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Long-term retreatant Benjamin shares the turbulence, lows, and highs over nearly a year in retreat, and reflects on how training the mind can truly benefit of all beings.
Note: This article is excerpted from a longer thank-you letter that Benjamin sent to his close friends, family, and benefactors. He has allowed us to share portions of the piece in gratitude for the support of the greater CCR community. If you’d like to support retreatants like Benjamin directly, consider donating to our Retreatant Support Fund.
Dear Friends,
As I somewhat expected before entering Miyo Samten Ling hermitage, it is indeed difficult to find words to describe what long-term retreat is like and what it does to the soul. In the West we tend to psychologize everything, which hinders the reader’s ability to actually get a taste of what the storyteller wants to express. With these words, I do my best to welcome you to a delicate telling and listening.
Retreat is a bit like being in an airplane with the windows closed. Though changes can be felt here and there along the way, one has little ability to tell just how high and far one has traveled. But there are moments of sensed depth and breadth, both pleasant and disturbing, that give me a hint: “I ain’t in Kansas anymore.”
After a surprisingly painful first few weeks, I started to settle in. Letting go of what is familiar and the warmth of beloved people in daily life felt like a small death. The high, dry desert environment and my settling adrenals kicked my ass. But after a while, I started to feel at home in my retreat cabin, with my body acclimated and my mind settled enough to appreciate long stretches of silence and solitude. Being alone for so long brings me closer to my basic needs—that is, our basic vulnerabilities, ever hinting at the fragility of life. I cherish ever more simple acts of generosity. Enjoying life can be so simple.
My abode is isolated by sight from the others that are scattered about the landscape that surrounds the beautiful, homey community center and chapel where one comes to catch internet reception, pick up parcels, or come together for a common practice once every several weeks. Deer pass by my windows every other day, and the sound of coyotes frequents the night.
I’ve done retreats alone, shorter of course, and I can say it really makes a difference being amid other committed practitioners, some of whom have been here for years. Though we rarely see each other, there is a silent intimacy among us. Though I’m still crawling in my diapers, my daily practice continues to develop and deepen, like a slowly growing garden. The ancient Sanskrit word for meditation/contemplation is bhavana, which means “cultivation.” At the moment, I “cultivate” in formal practice around eight hours a day, and that’s gradually growing. Ambition, pushing, and overthinking don’t work, so it’s a delicate and often difficult task to listen very closely. The time in between sessions also has its special qualities and particular demands. The tenderness and insights that arise now and again remind me that I’m not on an efficient assembly line, but a lively river. So, I can say that on some days, I am in full-time practice from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed.
So, what is it that I am actually doing every day?
I’ve put myself into a ten-month shamatha retreat, which means the vast majority of my time in formal practice and the intermediate moments are devoted to the cultivation of shamatha, with one to two hours a day of auxiliary practices.
Shamatha is a Sanskrit word (zhiné in Tibetan) meaning quiescence, stillness, calm abiding. It refers to a specific set of practices that develop attentional intelligence. It’s about intentionally developing the ability to maintain a continuous stream of cognizant, focused, relaxed, and vividly aware attention to dissolve the mind’s rampant flip-flopping between dullness and disturbing excitation. In Buddhist training, shamatha is an indispensable foundation for more advanced practices.
One can cultivate a regular shamatha practice with 20–60 minute sessions once or twice a day, as I have on and off over the past twenty years. These types of meditation have been demonstrated to increase mental and physical health, which I can attest to personally. However, with sustained long-term training, shamatha practice takes on a whole new dimension. Essentially, one is settling the mind into its natural ground state, free of coarse and subtle disturbances, idle chatter, and obsessive ideation. It has been confirmed again and again by professional contemplatives over thousands of years: the natural ground state of the individual mind is 1) blissful, 2) luminous, and 3) peacefully non-conceptual. These three salient qualities of the distilled individual mind, along with an unprecedented sense of well-being that emerges, are inseparable from such a refined and developed attention.
But boy oh boy, it ain’t an easy path. All sorts of things can occur along the way—the good, the blissful, the bad, and the real ugly. As one relaxes the body and mind deeper and deeper in long-term practice, the mind dishes out all sorts of things as it purges and heals itself. This phenomenon is referred to as “meditative experiences” (nyam in Tibetan), which can be both pleasant and unpleasant. Like dredging a swamp, as one digs ever so gently but discerningly deeper into the mind, one may come across wonderful treasures: moments of joy, unprecedented clarity, an impenetrable sense of lightness, or perhaps spikes or long arcs of bliss. On the other hand, one may hit sleeping dragons that don’t like being woken up: unpleasant memories, old repressed material, energetic blockages, strange pains in the body, debilitating low self-esteem and confusion, deep-rooted traumas, and all the stuff we shamefully hide from the world. Whatever comes up, the guideline is: don’t take it too seriously, don’t reify, don’t get attached, don’t appropriate—just let it all arise and pass.
