Go on a retreat

What is sitting a weekthun like?—There’s what the daily experience is like from the outer perspective and then there’s what is it like from the inner perspective.

I’m not sure how to tell you what it was like from the inner perspective because I think I’m still not sure myself. I am not transformed. But I feel like I was a green plant and now I’m a green plant with a (very) little flower bud. Or I’ve become aware of the flower bud. I feel like if I tend it carefully, it might just develop into a little flower. But in any case, I realize that the green plant that I am/was always had the potential to create a flower, and that’s something new and interesting.

As for the day-to-day, have you ever had one of those days where at the end of it you crawl into bed and reflect back and think, “my goodness, was that this morning? It seems like it’s been a week.” Every day was one of those days; incredibly rich, full, time-compressing days, and yet most of what happened was sitting in a big room with 140 other people.

A typical day:

6 a.m. – wake up
7 a.m. – morning chants and chi gung
8 a.m. – oryoki breakfast
9 a.m. – sitting meditation, walking meditation, interspersed yoga/stretching
12:30 p.m. – oryoki lunch
1:30 p.m. – study/rota break
3 p.m. – sitting meditation / dharma talk
5 p.m. – tea break
5:30 p.m. – protector chants, sitting meditation, dharma talk
7:00 p.m. – oryoki dinner
8:00 p.m. – sitting/walking meditation, dharma talk
ending somewhere in the 9:30 – 10 range
10:30 curfew

Oryoki is a highly structured Zen monastic style of eating. We were told it meant “just enough.” The idea is that it is a study in giving/receiving without expectation. The participants of the dathun/weekthun were divided into thirds with one third serving three meals, then eating six meals. Serving is a study in giving, eating is a study in gratitude and receiving. The whole thing from beginning to end has rules. The rules of what fingers you use to touch what cloths, how the bowls are laid out, what can go in each bowl (grain only in the Buddha bowl), what bowl you use the spoon in (Buddha bowl only; 2nd bowl chopsticks…), the order you eat in, you can’t mix food in bowls no matter how much you want to swipe up soup with the bread. There’s chanting, bowing, when you clean stuff… etc.

It could be really chillingly frightening if you were an uptight sort of person, and that’s really part of the point. It is a mindfulness study of food, gratitude, but also process and form. A lot of people don’t like Oryoki, but I loved it. I think I said something like, “I love complex processes explained gently.” It reminded me of learning adult card games from my grandmother when I was a child. They seemed impossibly complicated and then you played a few gentle hands with some rules suspended and after awhile, you started really getting the hang of it.

Rota is short for “Work Rotation” and everyone had a job to do. The jobs were assigned and you were told what you’d be doing when you got there. I have a romantic notion about working in a kitchen at a Buddhist retreat so I was hoping to pull some kind of kitchen duty. I did not. I was a partner in cleaning the Sacred Studies Hall Men’s Room. The importance of Rota was stressed by a general rule: “Rota comes first.” If you had Rota duty, you went. Efforts were made to let people be around for when the Sakyong spoke and such things.

Personally, though they did not say this, I think the brilliance of Rota is not that you learn to be mindful in work, or accept your work, or do the whole Zen courtyard sweeping gig. To me, the brilliance of Rota was how it changed the way you used everything when you were not working. For me it started with the bathrooms. When I used one, I knew that twice a day, somebody just like me was going to have to clean it up. If I missed the trash can, I picked up my towel. I used my towel to wipe the water from the faucet handle. I compressed the trash if it was getting full. Then this awareness moved on to other places. I knew my fellow participants would be cleaning floors, prepping food, tea, and it made me take more responsibility for my own wake.

Sitting. I hardly know what to say about this part. You know, I think I won’t say anything here quite yet.

