8

A Quiet and Secluded Place: Going on Retreat

GUY ARMSTRONG

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI

What is the value of doing a long retreat, meaning at least a week or ten days devoted completely to practice and silence?

GUY ARMSTRONG: It’s important to the evolution of Dharma in traditionally non-Buddhist countries to make retreat opportunities available to people, because it seems that’s where the deepest understandings of the Buddha tend to get realized. When people make that kind of commitment and put that much time into retreat, it permanently shifts something in their worldview.

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: I’ve seen incredible transformations take place in retreat. It’s common at our center to do one-hundred-day retreats, and when people come out, I see noticeable shifts in their understanding and in how they are as human beings.

I don’t think I really understood what practice was until I went into retreat. When you meditate, you get an incredible flood of thoughts, emotions, and experiences. It can be quite intimidating. Retreat allows you to be with that mind longer, to really get to know it. In retreat, I started to understand my mind, to understand how to work with my experience. Above all, I learned how to find pleasure and enjoyment in my own mind.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: What retreat means can vary widely—in terms of the container, what’s being asked of the student, the amount of guidance they’re getting, the challenges they’re encountering, how those are handled, and so forth. Retreat encompasses a wide spectrum of experiences, but what comes to mind for me is the Buddha speaking of going to a quiet and secluded place. That’s so important.

Though retreat is often discussed as an advanced practice, certain types of retreat are a helpful way to encounter the Dharma in the beginning, when everything is so restless and agitated and we’re so easily hooked by things. Stepping away from that helps us to genuinely encounter the Dharma and get some sense of what practice actually is—to encounter our own mind in a way that’s a little bit more naked and transparent. Then as we continue with our practice, retreats become even more important, because we’re able to practice more deeply, more effectively. So the retreat time is better utilized.

In retreat, what you may have been suppressing in your daily life begins to bubble up to the surface and puts you in a position to process it. Can you get to that deep place without doing retreat?

GUY ARMSTRONG: A lot of people feel they’ve had transformative experiences just from meditating on a daily basis. I do believe that’s true, but there is another level of understanding and realization that comes from the silent retreat experience that isn’t available to most people in daily practice.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: For most people, stepping out of worldly life for a while is essential. The unceasing, moment-to-moment experience of practicing is precious. Often when people are ambivalent about what their motivation is and what their practice is about, intensive retreat clarifies that. It helps them to come back into direct contact with what is important to them and why they began practicing in the first place.

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: You come to the point where you’re able to bear witness to experiences you would continually distract yourself from if you weren’t in retreat. There is no substitute for immersing yourself in that kind of intensity. Consistent daily practice is important and wonderful, but the deep silence of retreat takes practice to another level.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: It’s interesting to compare what we mean when we refer to an intensive retreat. Elizabeth is talking about something longer than what we do. The sesshin is a unique form of intensive retreat, though. It is completely in silence, but it is a group retreat that follows a unified schedule that includes a work period and meetings with a teacher. They are generally a week long. Since we do them every month, people in residence at Zen Mountain Monastery would do a full week sesshin every month. In our tradition, though, we don’t do the kind of lengthier group and solo retreats you see more often in Vajrayāna and Vipassanā communities.

What is the difference between doing a long solitary retreat and a series of sesshins?

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: In the sesshin approach there is a kind of pulsing back and forth. You have a very demanding week of sitting within a very strict container. Then that releases a bit and people have to return to daily life, and then once again they return to sesshin. The moving back and forth can be quite awkward and troubling in the beginning. For me, it felt like everything would come apart after sesshin, but over time those boundaries begin to fall away and there’s continuity, a dissolution of the difference between retreat and not retreat.

Retreat, then, is not an escape from the world, because you have to go back.

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: I find that perception very humorous because retreat is the opposite of escape. It’s about no escape. When you go into retreat, everything you’ve been trying to avoid surfaces. So often we don’t have a very sane relationship with our mind. It’s all about what you want and what you don’t want rather than being there. Practice is about seeing that for what it is. And that is a challenging prospect.

GUY ARMSTRONG: It is. You get into a retreat setting, and you go through a period of homesickness. You’re missing your partner, your children, the comforts of home. You spend some time adjusting to the schedule and your body being unaccustomed to so much stillness.

There’s a pressure-cooker effect. You have nothing left to deal with than the mind at that point. While that simplicity is a kind of escape from the hassles of daily life, you are plunged into the maelstrom of the untrained mind, working with each kleśa as it arises.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: Those early experiences of struggle get settled, and then there is a comfort we can develop within retreat, which is not altogether a bad thing. We’re learning how to practice more effectively and in a more relaxed and refined way. Intensity is no longer necessarily grueling. But there is a danger in that refinement. Once the surface frictions no longer affect us, we need to discover a deeper level of motivation to genuinely practice rather than just stay on for the ride.

GUY ARMSTRONG: The quality of one-pointedness, which is hard to generate in daily life, is so strong in retreat that when something new comes into the present moment—such as a flash of anger or loneliness or despair—we can fully recognize it and form a relationship to it. Samādhi gives the mind the strength to form that relationship in a positive way, whereas in daily life the force of it might just overwhelm us.

When we become accustomed to retreat, can ego subvert retreat at that point?

