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Dr. Eva Natanya reflects on our first five years as a true "Center for Contemplative Research," as well as the beauty and difficulties of long-term mind training in solitude.
We have an intrepid mission at the core of our work at the CCR, to create conducive conditions for dedicated practitioners to train their minds in rigorous, long-term retreat, with the aspiration to cultivate sublime levels of mental balance and compassion, and to gain transformative insights into the nature of reality.
But if you’ve read Benjamin’s beautiful account in our last Chronicle, you might have gathered by now that the typical day-to-day experience of long-term retreat is not always characterized by blissful meditations and profound discoveries. Indeed, many retreatants report going through some of the most challenging experiences of their lives—emotionally, physically, and spiritually. But why?
As prospective retreatants prepare for their yearned-for solitude and silence—with nothing else to do all day but practice Dharma—they learn about something the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has termed nyam. This can be roughly translated as “structured experiences,” or more specifically “meditative experiences.” It is not as though all these experiences happen while formally meditating, however. Rather, these include a wide range of physical, mental, and emotional experiences that arise as a result of a correct practice of meditation, and which can happen either during meditation or anytime between sessions.
These experiences are a by-product of the crucial process of dredging and purifying the many layers of the mind, which naturally involves uncovering buried traumas, insecurities, habitual attitudes, misconceptions, memories of one’s own positive and negative actions, and at a very raw level, tasting what it feels like to grasp to “me.” That is, we begin to recognize the root of our suffering in the experience of holding onto a prelinguistic construct of “me” that is actually unfounded in reality. But it can be quite a shock to discover that the “me” I thought was there doesn’t exist in the way that I thought, and never has. And sometimes the mind and body temporarily rebound into grasping more tightly than before.
Perhaps needless to say, such experiences are not always fun. Yet, if one is properly trained in how to remain grounded in the stillness of awareness and observe these experiences without following one’s ingrained habit of grasping to them or identifying with them as really being “mine,” they can naturally release themselves. Because the experiences are being catalyzed from within the depths of one’s psyche, and are naturally impermanent, if one ceases to fuel them with grasping and fretting, they will eventually exhaust themselves and disappear.
It takes an enormous amount of confidence in one’s teachers and the path that has been explained by countless contemplatives of the past for one to have the courage to endure such experiences while they are occurring. But as one continues in the practice of meditation, dwelling in the stillness of awareness as mental processes arise and cease of their own accord, there is a deep and quiet reward in knowing that the mind is being purified from within. One gains the confidence of being able to face one’s innermost demons and not be conquered by them.
The profound purification catalyzed by meditation may surface not only at the psychological level but also at the physical level, leading to strange and sometimes disturbing experiences of energies coursing or jolting through one’s body. This release of subtle energies (or prana) within the body can sometimes revive pain from old injuries, create new physical pains, or even trigger both diagnosable illnesses and undiagnosable issues. But it can also gradually heal deep-seated residues of trauma.
Even more surprisingly, the purification process that is brought about through one’s authentic practice of meditation in retreat can catalyze what are known as “outer upheavals,” or events in one’s external life and environment that are all too real, and that can indeed threaten to distract from or hinder one’s ability to remain in the silent retreat to which one is committed.
A practitioner must then discern very carefully to see what situation, without doubt, needs one’s attention through loving and compassionate action, and what distraction may simply be a temptation to abandon retreat practice, yet without one’s actually being able to benefit the outer situation by leaving retreat, either.
Navigating Serious Psychological Upheavals
Frankly, one needs to be quite psychologically healthy and balanced even before entering retreat in order to have the capacity to sustain retreat practice joyfully and successfully amid such an array of unpredictable meditative experiences, which arise differently for every person. The CCR’s Sixfold Matrix of Mental Balance is being developed as a training program that can guide practitioners in assessing and enhancing their own mental balance, whether they choose to remain engaged in the world or are preparing for solitary retreat. At a physical level, some practitioners may also benefit from time-tested, professionally guided methods of somatic trauma release before engaging in extended periods of solitude.
Yet sometimes individuals discover the depths of hidden psychological imbalances only once in retreat—even years into a retreat. Since our inception as a mind lab/hermitage, we have always had a team of experienced psychologists available for confidential consultation with any retreatant, whether by video call or in person. Different levels of care are offered depending on someone’s situation, and if a deep crisis arises, psychologists are ready to offer close care as needed. This remains private to the individual retreatant, and fellow solitary retreatants would usually not know and do not need to know when psychological care is being provided for a fellow retreatant. At such times, however, it is crucial for retreatants to consult with their spiritual teachers to discern whether it may be the right time to depart from retreat in order to recalibrate and seek healing through sustained professional assistance, as well as through regular contact with supportive friends and family. Indeed, there are times when the nature of an issue that has arisen is so acute that it is not healthy for a person to remain in solitude, and in such cases we, as spiritual teachers, have encouraged such a person to depart from retreat.
In other cases, certain individuals can discern that they have the capacity to continue full-time retreat practice straight through the particular psychological or physical upheaval, and see that they will find deeper healing right there within retreat than they might ever be able to do out in the world. This path of manifest healing has occurred numerous times for retreatants at the CCR and is a source of great joy for all of us. More details on the theory behind meditative experiences and how practicing with them properly can enable one to proceed further along the path of meditation will be the subject of a future Chronicle. Suffice it to say, one needs a profound view of reality to be able to release such intense experiences without grasping to them as if they really exist in the way that they appear.
Since our first group of retreatants began long-term retreat at the newly-founded Center for Contemplative Research in November 2020, we have certainly learned a great deal about the enormous variety of meditative experiences—both difficult and very beautiful—that can occur for different individuals.
As Dr. B. Alan Wallace has emphasized many times, we are breaking new ground in our efforts to establish a retreat center in the West where the focus is explicitly on creating the conducive conditions for retreatants to practice single-pointed meditation with the aspiration of entering the Mahayana Path. This means that we practice in sustained solitude and silence with the aspiration to develop sufficient stability of mind and openness of heart to bring about lasting and irreversible change in our own being, to embody the compassionate motivation to be of highest service to all sentient beings.
There are of course retreat centers around the world, many based in different spiritual traditions, which are focused on similar overall goals. But the model of long-term, solitary practice that we emphasize at the CCR is admittedly more rigorous than at most retreat centers or even monasteries in the East or West.
Most Christian monastic or lay intentional communities gather regularly (daily or weekly) in service and liturgy to reaffirm the communal aspect of individuals’ commitment to a certain vision and form of spiritual practice. Within the Buddhist tradition, especially as established in the West, rituals and meditations practiced as a community are a regular part of even the strictest of retreat periods. Think of your typical image of a Zen monastery or a Tibetan three-year retreat, where formal group practice is an integral part of the discipline.
Our CCR Mind Lab in Colorado is in part modelled on a different style of retreat, one which has been common in Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and India, but which has fewer precedents in the West. This is a model in which a group of individual retreatants would be spread out across a mountainside or valley, each in their own small dwellings, each under the guidance of their own teacher, keeping to their solitary practice for months or years at a time. There would be a loose-knit association among these practitioners, such that they would know if someone was ill or needed emergency assistance, but they would never meet together for group rituals or communal practice. All practice is performed in solitude within their individual huts. In Christian monastic history, this would be closer to the eremetic desert tradition, as distinct from the cenobitic monastic tradition.
In our first few years as a CCR, we tried our best to follow this solitary retreat model closely, as it has proven for centuries to be the most conducive model for attaining states of meditative stability such as shamatha, as well as deeper insights into the nature of reality. We discovered over time, however, that while such solitude and silence certainly enabled retreatants to delve deeply into their meditative practice, long-term retreatants were not always able to weather the enormity of the meditative experiences catalyzed without more regular, structured community interaction and ongoing teachings from their spiritual mentors.
We also gradually recognized that while retreatants all had a good deal of training in core practices prior to entering retreat at the CCR, many had not yet been sufficiently prepared to sustain the level of strict retreat to which they originally aspired (e.g., 8–12 hours a day of meditation). That is, some retreatants dove in with gusto and could maintain this intensity of practice for weeks or even a few months at a time, but then would find themselves overwhelmed by a particular meditative experience or upheaval (as described above), which would inevitably break the continuity of their meditation. If, over many cycles of effort and interruption, the disturbing experience lingered without releasing, then remaining in silent solitude would sometimes seem like an oppressive prison sentence rather than the liberative retreat they had been seeking.
The Importance of Maintaining Continuous Practice Through Silence
Sometimes, however, the urge to interact socially seemed to fall to another extreme, with conversations among retreatants burgeoning for hours upon a chance meeting in the community building or along the hermitage roads. There were times when we, as spiritual guides, needed to experiment by expressing clearer guidelines around maintaining silence in community spaces, so as to preserve the atmosphere and safety of silence for other retreatants who were still in the flow of their practice and would not want to be drawn into long conversations. Trips away from the hermitage for medical appointments are on occasion necessary for retreatants, and our retreat boundaries are not so strict as to prevent this. Nevertheless, at times we asked retreatants not to engage in conversation during the long drive with one of our caretakers, and also not to extend the trip with personal grocery shopping or a meal at a restaurant, which we all know so well can disrupt the single-pointed flow of long-term retreat (in which, traditionally, one would not go into a town at all). Rather, since our retreat caretakers, or stewards, are already responsible for obtaining groceries for retreatants on a weekly basis, retreatants should not have the need to go into public places separately. Such temporary rules were intended to help retreatants settle into a more habitual mode of silence and sustained practice, but we also saw that when some retreatants seemed to struggle with such guidelines, it was because something deeper was not yet balanced in their overall life of retreat. We recognized that these were times to encourage retreatants to delve more deeply into the overarching motivation for retreat, cultivating a heart-rending compassion for the suffering of all beings and an understanding of how the discipline of retreat—which includes refraining from distractions—can be in direct service of the much larger goal of cultivating irreversible transformation of one’s mind and habituations.
More recently, we have not even found it necessary to emphasize such guidelines on physical and verbal retreat boundaries, because, as our hermitage community matures at many levels, we have found that retreatants more naturally maintain silence as a matter of course. Current retreatants are inclined to greet one another in total silence, expressing a respectful gesture of warm-hearted kindness and admiration without needing to engage in conversation. Moreover, we have seen that open conversation among retreatants on the day of our now-regular (monthly) gatherings can then be welcomed as healthy and refreshing, since it does not then become a persistent mode of distraction from the main work of retreat.
Reporting to Teachers on One’s Practice
We have also experimented with different rhythms for retreatants’ reports on their meditation practice. At the end of 2020, Dr. Wallace developed a set of eight questions by which he asked all CCR retreatants to report regularly, via email, on their practice. These eight questions cover topics from the hours each day devoted to shamatha and other supporting meditations, inquiring about how meaningful each of these practices is for the retreatant, about challenges one has been facing and how one has dealt with them, about meditative experiences (nyam) and insights that may be arising, about how one is maintaining balance in practice both during formal sessions and between sessions, about how one is maintaining overall health in terms of diet and exercise, and about how one is finding satisfaction in the practice.
For most of the first two years of our existence as a hermitage, Dr. Wallace was providing guidance from afar, both through monthly video calls with our community and through private email exchanges in response to retreatants’ monthly written reports, as prompted by the eight questions. Doug Veenhof and I were present on-site for meetings when requested by individual retreatants, and occasionally I would hold scheduled check-ins with each retreatant. Individual meetings with Lama Alan were rare, occurring only when he would visit to lead one-week or eight-week retreats.
At the beginning of 2023, Dr. Wallace (also known as Lama Alan) entered his own long-awaited personal retreat in Crestone, and urged all retreatants to enter that deep silence with him. For six months, he no longer asked for monthly written reports, but invited retreatants to write to him only if they discerned that it was really necessary, that is, if they had an urgent issue for which they sought personal guidance. By the end of those first six months of 2023, however, Lama Alan and I were deeply saddened to discover that most retreatants had struggled through that period of strict retreat, which had included one in-person meeting with Lama Alan for each of them midway. We realized in retrospect that the majority had not reached out, even when issues had actually arisen in their retreats that should have received our attention. We saw from our experiment in strict silence that at that juncture, even experienced retreatants were not yet ready to remain in a flow of completely uninterrupted retreat for six months. So we again decided to require written reports—now submitted every other month—as the standard for all retreatants’ regular communication with Lama Alan, our spiritual director.
Community Gatherings, Ongoing Teachings, and Individual Meetings
From mid-2023, we also continued to experiment with different cadences for our community gatherings and teachings. We met for group rituals and teachings from Lama Alan in August and October, and then, beginning in November 2023, Lama Alan began offering public teachings roughly every six weeks, which we gradually made available to our larger local community and also online here.
From the beginning of 2025, we established a monthly rhythm that has seemed to work as our most conducive cadence for retreatants thus far. We now alternate monthly between a short teaching followed by a community ritual practice, and a longer teaching geared toward experienced retreatants. Collectively, these are the teachings we now make available to the public through the Seeds of Wisdom Library.
We have clarified for all retreatants that they are welcome to reach out to Lama Alan with a practice question between bimonthly reports, and we are finding that retreatants do so when appropriate. Lama Alan is of course willing to break his own retreat silence to hold an individual meeting with a retreatant when a clear need arises, though such occasions are relatively rare. Retreatants also reach out to resident teacher Doug Veenhof or to me to discuss particular issues in their practice, whether by email, phone, or in person.
Overall, meetings are held on an individual, as-needed basis, and not as a regularly scheduled part of retreat life, which helps to preserve the flow of silence for all of us at the hermitage between monthly community gatherings. When they occur, one-on-one meetings with a spiritual teacher can range in length from 30 minutes to 2 or 3 hours.
While we as teachers cannot magically make the internal process of purifying the mind and body through intensive meditation practice easy, we do sense that we have found more sustainable ways to help practitioners through these difficult and highly rewarding experiences of transformation.
As explained below, we have also modified the way that we guide retreatants into retreat in the first place, which has had a noticeably beneficial effect in the many short- and long-term retreats that were begun throughout the past year.
There are numerous authoritative Buddhist texts that state one can ideally achieve the state of shamatha—a transformative level of meditative stability—within six or nine months of continuous practice in retreat. But what is not always clear is how far along the path of spiritual maturity and transformation one needs to have come already in order for such a period of unbroken meditation to be successful.
That is, how many years might one have needed to prepare the mind and body through well-rounded, full-time spiritual practice in solitude and in community before one is ready to embark upon a particular six- or nine-month period of retreat and then continue meditating in an uninterrupted retreat schedule for that entire period, in order for shamatha to come to fruition in one’s mind and body? How can one prepare so as not to encounter such intense upheavals that one is actually derailed from the continuity of meditation again and again?
We discovered within the initial years of the CCR’s existence that we needed to dispel the idea that one could come straight from twenty-first-century life into a six- or nine-month intensive shamatha retreat with the expectation that one could sustain 10- to 12-hour days of meditation right from the first few weeks onwards for six months and, just like that, achieve shamatha and then return to one’s previous life and relationships!
Given the unprecedented stress and ubiquitous wounds of the digital and technological age in which each of us grew up, it is simply not realistic to think we can start retreat with the ideal schedule of a full-on “shamatha retreat” aimed to achieve unwavering stability within six or nine months.
From the beginning of 2024, inspired by detailed shamatha teachings given by Drupön Lama Karma, Lama Alan began formulating the concept of a level-one, level-two, and level-three retreat.
A level-one retreat is structured in such a way that someone transitioning from a socially engaged way of life can come to take joy in practicing Dharma all day long in solitude: gently removed from the sensory stimulation of modern life, one thoroughly immerses oneself in a balanced array of practices to open the heart and mind, settle the attention, and calibrate one’s body and mind to a relaxed and joyful way of being in retreat. One might still be listening to recorded teachings each day, taking long walks, and including mantra or other sacred recitations in one’s practice, while still maintaining overall silence as a way of life in retreat. Sustained for a few months, such a schedule will introduce individuals gently to the experience of being in retreat, while still creating the conditions for meaningful transformation and sometimes life-changing insights to occur.
A level-two retreat builds on some weeks or months of such balanced experience and begins to streamline conceptual practices, placing a progressively greater emphasis on silent, nonconceptual shamatha meditation, with less time spent reading instructional books or listening to teachings. How long one spends in this type of retreat will vary from one person to another, but the 6 to 8 hours that one typically spends practicing shamatha each day within such a level-two retreat will be enough to catalyze both pleasant and unpleasant meditative experiences and upheavals, so that one begins to learn how to handle and progress through such experiences wisely and fearlessly.
By the time one is ready for a level-three retreat, one is now so thoroughly flourishing in one’s overall practice that one might feel one is already coming around the home stretch toward sublime balance of body and mind, both in meditation and between sessions. This is the time to begin a six- or nine-month period in which all the outer and inner conditions are in place to meditate 12 to 14 hours a day, every day, continuously.
But again, if one starts this type of schedule too soon, one will get too tight, push too hard, and eventually burn out. One might even keep going at such a pace for a while, but without sufficient preparation in comprehending and embodying the depths and breadths of the entire spiritual Path—within which shamatha is only one practice along the way—one might become bored with a hollowed-out version of the practice. If such a stagnating meditation practice has at some level lost its tenderness of heart and profound inspiration, one might begin to find it pointless in the face of the magnitude of the problems in our world, and eventually give up. So, sufficient preparation for a level-three shamatha retreat is indispensable, to say the least!
Lama Alan has developed this flexible structure of outlining different levels of retreat not as a grading system, but as a reasonable and user-friendly way to help people who have lived in our contemporary age to so thoroughly adjust to what it means to be in retreat that over time it no longer feels like something drastic or intense.
The most important first step is to find contentment with being in retreat—being alone with one’s mind and body, free of major hedonic stimuli, without needing to rely upon conversation or social engagement to keep one inspired. This itself is not always easy, but we rejoice in the many retreatants in whom we have seen this transition take place over the first few months in retreat. That is the first step on a path to true flourishing.
At the CCR, we see ourselves as pioneers, as explorers. So, learning from our collective experience and, with hindsight, our mistakes, is part of the process. We are taking unprecedented steps in the creation of a contemplative culture in the West. But that means we don’t have ready-made roadmaps for everything we are doing. The breadths and depths of our compassionate motivation are something in which we can be confident, and we also continuously recognize that none of us is infallible. We are a work in progress and cannot simply follow in the tracks of others—even within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition—for we are facing unprecedented situations in the twenty-first century.
We know that we still have much to learn in helping retreatants navigate the effects of previous complex trauma and grief that emerge while in retreat, especially as these manifest deeply within the body and its subtle energy systems.
We know that life in retreat takes an enormous amount of dedication and that it is not for everyone. We also recognize—now that we have been in existence as a working CCR hermitage for our first five years—that incoming retreatants have a much better idea of what to expect and what not to expect from long-term retreat.
They know that it will not be easy, and that no one should get their hopes up for achieving shamatha within six to nine months, if that is counted from the beginning of entering a life of retreat in this day and age. Current retreatants understand that they will not be having regular in-person interviews with resident spiritual teachers, especially when those spiritual teachers are also immersed in full-time retreat themselves.
Incoming retreatants can trust that our marvelous caretaking team will be there to attend to their immediate needs and medical emergencies, and that our global team of psychologists will be available for both interim and sustained help if needed. And retreatants are aware that sometimes such enormous obstacles arise in the course of full-time practice—and life—that it might become necessary to leave retreat, whether to seek ongoing medical or professional assistance for a chronic personal issue, to care for a sick family member, to return to a committed relationship, and so on.
I wish to express my personal gratitude to our spectacular team of staff and volunteers, who have step-by-step streamlined systems that we had to put in place so swiftly and often in ad hoc ways within the first two years of retreat here at Miyo Samten Ling. Our hermitage caretaking system is so smooth now—thanks especially to Virginia Craft, Aaron Taylor, and Jon Mitchell—and this brings much reassurance to my own heart.
For readers who wish to understand more about the traditional relationship with the spiritual teacher, and how one can become closer to that mentor precisely through practicing what he or she has taught, I would encourage you to listen to the recent (August 2025) talk that I offered at our hermitage, “Calling the Guru from Afar,” which is available through the Seeds of Wisdom Library. It is crucial to understand that within our particular model of long-term retreat and hermitage life, one should not enter with any expectation of becoming close to the spiritual teacher through frequent conversations or personal interaction. Rather, in our model, oral instruction is offered primarily to our community as a group, and personal guidance from Lama Alan is done primarily through written correspondence. And the deepest form of relationship with the ultimate spiritual teacher occurs through practice itself, as the many great contemplative traditions of the world have taught. This was highlighted recently by Fr. Eric Haarer in his exquisite talk on “Forgotten Gems of Christian Mysticism.”
We are also delighted to announce the publication of two new books that will serve as textbooks, as it were, for our Center for Contemplative Research. These are Śamatha and Vipaśyanā: An Anthology of Pith Instructions, composed and translated by B. Alan Wallace and myself, and The Vital Essence of Dzogchen: A Commentary on Düdjom Rinpoché’s Advice for a Mountain Retreat, by B. Alan Wallace.
A natural prelude to the latter book was published last year, under the title of Dzokchen: A Commentary on Düdjom Rinpoché’s Illumination of Primordial Wisdom. The root texts and pith instructions contained in these three books are designed precisely for the kind of retreats taking place at the CCR, and readers can learn much about what we practice—at its depths—by studying these books and also the linked oral commentaries included in Śamatha and Vipaśyanā.
Careful readers will glimpse the variety of approaches to the practices of shamatha and vipashyana that appear across different lineages of Buddhist teaching, all of which have been validated through centuries of contemplative experience. The modern commentaries included in these books are intended to help readers navigate these apparent differences, and eventually to reach a sophisticated understanding that can be tested in one’s own dedicated practice.
For all the difficulties that long-term meditation retreat can entail, the vision of a contemplative path to irreversible transformation and the compassionate intentions that inspire such sustained practice eventually make the difficulties pale in comparison. But one needs to understand the nature of reality at subtler and subtler levels to actually see why such practice is so worthwhile from hour to hour, day to day.
If you feel drawn by such a challenging path, we invite you to read more about short- and long-term retreats at the CCR here. While all our cabins are currently booked for most of 2026, and long-term applications for retreats beginning in 2027 are already being considered, we always welcome new applications. There are many conditions that need to come together for a retreat to take place successfully, and the longer in advance one can prepare, the smoother and more meaningful the retreat can be.
