46 RETREATS

We can jump-start or greatly support our daily meditation practice by participating in meditation retreats. I have spent many months and years in silent meditation retreats in retreat centers and monasteries in Asia and the United States. I love meditation retreats. If you haven’t attended one and you have the means to take a few days or weeks out of your life, I encourage you to give it a try.1

A silent retreat in my tradition typically involves a structured schedule of alternating sitting and walking meditations, along with teacher guidance, dialogue, and hopefully some access to nature. All your meals are taken care of, usually, and you don’t have anything to do except attend the meditation sessions and perform a work meditation (like washing pots) to help the retreat center function smoothly.

Why are retreats so valuable? For many reasons: First, they take us out of our typical routines so we don’t have to employ the busy, responsible, to-do-list-checking, worrying, planning, taking-care-of-life mind. For me, the moment I step into a retreat center, I relax. I don’t have to do anything except meditate, and with that recognition comes a freedom in my psyche that allows me to devote myself fully to the practice.

Second, it allows us to practice for extended periods of time. When we meditate daily (or dailyish) at home, we often do so for short periods. Although meditating for even a few minutes every day is valuable, when we have an extended period of practice, our concentration builds, and, as I talked about earlier, our minds have the chance to stabilize. Meditating for longer periods also allows for a depth of experience and insight to occur. When we are in the midst of our daily life and our ordinary concerns, we don’t usually have the time to sustain our attention and cultivate a robust awareness.

The sheer number of hours spent meditating on retreat allows our concentration to build, and then we find our capacity to be aware strengthens. This stronger awareness, in turn, can allow a healing process to happen, as we have the space and time for emotions to move through us. We can get perspective on our personal challenges when we bring awareness and compassion to them. We also may find insights about the world arising from this concentrated mind. All of this understanding needs time and continuity of practice to develop.

Throughout this book I have shared how natural awareness can ripen over time: our awareness intensifies, prolongs, and becomes stronger and more refined at the same time. In longer retreats we can often find ourselves living in a natural awareness state for hours or days. We likely flow in and out of it, but the possibility of being in it is always present. So the extended periods offered by retreats are quite valuable.

But retreats can also be quite hard, and most people who haven’t been on one are usually afraid to try it. Many people have told me flat out that they don’t think they can do it. This apprehension is very common and quite natural, and I would encourage you not to let it get in your way. Those same people almost always describe their first retreat as being one of the most important things they have ever done in their lives, in spite of it being hard. Sometimes we meet our demons on retreats (loneliness, restlessness, fear, life challenges, and so on), but with teacher support and the skills of meditation, we can also contact internal resources we never knew we had. ABC News anchor Dan Harris said after his first retreat, “It was the longest, most exquisite high of my life, but the hangover came first.”2

Personally, I’m a retreat junkie. I crave them. When my daughter was born, I stopped attending retreats for a few years because I didn’t want to leave her for extended periods of time. When she turned five, I went to my first retreat since I was pregnant. And I’ll tell you, when I walked through the door of the retreat center, I started to cry, because I felt like I had returned home. Yes, to a place I love, but also to the part of me that is deeply at home in retreat, the place where I grow and learn and heal and dream and vision, a place where I can make myself whole.