Easier said than done. Meditative experiences manifest uniquely to each individual, as we each have our own mental-physical matrices that unravel their blockages in unique ways, and there is no predicting what will come and hit you from the side. In order to discern how best to deal with these experiences, it’s essential to have seasoned practitioners close by, as well as mentors who have traversed their own wonderful and treacherous inner landscapes enough that they can help others navigate their own—as I so fortunately do here.
At the onset of this retreat, my mind’s chatter went wild. It felt like meditation was making my mind more chaotic, not less. Apparently this happens to pretty much everyone who starts to engage in long-term practice. It’s not that my mind was getting more disturbed than normal, but rather I was peeling back the surface layer of my awareness and dipping into the undercurrents that were already there and are always moving below my ordinary state of mind. No way can my mind be this chaotic! A humbling experience to say the least.
All sorts of strange and interesting characters suddenly appear and pass through the space of the mind. It sometimes seems as if they are not part of me at all. Some guests show up frequently over days or even weeks, as if one were watching a television program that one cannot simply turn off. Some examples from my first months included: imagining what possessions I need to downsize in a year in order to pack before I leave Colorado, endless arguments with a particular person, and Thor, the god of thunder. I know that it doesn’t really matter what the content of the thoughts are. If I’m in a state prone to appropriating the movements and contents the mind produces, then pretty much anything will be appropriated. If I am not able to abide in discerning awareness, thoughts, emotions and stories will kidnap and take me for a ride again and again and again and again.
It is indeed possible to rest in the stillness of awareness—something that is always present with us, having the two qualities of luminosity and cognizance—and still have a flood of thoughts occurring in the space of the mind. It’s fascinating to rest in the stillness of awareness in the midst of so much inner movement, where a sense of peace doesn’t entail the mind being devoid of thoughts, and where there is a spaciousness that allows for more patience and humor.
These are the non-threatening kinds of movements of the mind. I’m sure we all know the hellish states of mind that can abduct and torture us, even when not engaging in long-term practice. I’m told that in retreat, one is to treat those states with just as much impartiality as the extremely enjoyable ones. Again, not easy. We need to have great compassion for ourselves.
Every morning, whether or not the sun has yet arisen, I contemplate the reality of impermanence and death. What does that look like? To start, I remind myself of the ever-changing nature of life.
One object of meditation I’ve frequented lately is my thinning hairline. Is the filter of my shower drainage supposed to be cleaned out that many times a week? Or is it just my long beard contributing to the blockage? I’m definitely not young anymore, and indeed there are other parts of my body that perk up uncomfortably to remind me that my time to leave this life is always sooner than I think. As the Tibetan saying goes, “Old age is not guaranteed, but your next life is!”
Contemplating my own death repeatedly proves itself to be a powerful way to be returned to my priorities. It boils down to one question: Given my definite demise, what am I going to do with this unique and precious day? There is no guarantee I will see this day to its end, no promise that I will lay this body back down in bed the same way it arose this morning. I believe that when I finally do face death, what will truly help me is the clarity of my conscience and the quality of my awareness. These are not things that I can cultivate in a short time span, but are a result of the positive momentum I add to every day of my life. What shall I do to meet death without fear and regret? Will I be surprised and feel that I’ve been cheated by life, or is there some way to approach that transition with positive anticipation? Perhaps, I hope, I will settle down with a sense of peace, even celebration, knowing that I treated others well and worked every day to uproot my very own mental afflictions—afflictions that cause pain to myself, other human beings, and animals, not to mention the environment I inhabit.
In order to be touched as I am, to make genuine change in my priorities and attitudes, I need to let the reality of death and impermanence actually be real for me. I can meet that reality through genuine insight, because death is always happening, and for such insight, that takes tending. One of my long-held practices is one where when I say goodbye to someone, especially when it will be for more than a couple of weeks, I take in all detail possible of that moment, like taking a mental photograph with all my senses, and secretly bow to the possibility that this might be the last time I see this person alive. This not only brings me closer to the reality of death, but also to the delicateness and preciousness of life and my relations.
“God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.”
This is my favorite poem of the great Persian Sufi poet and mystic Hafiz.
How do I know when I am bumping up against something sacred? Sometimes in the middle of a meditation session I burst into laughter. The slightest something breaks the rigid symmetry of my serious attitudes and there I am, cracking up all on my own in my meditation box. Tears also come regularly, spontaneously, secretly showing the world the gratitude I have for my life, for all the kindness I’ve received. One could dryly say that these are only moments of catharsis, just the nervous system letting off some pressure. I don’t think so.
Sometimes I am rubbing up against something holy and don’t regard it as such. All I feel is agitation and impatience, as if I’m being dragged, unable to find any satisfying reason why I’m so frustrated. This may go on for hours, even days. Then something suddenly becomes clear—like finally getting the message, whether through a harsh truth or gentle advice—and I see that I was indeed so close to something important to me: an insight, a moment with the divine, a reconciliation waiting to happen, a recognition of something primordially pure—but because of my own limiting conceptions and addiction to my beliefs, I buffered myself from them. In hindsight, I see it was just fat old God bumping into me, and I was refusing to laugh.
