As most of you know, I have been on a meditation retreat for a month. The retreat experience is relatively new and unfamiliar to most of Western society. But it was commonly referenced in the Buddha’s teaching and still widely practiced in Buddhist countries where it was and is also known as the rains retreat. During the rainy seasons, monks were not welcome wandering around the flooded rice paddies messing up the newly planted beds, so they retired to the monasteries to meditate and the villagers committed to supplying food. In return, the monks offered teachings, meditations, and rituals.
Retreat time allowed monks to deepen their meditation practice by going into seclusion and removing themselves from the activities and influences of daily life. Today this includes separation from work, household duties, jobs, family pressures, community involvement, and input from the wider world - news, cell phones, computers, television, blogs, posts, papers, magazines, etc.
All this sensory deprivation from our everyday lives can be quite challenging. With fewer distractions, the mind has nothing to feed on but itself. As my meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg would say, the mind empties itself of its own content. So in the solitude of retreat life and meditation, the mind obligingly coughs up any and every memory, feeling, mood, belief, conversation, song - recently heard or decades old - it can think of, some of it to entertain, some of it to distract, and some of it to allow the airing and resolution to knotty and/or painful unresolved stuff buried under the mountain of trivial input.
What is interesting to me is that, while on retreat, I did not ruminate or obsess about the news all that much. It faded without the steady every day reinforcement. What persisted was all the uniquely personal unresolved stuff we all know so well. It often surfaced as quite challenging feelings, mind states, moods, beliefs, emotional darkness. Beneath the ruminations, it was intensely visceral. And then it would dissipate.
Much of the worst stuff our minds have to offer is kept in place by a thick layer of thinking, rationalizations, imaginings about what we would say or do. In the silence of retreat, the thinking weakens, sticky knots are loosened, and the bonds begin to fall around our feet. The hardest stuff emerges, threatens to overwhelm, and dissipates in the space of a day or so. We have gained some measure of freedom.
And it is this freedom from some of our deepest entrapments that allows us not to be so caught by the exhaustingly incessant external news. It triggers deeply held fears and beliefs that isolate us by catching on the rough edges of our vulnerable, unresolved deep past junkyard.
We may not have the ability to change the news but we always have the ability to change how we relate to it. MBSR grads will remember this. And the more balanced and resilient we can be, the better, healthier, and more effective our response will be.
Meditation teacher Shaila Catherine writing in her book Focused and Fearless (and excerpted in Wisdom Experiences’s "Joy of Seclusion," https://wisdomexperience.org/wisdom-article/joy-of-seclusion/ ) has this to say:
“... ‘seclusion' does not imply repression or denial; it is not a state of alienation, loneliness, or division. The seclusion that supports a meditation practice is rooted in wisdom and clarity. Knowing what leads to suffering, you wisely choose a path that leads to happiness. The Buddha addressed this point quite simply:
If, by giving up a lesser happiness,
One could experience greater happiness,
A wise person would renounce the lesser
To behold the greater.”"Sparked by this basic instinct toward happiness, we follow the trajectory of training that will eventually carry us beyond conceivable delights.
"The Buddhist teachings describe three kinds of seclusion: (1) physical aloneness that is experienced as we remove ourselves from complex social dynamics; (2) mental seclusion that describes the aloofness of the mind while it is absorbed in jhana [deep meditation] —this marks a separation from unwholesome states and sensory pleasures; and (3) liberation as detachment from the root causes of suffering. This implies a suspension of conceptual proliferations."...Physical solitude creates a temporary separation from the distractions and activities that fill daily life, but true external simplification involves more than renunciation of material possessions. It is a process that divests the heart of the activities and roles upon which personality relies. The Buddha suggested, “A bhikkhu resorts to a secluded resting place: the forest, the root of a tree, a mountain, a ravine, a hillside cave, a charnel ground, a jungle thicket, an open space, a heap of straw.” We could, of course, expand that list to include the modern option of a formal retreat center.
"At the rudimentary level, this detachment may be likened to a spiritual vacation. A retreat may be for any length of time, from a single day of silence to many years. It can be a relief to take time away from the exaggerated responsibilities of your routine. Most people need some degree of periodic solitude to learn to calm the anxious heart and quiet the distracted mind. Alternating time for inner retreat with time fully engaged with career, family, and social concerns makes for a balanced approach to the lay lifestyle. Ultimately, silence supports depth in meditation, but it is through our social interactions that our understanding matures and is tested. The Buddha’s life is an exemplary model for balancing seclusion with the compassionate engagement with society. There were periods in his ministry when he remained aloof from his disciples, and many times when he taught, led, and served the community.”
I read recently that our reactions of anger, anxiety, irritability, sadness, grief, horror, and overwhelm are actually quite appropriate reactions. They are understandable and very normal human feelings to what we see and hear. This is a time of horrible happenings. This is how human beings respond to horrible happenings - at least human beings with functioning hearts and minds.
Normal and appropriate as these reactions may be, they can unbalance us. And it is not healthy for us to be in extended unbalanced states.
Hence, retreats - and other forms of separating ourselves from the persistent irritation and assault of bad news. Retreats can help us restore balance. They also deepen the foundation and stability of that balance for increased resilience.
There are other means to those ends but they all involve some period of separating from the ordinary and extraordinary input of our lives.
As Shaila Catherine put it, "A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.”
One point I want to emphasize which may be obvious is that it is not just physical seclusion that is pointed to in the retreat idea. It is creating conditions in which mental and emotional seclusion can occur on a deep level. It is possible to find temporary seclusion of a deep sort in other circumstances such as a busy NYC street. The mind turns inward when conditions are right and can access the silence within any number of situations. But this kind of seclusion depends on a greater stability of mind that may be harder to find if the mind is stirred up to begin with.
So finding available paths and conditions to offer the mind this respite is becoming more and more critical to balancing the extremes of assault to our perceived safety and well-being.