, borne from experience, that I have never questioned. But I wonder if that’s a story that’s overly hardened in my head?

My most disastrous day of the retreat was about midway through. I didn’t sleep well the night before. I was up for hours in the middle of the night, including from 12am midnight until 4:50am, with my mind racing in every which direction (ironic, I know, being on a retreat). By that time, I knew I’d be woken again by the 5:30am wake up bell. I then did something I’ve never done before: I got out of bed and took a Tylenol PM at 4:50am. I sometimes take TyP when I travel or if I’ve had several rough nights of sleep, just to lock in a solid night’s sleep when I feel like I need it. But I always take it earlier in the evening because if it enters my body too late it can cause drowsiness the next morning. Taking it at 4:50am seemed crazy but I was desperate for sleep and concerned about losing a whole day of a retreat to sleep-deprivation. It knocked me out for about 90 mins. I awoke at 8am.

I missed the early morning sit and breakfast. I threw on my sweatpants and hustled down to the dining hall to grab a couple soft boiled eggs that were left in the fridge. I felt tired, groggy, and grumpy. I rolled into the meditation hall at 8:30am for the guided sit.

Then something funny happened. I had a series of excellent sits and walks. I felt tired, a bit, but not too bad. I felt concentrated. I felt aware. And my day kind of unfolded rather nicely.

It made me wonder: Do I stress too much about getting a bad night of sleep? Being stressed about getting enough sleep can inhibit your ability to get sleep, for sure — there’s a weird feedback loop. So it’d be nice if the reality of my experience is that I can manage on low sleep, at least if it’s not too many days in a row.

What Would a Virtue Bootcamp Look Like?

If I had access to a facility as beautiful as Spirit Rock, and had 10 days of my life blocked off, what other worthy spiritual or intellectual adventures could one construct? In other words, could you craft something around developing virtue and wisdom, via lectures and discussions and some meditation and some reading, where the experts or books come from a range of spiritual and intellectual traditions? What would a “virtue bootcamp” look like?

Intentions vs. Goals

A teacher once said on this retreat: “Trust your intention when you signed up for the retreat.” It made me think: What was my intention with the retreat?

I don’t really think about “intentions” but in re-reading some of Phillips’ writings, I found the distinctions below, as described in his book, helpful:

Living from your intentions is quite different from living from your goals. It is not oriented toward achieving a future outcome. Instead it is a path of practice that is focused on how you are being in the present moment. Your attention is on the ever-present now in the constantly changing flow of life. You set your intentions by understanding what matters most to you and making a commitment to align your worldly actions with your inner values.

Cultivating intention does not mean you abandon goals. You continue to use them, but they exist within a larger context of meaning that offers the possibility of peace beyond the fluctuations caused by pain and pleasure, gain and loss. Goals help you find your place in the world and make you an effective person. But being grounded in intention is what provides integrity and unity in your life.

Students often ask me whether values and intentions are the same thing. In my view, values come from understanding what is important to you and are part of your personal philosophy, whereas intentions are the application of your values in daily life. You have an array of values that extends into all aspects of your life. For example, you may value loyalty in friendship, earning an honest living, individual privacy, self-understanding, living a certain lifestyle, etc. You also have a core set of intentions that are based on your values and with which you want to meet every moment of your life, such as integrity, compassion, not causing harm to others, being accountable, and so forth. So if one of your values is self-understanding, it is through your intentions of practicing integrity and accountability that you manifest the wisdom that you gain from self-understanding.

In Buddhist psychology, your path to well-being begins with understanding the values you want to live by (your intentions) and the direction you want your life to go in (your goals).

Your values and intentions form the foundation of your inner priorities. So in setting inner priorities, you are specifying how you wish to feel inside no matter what you are doing. Begin by naming your values and intentions and reflecting on what brings you peace of mind and joy. Acknowledging that you are a work in progress, set reasonable priorities that are truly possible for you to live out in daily life. As best you’re able, rank your inner priorities on a scale of 1–3, with 1 being your most important priorities and so forth.

“I Feel the Sincerity”

Throughout the course of a retreat you have an opportunity to meet with teachers 1:1 a couple times. In my first meeting, I shared a question that I won’t repeat here.

The teacher, after talking for a bit, paused and looked me dead in the eye: “I feel the sincerity of your question.”

No one has ever said that to me before. That they feel my sincerity. For some reason that line is still ringing in my memory as I look back on the retreat.

The Best Version of Yourself

A silent meditation retreat isn’t real life. Not even close. The physical setting and conditions are hard to replicate in normal life and indeed, even establishing a regular meditation practice at home after retreat is not made dramatically easier just because you’ve been on retreat.

So what’s the lasting benefit of a retreat? A significant part of it, for me, is that you see the best version of yourself on retreat. You will likely be as peaceful, as compassionate, as level headed on a silent meditation retreat as you will be anytime else in your life. You’re not like this all the time on the retreat. Just for moments.

In the same way that mindfulness practice leads to moments of genuine freedom, in the Buddhist sense of that word, going on retreat leads to moments where you catch a glimpse of what your best self looks like. What the best version of your mind looks like: clear, stable, collected, radiant.

It’s a benchmark against which to compare other moments. It’s a true north. It’s a version of yourself that you know is possible.

N.B. I’ve organized all my blog posts on meditation retreats and Buddhist into this one long page. If you’re new, you can read that page for more context on my journey to date, my summary of the Buddhist argument, and my experiences at other long retreats.