Christine Skarda's Articles on Lion's Roar

In this Buddhadharma Forum, Guy Armstrong, Elizabeth Mattish-Namgyel, and Geoffrey Shugen Arnold explain what to expect from going on a long-term Buddhist retreat. Introduction by Christine Skarda. Sometimes when I tell people that I live in retreat, they raise their eyebrows in amazement—or is it perhaps disapproval? I seldom go on to say that I have been doing this for twenty years. What I am unable to share is how this form of spiritual practice has deeply enriched my life. In retreat, spiritual practice becomes one’s sole occupation. This contrasts sharply with life in the modern world, where religion has been relegated to the margins. Retreat affords us the “space” to create new forms of meaning by living in a radically different way. This is a great privilege as well as a great challenge. Retreat also provides the opportunity to engage in forms of practice that require sustained effort and relative isolation. Some meditative goals cannot be attained through part-time practice. I have found this to be especially true for the Vajrayana tradition, in which certain yogic practices require full-time application, but it is certainly also true for other traditions and forms of practice. My experience has shown that if I try to start and stop certain practices, or do something in addition to them, I suffer from severe physical and psychological ailments called wind disorders. There is a reason that these practices were traditionally done in isolated retreat: this is where they can be done successfully—and safely. Over the years, my views on retreat have changed. I’ve moved from viewing it as it is portrayed in the popular imagination to what I would call a more realistic view. At first I tried to live according to the models I found in accounts of great meditators of the past. It didn’t occur to me that they were highly edited accounts, sort of like the baseball highlights on the evening news. “Life in the cave” is not all home runs, nor is it accurately understood as a vacation from life. For those who engage in it, retreat is life itself. It is a way of living, replete with all of life’s ups and downs. Some of us do it all the time; others do it for a while and then put on “another hat.” If people are to have the opportunity to engage in this form of spiritual practice, it is critical that retreat continues as a living tradition. Retreat may always have been the occupation of a small minority of people, but unless the tradition is maintained, it will turn into a dead language. We need living role models; we need people to turn to for hands-on advice. In the following discussion, panelists explore the challenges and rewards of retreat practice and the steps that may be needed to keep this rich tradition alive. Buddhadharma: What is the value of doing a long retreat, dropping your usual day-to-day life altogether to deepen and intensify your practice? And by “long” we mean retreats devoted utterly to practice and silence that last at least a week or ten days, up to retreats that last years. Guy Armstrong: Long-term retreats have been really important in my life. What may be long to some may be short to others, but each person will define for themselves what retreat means in accordance with their own life circumstances. Retreats lasting from a month to three or more months have always been a key part of my practice. It’s important for the evolution of dharma in the West that we continue to make retreat opportunities available to people because it seems that’s where the deepest understandings of the Buddha tend to get realized. When people make that kind of commitment and put that much time into retreat, it permanently shifts something in their worldview. Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel: I’ve seen incredible transformations take place with people I’d known for a long time before they came into retreat at Samten Ling, our center in Colorado. It’s common to do one-hundred-day retreats here, and when they come out, I see noticeable shifts in their understanding and in how they are as human beings. For myself, I don’t think I really understood what practice was until I went into retreat. When you meditate, you get an incredible flood of thoughts and emotions and experiences. It can be quite intimidating. Retreat is so concentrated, it allows you to be with that mind longer, to really get to know it. In retreat, I started to understand my mind, to understand how to work with my experience. Above all, I learned how to find pleasure and enjoyment in my own mind. Geoffrey Shugen Arnold: What retreat means can vary widely—in terms of the container, what’s being asked of the student, the amount of guidance they’re getting, the challenges they’re encountering, how those are handled, and so forth. Retreat encompasses a wide spectrum of experience between traditions and even within a given tradition, but what first comes to mind for me is the Buddha speaking of going to a quiet and secluded place. That’s so important. Though retreat may often be discussed as an advanced practice, certain types of retreat are a helpful way to encounter the dharma in the beginning, when everything is so restless and agitated and we’re so easily hooked by things. Stepping away from that and into retreat helps us begin to genuinely encounter the dharma and get some sense of what practice actually is, to encounter our own mind in a way that’s a little bit more naked and transparent. As we continue, then, retreats become even more important because we’re able to practice more deeply, more effectively—so the retreat time is better utilized. The commitment we make is essential. In our sesshins, we ask people to make a very clear commitment to the length of that retreat, which means that no matter what, barring family emergencies, they’re going to stay there. Closing off the escape door has always seemed to me to be a vital aspect of retreat. It’s very easy to look for an escape, and commitment can be very hard to find or to draw upon within ourselves when we’re on our own. When we practice within a community, particularly under the guidance of a teacher, and we are pressed to follow through on our expressed intention, that leads to a deep engagement with the practice. Buddhadharma: In retreat, when you begin to relax, what you may have been suppressing in your daily life begins to bubble up to the surface and puts you in a position to process it. Can you get to that deep place without doing retreat? Guy Armstrong: I’ve seen a lot of people who feel they’ve had transformative experiences with meditation just from working on a daily basis. They report a real growth in self-acceptance, equanimity, spaciousness of mind, access to calm, and greater loving-kindness and compassion in their life. I do believe that’s true, but I would say there is another level of understanding and realization that comes from the silent retreat experience that isn’t available to most people in daily practice. Some extraordinary people may have the kind of depth of mind to get there quickly, like Dipa Ma. But even Dipa Ma was only enlightened in her first seven-day retreat. For most people, to get to a depth that we would call realization requires a longer retreat. Geoffrey Shugen Arnold: I would never say that any particular thing is absolutely required. The world is vast and human beings are as well, and all things are possible. For most people, though, stepping out of worldly life for a while is essential. The unceasing, moment-to-moment experience of practicing, of going deeper, and the intimate contact with one’s motivation—these are precious. Very often when people come in who are shaky or ambivalent about what their motivation is and what their practice is about, intensive retreat clarifies that. It helps them to come back into direct contact with what is important to them and why they began practicing in the first place. Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel: The closing of the escape hatch that Shugen was talking about is so important. You come to the point where you’re able to bear witness to experiences you would continually distract yourself from if you weren’t in retreat. There is no substitute for immersing yourself in that kind of intensity. Consistent daily practice is important and wonderful, but the deep silence of retreat takes practice to another level. Geoffrey Shugen Arnold: It’s interesting to compare what we mean when we refer to an intensive. Elizabeth would generally be talking about something longer than what we do. The sesshin is a unique form of intensive, though. It is completely in silence, but it is a group retreat that follows a unified schedule that includes a work period and also meetings with a teacher. They are generally a week long. Although, since we do them every month, people in residence at Zen Mountain Monastery would do a full-week sesshin every month. In our tradition, though, we don’t do the kind of lengthier group and solo retreats you see more often in Vajrayana and Vipassana communities. Buddhadharma: Clearly there is a distinction between doing a long solo retreat and a series of sesshins, but perhaps in the end it’s a distinction without that great a difference. Geoffrey Shugen Arnold: In the sesshin approach there is a kind of pulsing back and forth. You have a very demanding week of sitting within a very strict container. Then that releases a bit and people have to return to daily life, and then once again they return to sesshin. The moving back and forth can be quite awkward and troubling in the beginning. For me, it felt like everything would come apart after sesshin, but over time those boundaries begin to fall away and there’s continuity, a dissolution of the difference between retreat and not retreat. Buddhadharma: Retreat, then, is not about an escape from the world, because you know you have to go back. Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel: I find that common perception very humorous because retreat is the opposite of escape. It’s about no...

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