The Container. In Shambhala we talk about “The Container” which is basically the environment in which you practice. Going on retreat, having people there organizing things, having security, having Dharma teachers, Meditation Instructors and having all the other participants creates an ecosystem in which you can practice. The Shambhala container is an unbelievably kind, gentle and supportive one. Some containers force you to confront yourself through irritation, imposing strange rules/forms on you and eventually you face yourself through resistance to the forms. I think maybe for some people they found oryoki and rota enough of an irritant to face themselves this way. I did not. I found the whole container to be soft and pliable and forgiving. I bumped up against the forms, mostly against Functional Talking and Noble Silence and a few times I felt ashamed that somebody had to tell me to keep my voice down, but this is not the same as standing in front of a Zen Monastery for three days to be granted admission. If the complexity and formalism of oryoki were presented someplace more rigid, I would have had a very hard time with it. It isn’t about staying comfortable, though, don’t get me wrong. We have to confront our fears and embarrassments and realize that they are not mortal dangers. We have to have obstacles to make progress. But I think if the container is one where you feel ashamed and punished all the time, you will simply shut down. It is a balancing act and for me, the Shambhala container is a very good balance.

Ok, I’ll say one thing about sitting, but you’ll think it’s weird. The bond that is created between people just by meditating in the same room is really hard for me to explain. This is a metaphor now, so keep that in mind. It is as if you create an energy field around you and it extends from your body out in a large fuzzy bubble and when you generate a big field by meditating, and others around you are doing the same thing, your energy gets mixed, or synchronized, or somehow bonds. You feel like you know people with whom you’ve exchanged only nods. You feel desperately sad when you have to leave after only a week.

I was extremely sad to leave the dathun after only a week and would have loved to stay the full month. I was extremely happy to leave the dathun and see my family and have Christmas in Denver. I am grateful for the week. I will not hesitate when time, stamina and work allow me to go to a full dathun, but I’m in no great rush either. It’ll be there when the time is right.

See y’all (yous guys) in the New Year.

I took this class this weekend:

The nine stages of shamatha (“peaceful abiding”) are a map of the meditative process. We will explore how the stability, vividness, and strength of the mind can be brought to the fore and utilized in our everyday life through these progressive stages. Peaceful-abiding meditation, or shamatha, is the foundation of the practitioner’s path in both Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions.

I felt a little bad with family in town for the week, but it was taught by a senior teacher who is only here a couple months of the year and this class is not offered very often. It was Sat/Sun from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m or so and was very similar to the shambhala classes in format. Except that we were in “functional silence”, which means we could not speak unless it was of practical necessity (in kitchen duty, “please pass me the knife”, etc). There was also work rotation (rota) like clean up duty and kitchen prep… etc.

Aside from that, there were two 1-2 hour Dharma talks a day, a reading period, and a lot of sitting/walking meditaion. It was actually the perfect class for me at this moment because I have made some progress in meditation and I’ve been at a point where I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Reading about the stages, the obstacles, the antidotes, the experience and being able to ask specific questions to verify where I am and what I should do was really invaluable.

My next (and close of this goal) retreat starts Dec 15th. It’s a week-long retreat at Shambhala Mountain Center. It is going to be really challenging to go from early morning to late evening every day for a week, but I’m incredibly excited about it.

Here’s a completely abbreviated summary:

The main material at level II dealt with how our ego creates a cocoon of habitual patterns (thoughts, feelings, actions) in order to attempt to create a comfortable and controllable world. The instructor explored how this doesn’t really work and presented meditation techniques for observing this process and ways to change it without simply adding “struggle” to the same patterns. Since the instructor is a medical doctor, he spent a fair amount of time presenting materials on how the brain/body works and how the material is supported by neuroscience and biology.

It was fascinating.

Again, there was a lot of sitting meditation, a lot of walking meditation, broken up by lecture, discussion, discussion groups, one-on-one interviews with senior teachers and lunch/tea/evening socials with the other students. It is a very full, very intense weekend.

