My Insight Meditation Retreat Experience
I did a 5-day insight meditation retreat at Breitenbush Hot Springs
What was it like?
It was amazing. It was hard. I learned a lot about myself.
Were you completely silent? Wasn’t that hard?
In short: 1. Pretty much. 2. Not really.
During the retreat, you ask questions of the teachers, answer questions, and even have a long conversation with them. Other than that, though, the intention is to focus inwards and not speak. Chatting about the food or even the teachings would be a distraction. I didn’t find the silence itself to be much of a challenge.
My experience might not be the same as yours, though. As an introvert, it’s lovely to be encouraged not to talk for once. I already have an hour per week set aside to do nothing and speak to no one — a time which I find reenergizes me. In a sense, this was just a more structured, more extended form of that. I’m also a fan of Quaker meeting, where (it is said) people speak only when they are quaking with the message within them that wishes to be spoken out.
There were tricky moments with the silence. Not everyone at Breitenbush was part of the retreat, so folks were walking around talking. I was occasionally asked to read something for someone who wasn’t wearing their glasses (my reaction: awkwardly gesture to the next person over, who can read out loud), or asked for the time (even more awkwardly thrust my watch in their face). But no, the silence wasn’t hard.
What was hard, then?
There was a fair amount of suffering. And a lot of the point was to experience that suffering, examine it, potentially dissolve it. Suffering came in the form of physical sensations — your back being tired from holding you up for 45 minutes — or from ideas — wanting the sit to be over for no particular reason.
It feels weird to say that… “I went on a meditation retreat, partly so that I could experience suffering fully.” The crazy thing, though, is: this suffering isn’t much different from the suffering we experience on a day-to-day basis. We just don’t think of it like that. Think of the stress of not being on time for something, or judging yourself for forgetting to do something, or regretting things from the past, or just wanting things to be… different. That is what suffering is. An ideal of insight meditation is that if we truly understand our suffering, we may be able to opt-out, by seeing the world with clarity, love, and equanimity instead of judgment & co.
I do realize that I am incredibly, incredibly lucky to be in a place where I can do this and that my day-to-day suffering is lower than that of many beings and people. But I was impressed by the amount of suffering that I could identify and dissolve only using my attention.
How did you feel afterward?
Incredible. Supremely relaxed. “Blissed out” is the term. In addition to the meditation itself, this was likely partly from 5 days of:
- Living in a snowy forest environment (I love snow)
- Unlimited hot springs
- Proper hydration from carrying a water bottle everywhere
- Getting enough sleep — By going from the evening meditation sit pretty much straight to bed, and from bed straight to the morning sit, I got 9 ½ hours per night. That ain’t bad. Plus, I used some of the unstructured time for 20 minutes to an hour of naps.
- Incredibly tasty and healthy food
- No responsibilities other than to be present.
So yeah, I felt pretty great.
Things I learned about meditating
There was a lot contained in the teaching delivered by our teacher, Robert Beatty. Anything of his that I attempt to relate here is probably an incomplete version of something he says more eloquently and precisely in one of his talks. But hey, you didn’t come here to listen to him. So here are a couple things that will stick with me:
1. It’s OK to be distracted when meditating
Really.
Meditators often talk about the “monkey mind” and how it will wander and attach to things when you’re trying to meditate and focus on your breath. The problem with this is that monkeys are basically the same as humans. They’re smart, and they can be trained to act in specific ways. After working with your monkey-mind for some time, one would expect it to, you know, wander less. Behave more. In my experience so far, this is wrong and only leads to frustration.
A much more apt metaphor of my own devising is the kitten-mind.
When you try to focus on your breath, your mind — like any one of these kittens — will wander. And you shouldn’t expect it not to. There need be no disappointment when you have to pick up the kitten and gently put it back in line.
In the retreat, Robert Beatty spoke clearly about what happens when we try to meditate. There are the 5 Hindrances, one of which is this restlessness-and-worry, which is what I’m talking about. Another is sloth-and-torpor, which includes sleepiness. These hindrances do not go away. Beatty, after decades of meditation practice, became a teacher and has since fallen entirely off of his chair three times, thanks to sloth-and-torpor.
So the point is this. Be patient. Maybe the kitten will learn and grow over time to be less restless. Perhaps it won’t. In the meantime, you have plenty to gain from picking up that kitten, sky-crane style, and putting it back in line, perhaps tens or hundreds of times per day. This is the real practice of meditation.
In fact, at the end of each day of the retreat, this is how Beatty reviews the day: “How many times have you become aware of where your mind is, and come back to the breath? Tens? Hundreds?” It’s a reminder that meditation is usually not about the quiet, still mind. It’s not about the kitten not doing anything. It’s about the mind that becomes aware of where the kitten is and brings it back into line.
