Embark On The Most Rewarding And Illuminating Journey Of Your Life
Explore starting your own practice of intensive meditation in this book excerpt from “The Meditation Retreat Manual”
Photo©GalinaPeshkova/123rf
It is no exaggeration that the path of intensive meditation training may turn out to be the most illuminating and rewarding journey of your life. I hope you stick around long enough to see this for yourself because the reasons are not immediately apparent.
From the outside, it makes little sense why people go to a remote place to sit in silence hour after hour, for many days or even months in a row. It would be easy to conclude retreats are all about mystical mumbo jumbo or avoidance of life challenges. In fact, meditation is not a state of shutting down or doing nothing. Despite how static it might appear, meditation actually involves navigating a path of developmental changes. You could think of it as a complex journey to the heart of the human condition. At times exhilarating, at times painful, the journey is ultimately profoundly rewarding. And along the way there are fascinating landscapes, evolving perspectives, and an eventual destination of sorts.
The landmarks on this journey can be mind-blowing, mind-numbing, heavenly, disturbing, transformative, and more. But you must walk it for yourself. The discoveries cannot be explained in words that replicate the experience. If someone were to try, the uninitiated would link up those words with old familiar concepts and settle for an understanding that falls short. Meditation shows us precisely that which is obscured from our normal untrained view, so it must be experienced to become known.
Meditation leads to experiences more than we ever could have imagined.
If meditation only showed us conditions available in normal daily life, there would be little of interest in it. But with enough practice at what we call purifying the mind, one can arrive at states of peace, stillness, and release that have no comparison in one’s life prior to taking up meditation. These experiences can leave us breathless and astonished to discover there is so much more to be felt and known throughout this body-mind complex than we could have imagined. And eventually we may see the greatest of benefits unfold: the overflow of meditation learnings into our daily lives such that we begin to walk a different, more aware path. Again, this is why each of us must undergo the training in order for the fruits to be revealed and lived.
As you might guess, getting to grips with all that one can encounter in the world of meditation training is no walk in the park. And yet the greatest of hindrances we will face are the ingrained habits of mind that we ourselves bring to the task. I’m reminded of the old Zen trope of the teacher standing before his students guiding them to see the brilliance of the moon. But instead of observing the moon, the students are fixated on his pointing finger. You can imagine the teacher’s struggle. “There it is,” he says, gesturing. “Yes, we see,” they reply, nodding at the finger. “No, not that,” the teacher counters. He points more emphatically. “There!” “Yes, we understand,” the students nod again.
Adopting beginner’s mind allows discovery of what is right before your eyes.
If we are satisfied we know something, the mind has effectively closed the door on the matter, convinced it has no need to search any further. But if what we have settled on is wrong or incomplete, it’s an uphill battle to update that understanding. Such is the perennial problem we face when approaching the Buddha’s discoveries about the mind. We are setting out to investigate that which has always been right before our eyes, but has routinely escaped notice. So, it serves us well to bring to meditation what the Zen Buddhists call beginner’s mind: the approach of assuming nothing and being open to learn anew in every moment. Because understanding is always a work in progress, not a static destination point.
Long-term meditation practice eventually reveals the basic truth that the mind more or less instinctively knows the way to the ultimate peace. It just needs the opportunity to get there, much like a wild animal in a cage only needs the latch lifted to make good its escape. So, it’s less important which tradition you start with and more that you diligently do the practice until the way forward is revealed.
No matter the tradition, meditation retreats tend to share the same basic formula: we remove ourselves from the busy world to a quiet place where we commit to a daily routine of meditation training. There may also be further activities such as a daily lecture, a teacher interview, or a chanting session.
Meditation retreat traditions hark back to Buddha’s time of the fifth century BCE.
Sign at the Buddha’s birthplace, Lumbini, Nepal. Photo courtesy Peter Stuckings.
The practice of retreating harks back to the dedicated training undertaken by monks and nuns in the Buddha’s time of the fifth to sixth century BCE. In those days it was common for monastics to strive for intensive meditation training in their daily routines, but it was not always possible. They had chores and duties, as well as a need to keep on the move between kingdoms, districts, and towns in order not to exhaust the patronage and patience of the communities they depended on for food and other material support.
As it turned out, every year they got the chance for focused, committed training. A custom among ascetics at the time was to stay put during the three-month rainy season that usually falls between July and October across northern India, due to the difficulty of travel as well as the danger of damage to budding crops. The Buddha made this sedentary period into a formal custom for the growing population of monastics who followed him. The Pali term for rain, Vassa (Sanskrit: Vars.a), is still used today for the Rains Retreat, the three-month period when monastics are expected to settle down for meditation and study.
During the Vassa, the Buddha’s monastic population took up a daily routine of rising early, gathering food donations from nearby communities, and spending the remainder of the day and night in meditation practice. Sometimes a senior teacher, possibly even the Buddha himself, would deliver a lecture to help clarify a technical point or to inspire the trainees with a discourse on the benefits of the practice.
Throughout the twenty-five centuries-long history of Buddhist meditative practices, some lay people also wanted to train seriously in these methods. They typically had to fit the practice into their daily household routines which, if you’ve ever tried it, is a challenge even for us modern folks with time-saving luxuries like washing machines and microwave ovens.
Dedicated meditation practice spreads beyond monasteries to lay people.
While dedicated meditation practice among lay people was fairly rare until modern times — that’s what the monastic life was for — it grew quickly in the twentieth century in the wake of European colonial upheavals across Asia in the nineteenth century. One obvious example is the changes in Burma. The newly arrived colonial authorities removed the monarchy and thereby cut off the traditional imperial protection of and financial support for monasteries. The monks were forced to turn to the civilian population which, by the twentieth century, gave rise to a new relationship of interdependence and cooperation. Through regular contact with the community, meditation masters discovered there were many among the population who wished to strive for the highest goals of the practice, previously available only to monks and nuns within the monastic institutions. In the mid-twentieth century, some Asian teachers even began going abroad to teach, while students from around the world travelled to Asia to train.
Throughout these changing times, it is also true that Buddhist meditation methods and their theoretical frameworks have evolved to suit a more lay-oriented mass market. You may hear teachers and schools claiming their method is exactly the way the Buddha taught his followers to meditate. Too much time has passed and too much interpretation has been added to the remnants of his earliest teachings for this to be entirely knowable. Hence, this is why among the world’s meditators is a subset of people seeking out the most reliably effective teaching and training approaches and, as you might expect, these are rarely found in mainstream meditation settings.
Modern meditation retreats allow for greater intensity of practice, and are by no means a breeze.
Nowadays there are countless meditation retreat centres in most Asian countries, and centres have also proliferated elsewhere around the world. As a result, taking time out to go train at a meditation retreat is now within the reach of unprecedented numbers of people. There are no formal limits to who can attend, and these days people of every age and stage of life, and every cultural and religious background are giving it a try.
Around the world, people are discovering that retreats allow for greater intensity of practice. You don’t need to prepare meals or go to work, or look after kids or cars or gardens or pets. There may be a few simple chores to perform, but generally you need only concern yourself with joining the training sessions on time. This ensures you get plenty of consistent, uninterrupted meditation time out of each day.
A well-run meditation centre can support a schedule of ten to fourteen or more hours of formal training per day. By comparison, most people in the beginning stages of their daily meditation practice at home may find an hour per day a lot to fit in. Add to this the supportive and cooperative environment of a centre where everyone is tacitly sharing the struggles and joys of the journey together, and you can see how a retreat provides us with unparalleled conditions for strong and intensive practice.
The word retreat is usually taken to mean withdraw, especially from something difficult or dangerous. But according to dictionaries, it can also mean to go to a quiet, safe place. Or to step back from a position of believing something. Or to remove oneself from the busy world to engage in meditative contemplation. I like to think of going on a meditation retreat as engaging with all of these possibilities.
But we should not entertain any illusions that retreats are a breeze. While some meditation retreat centres are luxurious and comfortable— mainly in Western countries—this is not the norm in the traditional Asian settings where monasteries and meditation centres are generally built and maintained with donations, so they may feature basic structures, simple food, and rudimentary facilities. Add to this the fact that you will be required to practice meditation for all the waking hours when you are not eating or doing daily ablutions, separated completely from your typical daily life habits and comforts, and you can see that a degree of adjustment is required.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher from The Meditation Retreat Manual: In Search of Ultimate Peace. By Peter Stuckings, Aeon Books, 2023.
Peter Stuckings hails from Australia and has lived around Asia for most of his life due to a fascination with the region’s ancient wisdom traditions. Nowadays he has taken the robes and dwells as a monk in the forests of Sri Lanka. His blog, Places To Meditate, lists meditation centres of good standing throughout the region.
