There were many little nuggets of gold from the retreat I just sat that I would love to share with you. But two stand out in particular.
The first is that we often can’t tell the benefit of our practice in the here and now. I came home from the retreat exhausted by the packing and moving, by the early hours I keep on retreat, and by stopping to attend to a sick friend on the way home. It takes time to emerge from any retreat - concentration retreats even more so. But I felt a little at sea, a bit of “what’s it all about, Alfie?”
Then yesterday, I woke up and decided to have lunch with a friend rather than go on a rally. (No, I haven’t given up on rallies. I just took a break.) And as a pleasant lunch outside in the sunshine and breeze neared its end, I decided to spend the afternoon cleaning out my files. So I did. The process is still ongoing.
That’s when I knew the retreat had had a profound effect on my mind. If my mind is overstuffed, then the files are too. So it was both a relief and a joy to wade into the files on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. My mind delighted in the task of clearing out my physical space. (May it continue.) The best thing is that the files are in the garage so I could do this with doors open, breeze blowing by, and a beautiful sunny day in attendance.
The second little nugget happened this morning as I sat to meditate. We’ve been looking at the Four Noble Truths recently. The first noble truth says there is suffering. The Buddha understood that we don’t actually look at suffering if we can help it. We look away, distract ourselves, pretend it’s not happening, reach for food, our phones, tv programs, whatever distraction helps us ignore our suffering. The second noble truth says there are causes for suffering - namely attachment. Attachment to wanting things to be our own way, not wanting bad things, wanting good things, being deluded about what brings us happiness. The third noble truth says there is a path out of suffering. We’re not stuck, trapped, hopelessly mired in our own tangled net of attachment. The fourth noble truth says the Noble 8-Fold Path is the way out of suffering - wise view, wise intention, wise speech, wise action, wise action, wise livelihood, wise effort, wise mindfulness, wise concentration. We’re review these in a little more depth later.
As I approached my meditation bench, I realized I had forgotten to make tea which I habitually have before I sit to meditation. I decided if I didn’t remember to make it, perhaps I didn’t desire it so much and could go without. Then, as I sat, I remembered what had triggered my remembering the tea - a sensation in my arms and hands of placing the tea near my bench and reaching for it to drink. Then I became aware of a tingling in the tip of my tongue, then the sides of the tongue. The tongue had a physical memory of tea, desire manifested in the tingling. I was slightly annoyed by the distraction until I realized these sensations were not a distraction. They were a present moment manifestation of “desire.” I was being handed an opportunity to investigate “desire" right in the moment of its arising.
Some of you may remember from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction that desire rises out of the positive feeling tone we experience when we make contact with an experience that we like. In my case, it was the thought - or more specifically, the memory - of tea that led to the positive feeling and then to desire. The desire for tea increased to a craving of the tea which manifested in the physical memory of reaching for and tasting the tea. That led to memories of how to make tea, the calculation of how long it would take to make, the tea kettle, the tea bag, etc. The mind quickly reviewed the possibility of getting up from meditation to make tea. Frustrated in that desire by my determination to keep sitting, the mind began investigating memories of how long I had been making tea before meditation and realized there was a time before tea. For years, I would sit in the morning before making tea. The tea always came after meditation. So what I was looking at was a habit pattern created by desire and craving - a deeply engrained habit pattern based on years of repetition and satisfaction of that desire. The result was suffering when I didn’t have that tea.
That habit pattern contained the attachment the Buddha referred to as the cause of suffering in the second noble truth. As I continued to sit, I watched the sensations in the mouth lessen, disappear, then return again and disappear again. The desire weakened as well when my mind turned to the breath and the rest of the meditation process.
This spontaneous awareness and reflection too was a process strengthened by the retreat, I realized. Other little nuggets may continue to appear. Some will get lost in the tumult downstream but will alter the flow nevertheless. When we become aware of and investigate a negative habit pattern, we weaken the habit. When we practice, we strengthen the positive habit of training our minds and turning our trained minds to investigating what leads to suffering and what leads to the end of suffering in our lives.
Concentration meditation calms and steadies the mind. It sharpens the focus and trains the mind to stay on a single object of investigation for longer. The concentration object is often the breath although it doesn’t have to be. But training the mind to return again and again to a single object strengthens the capacity of the mind to engage in a more focussed way.
The purpose is not concentration for concentration’s sake although there is some of that as well. The purpose is to investigate how we meet the experiences of our lives with a better, sharper investigative tool - the concentrated mind. How do we relate to wanting something and not being able to have it? Are we aware when it is happening? Or conversely how do we relate to experiences that arise that we don’t want - an unpleasant encounter, a negative health diagnosis, burning our hand on a hot pan, hearing about adverse circumstances that affect our community or our country?
The steadiness and focus of the concentrated mind - one that is free of clutter - enables us to see more deeply and with greater clarity into how we relate to what we want, what we don’t want, what delusions persist. This greater clarity allows a calmer, more appropriate response to whatever arises that is not encumbered by the suffering of attachment.