2. Noting
When we find our mind somewhere, Beatty instructs us to not just bring the mind back to our intention (usually breathing), but first to take a look at where we’ve found ourselves. Make a note. Maybe label the thought — is this liking? Disliking?
Noticing my emotional reactions to things, and labeling them in my mind, was a start to understanding them more, as well as a step towards separating my response from the experience. For instance, I may notice wanting another piece of cake. I can then take a moment to appreciate the wanting as a sensation that I am experiencing, and move on: that dissociation from suffering that I mentioned earlier.
During the meditation retreat, “disliking” became almost a joke to me. Many times, I would catch myself disliking something — a sensation or a thought — such that my initial, unconscious response was to get stressed out or feel like I had to act on the dislike. When brought into awareness, however, the disliking would be in an entirely new light requiring no action. Amazing, I would think to myself. For a moment, I was convinced that this was something I needed to be upset about!
Conversely, when I catch a “liking” reaction to something, I have the power to focus in on it and potentially bring it to a level of glee. Intense liking. Good stuff.
Things I learned about myself
After meditating for several hours a day in a relatively stress-free environment, you get a pretty clear picture of the things that your mind wants to dwell on. Even without consciously trying to analyze these thoughts, the pattern-recognition centers in your brain will switch on and say, “hmm! It looks like we’re doing a lot of X.” Or “wow! That thought was interesting!”
Anyway, here are a few things that I learned about myself as a result.
1. Why I obsess over decisions
Partway through the retreat, I found myself repeatedly coming back to a train of thought about our car. I was worried that, in the cold, the car wouldn’t maintain enough charge to make it to the charger when we were done. No matter how many times I dismissed it as irrelevant, or did the math, or even caved and checked the car’s battery level (plenty of charge by the way. We only lost ~10 miles of range over 5 days of subzero temps), the worry kept coming back, along with a sense of urgency, of fear. Should I break the silence and find a way to plug the car in? Should I go charge it before it gets too low? The thoughts and the suffering just kept coming back.
So I let myself analyze my feelings a bit. What was this fear I was feeling? What calamity would occur if, even by some crazy happenstance, we had to get towed 10 miles to the nearest charger? Nothing really. But then I hit upon it. The scariest thing in that imagined scenario was my own judgment. I was obsessing over the decision because I was afraid that I would judge myself if I made the wrong decision. And this despite having made the decision in good faith. Crazy.
So what I did was this: I took my previous plan (“don’t do anything about the car”) and added a clause. It became “don’t do anything about the car, and if something goes wrong, I plan to forgive myself.” Immediately my mind and my adrenaline level began to calm down.
In our guided sessions, the teacher discussed that there doesn’t have to be a reason like this for your conditioned responses. A particular pattern might just be what you do. But in this case, I think I found a pretty compelling reason for my suffering and an amelioration plan that works.
2. I get high on problem-solving
This realization has actually been from my meditation since the retreat, but it’s too exciting to leave out. One day when meditating, I had a particularly fruitful train of thought, where I was thinking about how I could use x do accomplish y and how that was especially nice because of z. It wasn’t even a particularly great solution to any problem, more of a daydream. Then the sky-crane came in, and I brought myself back to my breath (kitten back in line!). As I checked in with my breath and body, I realized that I felt fantastic. Total body high. Tingles of blood flow to my extremities. Endorphins in my brain. Just from pondering how the world could fit together. Interesting. No wonder I became an engineer.
3. I don’t have to be continuously entertained
This goes without saying, and yet in the modern world, we continually forget it. We carry our phones everywhere and “check” them in every spare moment when we could be centering and checking in with ourselves. During the quiet of the retreat, I could feel my mind sometimes scramble for entertainment like a caged rat in fear of what would happen without stimulation or input. Try sitting still for 5 minutes and not reaching for something to do or read, and you’ll probably feel it too. I’m not sure where that fear comes from — is it a fear of not keeping up with the ‘Jones’’ if we don’t stuff our lives full? A fear of “wasting” time? — but I’m pretty sure we don’t need it. What we do sometimes need is some quiet time.
Since the retreat, I’ve taken more of these quiet moments to myself rather than filling them with news, or podcasts, or books. It’s been great. I’ve pretty much stopped reading books before bed, but I’ve slept more. I’ve listened to fewer podcasts, but I’ve noticed and processed more stray thoughts than I used to. These quiet moments are a great chance to identify suffering and solve it.
Questions?
This is just the tip of the iceberg for me, of what I learned and experienced. Let me know in the comments if there’s anything I can answer!