Once again, I found it to be an incredible experience, I found it to be a very good confirmation that I’m headed the right direction, I learned a few very practical and useful techniques to incorporate into my practice and I felt deeply connected to this Sangha. The more I do at Shambhala, the more I am grateful that I overcame my initial fear and kept going back.

On Sunday afternoon, I had to try very hard to not become preemptively sad that it was nearly over. I would gladly have gone back this morning for Level III, which isn’t until March. I may take Level II again in Jan or Feb, particularly if it is a different instructor to get a different perspective and b/c it is so fulfilling.

I was sad not to see a few more students from my Level I group, but it was very gratifying to see those that were there again and to meet some new people. There were about 24 students this time.

I’m going to leave this goal open till I do my week at the Shambhala Mountain Center.

I can only imagine the strangeness and pain of leaving a group after a week, month or three month retreat. It is hard to come back to “the real world” after weekends like this.

I completed Shambhala Level 1 training this last weekend. Shambhala Training is described as:

Shambhala Training is a series of contemplative workshops, suited for both beginning and experienced meditators. The simple and profound technique of mindfulness and awareness is the basis of a secular path of meditation, which can benefit people of any spiritual tradition and way of life. Shambhala Training is the study and practice of Shambhala warriorship—the tradition of human bravery and leadership. This path shows how to take the challenges of daily life in our modern society as opportunities for both contemplative practice and social action.

For level one, this translates as introductory teachings in the view of Shambhala (in the view, path, fruition sense, of which that is a teaching). This is about Shambhala as a symbol of enlightened society, the concept of basic goodness, the role that meditation plays in (re-)discovering that as humans we have basic goodness, that is what we get for being human, and what it means to bring this discovery into the world. Fundamentally, this is about meditating, specifically shamata meditation.

Shambhala is touted as “secular”, but it has very strong Buddhist leanings. It is in many ways a study in engaged Buddhism. It seems to me that it is a being-in-the-world Buddhism as opposed to a renunciant form. I am (about to be) a Buddhist, so this doesn’t bother me and maybe I’m looking for parallels and connections, but I’m really not sure how well somebody not at all interested in Buddhism would like this stuff. On the other hand, somebody from a forrest tradition or a monastic would be sort of confused by a lot of the in-the-world leanings of Shambhala, though that goes for the Shambhala Buddhism as well. They’re both in-the-world traditions.

Anyway.

There was a talk on Friday evening, and then class/sitting Saturday and Sunday 8:30 am to 6 pm. Each of Saturday and Sunday was about 6 hours of meditation, sitting interspersed with walking. There were breaks for lecture, discussion, teacher interviews, readings, lunch and tea throughout both days.

This was by far the most meditation I’ve ever done in 48 hours—and it was great. Utterly great.

It was amazing to be in a room of meditators for so long. Group sits are always great, but it was like a marathon experience for me, in the community and energy sense. And even though break times were in retrospect short, by the end of the weekend I felt like I knew and had a deep connection with almost all of the 30 or so people who where there. I would gladly have gone to level 2 on Monday, particularly if it could be with the same group of people. I seriously wanted to just give all of them my cellphone and tell them that I’m always there for them, whatever they need. I did give my number to a few people. I’ll give it to more if they show up to Level 2… which I am very much looking forward to.

This weekend was also the weekend before we launched a live client at work. It was a hard… well, really almost unworkable weekend to be away from work. Yet, I insisted that I was going and thankfully, the launch has gone well. Not perfectly, but launching new software is rarely totally smooth and none of the stuff we’ve faced this week would have been avoided by my working the weekend. In fact, it was sort of an experiment in not screwing with software to the hour before launch; that so rarely works out for the better.

The SMCLA is marvelous, the coordinators, teachers, volunteers—the Sangha is awesome. It was so well organized, and a super low bow to David Nichtern for the teachings, a teacher of the highest order.

As soon as I got back on Sunday, I signed up for a week-long retreat in the mountains for December.