Reflections from Deep Retreat

Periodically, we ask our long-term retreatants in Crestone for anonymous feedback about their experiences in retreat. Their stirring responses offer a rare window into the transformation and insights that are possible through dedicated mind training. 

Today, we share some of these reflections from long-term retreatants, whose experiences are made possible through your generous support.

To address the existential crises of the twenty-first century and turn toward a truly life-sustaining society, humanity needs the experience of mental balance that can come from the internal cultivation of genuine well-being, which gradually loosens the allure of a life dominated by fleeting distractions. CCR retreatants train and collaborate to help make this possible and available to our world, in our time.

 

 

One CCR meditator shares that extensive practice of mind-training techniques can generate a profound shift in needs:

 

“[I realized] how material desires, or external needs, are diminished when the mind is calm and when it knows itself… How simply we can live when there is genuine inner contentment and fulfillment.”

 

And another described retreat as a catalyst for sanity and serenity:

 

A journey towards healing and wisdom, through which one develops mental sanity and serenity, that progressively reveals deeper and truer aspects of one’s being and of reality itself, untapped resources (like courage, fortitude, patience), and an opening of the heart to depths of love and compassion previously unconceivable. A journey through which, inevitably, revolutionary emotional and psychological transformation takes place, catalyzing changes in all aspects of one’s life and relationships.

 

Retreat is not easy. Being alone with one’s mind in meditation for 5–12 hours every day, as CCR retreatants are, can unearth challenges to be faced and released. Retreat is thus an opportunity to break lifelong patterns of rumination:

 

Retreat has helped me become less convinced by the heartbreaking stories about my life that have been stuck on a superhighway of habitual rumination. It is easier now to recognize these same stories and avoid their hooks. The same feels true for mental afflictions in general, including the oscillation between anxiety and depression (with or without the storyline) that has created a baseline for experience throughout much of my life.

Without getting wrangled into their seemingly static stories, greater relaxation is accomplished—for without the exhaustion of gripping so tightly to these afflictions, I feel increasingly more relaxed. (It’s funny how the mind so badly wants ground that it will stand on hot coals or shards of glass in order to obtain any variety of familiar comfort!) Increased letting go encourages a deeper relaxation; with a deeper relaxation comes a greater acceptance and, therefore, transformation.

No longer being held onto so tightly, afflictions dynamically arise and release on their own, without my need to interfere or try to fix them.

 

Some contemplatives-in-training have found that their time in isolation positively transformed their external and interactive capacities:

 

[I’ve experienced an] emotional evolution, or revolution, of uncovering the potential for boundless love, compassion, and equanimity you never knew you had.

_____

I’ve become a little quieter and more thoughtful, more grateful and more loving.

_____

I can perceive a more equanimous and patient way of dealing with adversities on a daily basis, that turns into a more peaceful mind and state of being.

 

And when asked what their most significant insight had been, another retreatant described a dawning understanding of inseparability:

 

The knowledge that the primordial, true nature of all beings is Love (unceasing, uncreated, without a giver or a receiver, boundaries or divisions) inseparable from Emptiness (the formless creative force that is all forms).

That in this Love/Emptiness there is no separation, no difference between one and others. Knowing all living beings as manifestations of Love in action/form, opens you to experience profound compassion and gives rise to true equanimity.

 

 

Though the mission to fathom the mind and heal the world is long-term by nature, our retreatants are plumbing the possibilities here and now.

Thank you so much for nourishing the potential for the CCR to share contemplative methods and findings. In doing so, you move the world one step closer to a new era of human flourishing.