Spiritual Retreats
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007Spiritual retreats are not just for monks and hard-core yogis, and they don’t have to last for years.
Direct realization traditions, such as Kashmir Shaivism and Dzogchen, are largely populated by householders. That is, by people living in the work-a-day world with families and other responsibilities. As one of my teachers likes to joke: if you are a householder and go on a retreat for several years, you may have no house to hold when you get back!
The key to a retreat is that, for some period of time, you devote yourself 100% to dharma practice and to relaxing in that context. So even though you may also cook, take walks and lounge around during a retreat, it is always within the context of deepening your awareness of Reality. You are doing these things in an undistracted way to the best of your ability. When you become distracted, you are able to notice this more easily than if your condition were masked by the general distraction we call normal life.
In retreat, we get to taste our practice more deeply, develop greater awareness of the essence state, and we are more nakedly confronted with our actual condition as the noise of our usual lives subsides.
Good times to go on retreat are when:
you receive a new practice from your teacher and want to bond with it;
you feel the need for rejuvenating and reconnecting with your spiritual life;
you are genuinely curious about retreats and are ready to explore a deeper commitment to practice;
you have encountered some blockage in your sadhana, and your teacher recommends a retreat; or
you enter a particularly good time astrologically for a retreat and want to take advantage of this.
More advanced students may be asked to go on regular retreats by their teachers, and some practitioners continue to undertake retreats throughout their lives.
The prospect of even a very short retreat can cause a lot of fear in some people. The busyness and business of life help us to avoid taking responsibility for our loneliness, anxiety, anger, exhaustion and lack of fulfillment. In retreat, such avoidance is more difficult.
We need a little bit of courage and capacity to sit with our real feelings, to recognize our condition and to use our practice to turn the tide of karmic momentum.
It’s like when we start to do yoga or other movement after a long period of stagnation. We want to move, but we are resistant to encountering the real condition of our bodies and to working directly with that. Our desire to Self-recognize has to be a bit more forceful than our resistance. And we have to be willing to feel the stiffness and even pain in our bodies as we begin to lubricate ourselves with appropriate movement. Once we move past our resistance, we rediscover a fuller humanity and the enjoyment of being more fully alive.
Anandamayi Ma organized week-long retreats (Samyam Saptah) during which householders could enjoy and encounter a short amount of time dedicated 100% to spiritual practice. The week encompassed diet, daily routine, satsang, kirtan and meditation. Although these retreats were quite rigorous for your average householder, people loved them so much, the events continue to this day.
Ma also used to require periods of silence, or mouna, perhaps one day a week, from some of those living in her ashrams. This is also a kind of retreat.
A properly organized retreat can help us to directly recognize what it is we really are longing for in this life and to find the means and the courage to embrace that. In the process, we enhance our capacity to relax and receive real nourishment.
One of the hallmarks of a retreat for those in a beginning or intermediate stage of practice is that retreats have a definite plan. You know beforehand what practices you are going to do and how to structure in time for just living and getting more in tune with nature. You have been given advice about what to do if you run into roadblocks.
Having a definite plan and guidance or advice from a teacher allows us to use our real condition to discover more about our real condition. We are good at planning and filling up our time with activities. This is how we avoid Reality. So we use this capacity for structuring time in order to encounter Reality instead.
When I was in my early twenties, I went on a three day retreat in the middle of winter in upstate New York. The retreat was in a very small hut–not big enough to stand up in–on the side of a snow-covered mountain. The hut was heated with a kerosene stove. People from the group who owned the land brought food twice a day and left it outside.
I had no idea what to do on a retreat, and I had yet to meet my first teacher, so I didn’t have any practice to fall back on. In addition, the kerosene stove gave off fumes. So I spent the time in a stupor of sleepiness and anxiety.
If you have been instructed in some kind of mantra or meditation or ritual, you can take useful retreat days even if you don’t have a regular teacher. You can ask a more experienced friend how to structure a retreat. Or you can contact a local center in the tradition to which you feel most connected and ask for advice from a teacher there. Perhaps you have been going to classes or meditations. Don’t be afraid to ask.
Asking for basic guidance, and also understanding that a retreat is not about doing constant seated practice, are the keys. Just being is important, too. If you already have a teacher and feel a desire to experience retreat, you can ask your teacher for help structuring your time.
A retreat can last for a half-day, a day, a few days or longer. While there are definite spiritual retreats, you should always remember to take spiritual refreshment. Taking time to reconnect with nature and yourself should be a regular aspect of your day.
A good way to orient yourself to simple spiritual refreshment is to consider the double meaning of refreshment: as rest and as nourishment.
Spiritual refreshment is not work. It is not exercise. And it is not self-improvement. When you sit to meditate, walk in nature, breath in good air, gaze at the sky, enjoy uncontrived life, or read or listen to spiritual teachings, you are receiving real food. You can relax and relish this subtle food just as if you were eating a sumptuous meal or drinking in the most delicious elixir. Eventually, refreshment will become your moment-to-moment experience.
In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi
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