Now, coming to motivation: what’s the point of it all? Why am I in this retreat? Why bother with all the hardship and spending so much time and effort cultivating the mind to this extent?
I quote my beloved Jewish World War II heroine, Etty Hillesum, who speaks it all for me (these are two quotes put together):
“It is the only thing we can do. Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate that we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable.”
“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.”
It’s been well warned for thousands of years in India and Tibet that it’s awfully dangerous to get caught up in one’s experience of the natural sense of well-being, power, and peace that arise due to sustained meditative practices like shamatha. There is the danger of isolating oneself in an enjoyable bubble, far from the harsh realities of the wider world. But no one is an island, and I believe the great practitioners of old Asia, like all great contemplatives, knew this better than most.
The point is to gain insight, to know how things really work. Shamatha makes the mind serviceable, refining the attention and senses so we can actually perceive and know definitively what is happening in reality at whatever level. And reality, ultimately, is said to be one of profound interconnectedness. It’s one thing to have intellectual understanding of how intricately intertwined our lives and sources of well-being are, and much virtue derives from that deep, conceptual insight. But já é outra loiça (it’s a whole other dish) to have direct, unmediated experience of reality firsthand, beyond any addictive ideation and even our psychological matrix. And that experience, as has been told, gives rise to spontaneous, undeniable, heartfelt compassion for all life. It’s said that it’s as if each person becomes your only dear child. Can you imagine that?
Besides death, I contemplate compassion every day. Until I reach that state of spontaneously arisen love and compassion that undoubtedly leads to meaningful action, I will do what I can to cultivate my mind and heart to be able to, as much as I authentically can in each moment, hold all of life’s complexities and the mess we humans have gotten this planet and ourselves in. To again quote my dear Etty Hillesum: “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”
I’m in this shamatha retreat to train my attention and love in order to offer relevant help to individuals and our larger situations. I often remind myself that the word “attention” is related closely to the word “tend,” the same word we use when we take care of the injured and sick. I won’t hold back from acting just because I don’t have ultimate wisdom, nor will I stay in a cave seeking isolated perfection for eternity, but I am seeking a meaningful, dynamic balance between these two activities. After all, it is within us and among people—including animals and all forms of life—where the word “wisdom” even begins to have any relevant meaning. And in our troubled times, we desperately need wisdom.
When I am in need of inspiration to cultivate the two wings of wisdom and compassion, I need look no further than His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This is a person who lost his country, who has witnessed the decimation of thousands of years of Tibetan cultural heritage, the destruction of thousands of monasteries and sacred places, his people imprisoned in work camps, dehumanized, starved, tortured, with many killed publicly or gone missing. When asked how he can remain so happy and engaged despite all that has happened, and is still happening, with very little hope on the horizon for Tibet and its people, he answered with one word: wisdom. He has never shown hatred or sworn revenge on the Chinese people or politics, despite his unending resolve and absolute stance for independence and fairness for his country. In fact, he has only shown great kindness and compassion to the Chinese, as if he too were their patron.
It was a conversation with some friends who are parents that encouraged me to go deeper into this kind of training. Each told me that when they were in their teens or twenties, they clearly knew that being a parent was their path. For many years I thought I was broken, as if my parent-gene was lagging sluggishly behind, even though being an educator of youngsters called me early on in life. By witnessing my friends’ enthusiasm and certainty of that wish, I recognized that I too had that kind of enthusiasm and certainty when I was younger, but it wasn’t for becoming a biological father. Rather, I had a primal urge for deep and sustained spiritual (though I don’t like to use that word so often) training.
As a young man, sex and parties were interesting, but only to a certain extent (though much later on women became an essential part of my path for learning unconditional love and the sacred). From University parties I often left early and alone, to wander home drunk with a sense of yearning, concerned for the depressed people I drank with, and looking at the stars and contemplating the sacred. Ha! But alas, there was no room for that contemplation in my wider culture, nor in the future of any career—no role models of professional contemplatives as the many ancient cultures had, no context for those who feel the call to go into solitude to gain wisdom and share it with the commons where it belongs. So instead, I continued to study Physics. I tried to get some insight into reality through that brilliant but limiting discipline before stumbling forward into young adult life, trying to seek a meaningful path. I am so grateful to have found the work and teachings of Dr. B. Alan Wallace and Dr. Eva Natanya, who have given voice to this calling I’ve felt since childhood, and the space they’ve created for us to truly fathom the mind for the benefit of all beings.
From the depths of my heart I thank not only my close friends and family, but for everyone who has contributed to the Retreatant Support Fund or otherwise supported me, making this retreat possible. I couldn’t be here without your generosity and care. Making lots of money has never been my forte, but fortunately making friends with virtuous and kind people has! I hope I can one day return your kindness.
With sincere gratitude,
Benjamin
January 2025
“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
~William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight
