Selection
from the Cypress Tree Zen Newsletter, Winter 1998Selection
from the Cypress Tree Zen Newsletter, Winter 1998Retreats Why Bother?
by Anne Rudloe, Abbot - CTZG
Beginning a meditation practice isn't the easiest thing. Period. When you first start, your back aches, your legs go to sleep, your nose itches, boredom and restlessness reverberate off the walls. In spite of that, it's a strong technique for learning how to pay attention to what's right here, right now, how to see the world as it really is bright and shining in each instant.
Each day we may meditate for a few minutes or an hour at home, but it takes a while for the mind to let go, to give up its effort to stay busy. The point of a retreat is to simply experience how life is when you're not busy hustling and grasping and being judgmental. Like a nursery school, everything is simplified and sheltered and aids are provided to help us learn and practice keeping a clear mind.
After practicing where it's relatively easy, then we take it back into the whirlpool of daily life with all its complexities and see if we can still do it there. After some time, the clarity gets a little worn and frayed so then we come back to the meditation hall and work under retreat conditions to restore it.
At a formal retreat, everything is done according to a schedule that allows very little free time. This systematically removes most of things that the mind loves to seize and use as distractions. The demanding schedule will challenge everyone. Some parts of it we like, but some parts of it are awful or ridiculous. Normally in life, we try to avoid what we don't like, but in a retreat if we stay we eventually begin to see clearly how our own mental reactions actually make things harder or easier. This teaches us how to cope with the major and unavoidable life crises cancer, death of a loved one the things that are absolutely unavoidable and as sooner or later will surely happen.
Maintaining silence in a retreat cuts out using talk as entertainment, a way to pass the time without confronting the depths of our non-understanding. It also eliminates our tendency to judge and rank everyone we meet, all the internal gossip that supports our own ego and tendency to be judgmental.
The discipline and silence of a retreat are walls against which the individual's personality bounces, reacting sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. As it does, we simply observe those reactions. The process highlights how opinionated and self-centered we are in normal routine activities and how much we like to stay in familiar, comfortable routines. We resent being corrected as we make mistakes in learning the apparently arbitrary rules and then we see how easily our egos are affronted.
For a beginner, it may be physically and mentally grueling, but it is also training in developing the courage, patience and will power necessary to do what is required in any situation regardless of whether it's difficult or easy, what personal likes or dislikes arise in dealing with it.