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: The ego is extremely adept at holding on to experiences and thinking that that’s the practice. After I had been on retreat a while, I started to realize that the postures and the methods support practice, but the actual practice has much more to do with how I’m responding to my experience. How much of mind can I bear witness to? In the beginning it might be very little, but as we go on, it could become much more if we choose to really practice rather than cling to results. It’s not about an answer. It’s about the question keeping practice alive.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: Each of our traditions has forms, rituals, and liturgies, and it’s very easy, if not inevitable, to think it’s going to automatically do something to you. But it’s the subtle fabric of the mind, the nonmaterial aspects of spirit and motivation and all the habits of mind, that are the real stuff of retreat. A teacher can help us to penetrate to that, but it is up to us to notice whether we are actually getting to depth. That’s an ongoing process, because we’re really quite adept at fooling ourselves, even when we have the best of intentions.

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: I find it helpful to simply ask myself, “Am I practicing?” It becomes easier to discern whether we were there or not, because we become familiar with the quality of struggle and grasping, and the free and courageous quality of being with the mind. One of the beauties of retreat is being able to clearly discern that.

GUY ARMSTRONG: Once we get somewhat comfortable in doing the physical schedule, the hard part is staying alive to what’s happening in the mind—and that involves a lot of investigation, inquiry, and deep listening. I’ve been working with a suggestion from a Burmese teacher named Sayadaw U Tejaniya. He says to ask, “Is there greed, aversion, or delusion in the mind at this moment?” It’s all about how I’m relating to my experience in the moment. He says, greed is present if you want something else to be happening, aversion is present if you want something to stop happening, and delusion is present if you’re not in touch with what’s happening. If greed, aversion, and delusion aren’t so strong, then some of the factors of awakening are going to be there.

How do you avoid becoming unstable and terrified in retreat?

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: In sesshin we’re doing everything together, but there’s silence and no eye contact. Within this deep solitude is a real experience of Sangha, which provides a grounding so that you don’t become freaked out or spacey. If somebody is getting into trouble, throwing themselves into a pit, the teacher can help them.

We also have hermitages and people do solitary retreats that generally last a week. But we reserve those for people who have more experience, because you don’t have the Sangha there to direct you and you don’t have the access to the teacher. The Zen tradition has many stories of teachers and practitioners living in solitude and practicing for a long time by themselves, but that usually came after a period of communal practice.

GUY ARMSTRONG: It’s nothing out of the ordinary for fear to come up in retreat. In fact, it’s something we value, because normally in daily life people feel overwhelmed by their fear and don’t know how to find any space in relation to it. Seeing fear as another emotion is very liberating and an important part of retreat.

If at any point we feel someone’s fear is pushing them too close to the edge, we back them off the intensity of the schedule, encourage them to take more walks, have them interact with staff a bit more, and make sure that a teacher sees them every day for fifteen minutes or more.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: It’s important to determine whether someone has the stability to enter retreat. We only allow people whom we feel are ready to go deep with themselves to enter. No one should be pushed overly hard into retreat, by themselves or by others.

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: As retreat master, I am there to support somebody to work through extreme difficulties, which we’ve all experienced in retreat. These experiences are incredible opportunities to develop a new relationship to suffering.

In retreat we have the space to ask ourselves what it really is that we’re experiencing before we immediately close down around it. As you learn not to react with greed, aversion, and delusion, you start to see that maybe what you fear is something different than what you thought it was. Freaking out is an opportunity to let your attitude shift. If you can go into retreat with that in mind, it will help you. Otherwise you may take the approach of simply trying to manage your experience, as we so often do in our outside life.

Ironically, the restrictiveness of the retreat container provides the space where a question mark can leak in.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: Stravinsky said that within discipline we find spaciousness, liberty, and freedom. But that discipline must be held in a way that’s based in wisdom.

GUY ARMSTRONG: Retreat places us in a position to work with the painful parts as well as the sublime parts, and working with the painful parts is really what opens the door to compassion. You see the full impact of negative states on yourself, and then you look around and realize everybody is going through the same thing. Compassion emerges naturally.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: At a certain point, the realization may dawn that although you’ve left so-called regular life and entered a seemingly artificial environment, you are doing nothing more than living. It’s in a slightly more concentrated way, and there’s more emphasis on zazen, but it’s actually teaching us how to live our normal lives. It’s about actually living retreat as just another day of life.

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: The challenges turn out to be the same. Seeing this helps us to be more ordinary about our retreat and daily life.

Yet there is not a lot of encouragement to do this sort of thing. It’s seen as exotic and impractical. Do you have any advice about how to carve out time and money to go on retreat?

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: It depends on what your focus is. If your intention is to wake up, then you do have time to do it. If that’s not your intention, then you won’t.

GUY ARMSTRONG: Motivation is the central question, and it usually builds in a series of steps that begins with learning to meditate and progresses through lengthier and deeper periods. Most people, apart from parents with small children, seem to find the opportunity to do retreat once the motivation sets in. Even people who have a busy work life tend to get at least two weeks of vacation a year and can carve out some time.

Helping people find the time is mostly about helping them discover their own motivation and then letting it develop to the point where retreat seems like the sensible next step. And in terms of cost, a retreat can be pretty modest compared with most vacations.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: I’ve also been inspired to see people with small children, with full careers, with partners who aren’t practitioners—the whole gamut—find time to do retreat not just once but repeatedly throughout the year. And they do it in such a way that they find balance with their families. In fact, retreat can help us to establish priorities in our lives. You may learn to be more discerning about what you take on. You may become clearer about what the most important things are and give them the time they need. You understand why the great spiritual traditions regard simplicity as such an important virtue. I live in New York City, so I know what an uphill battle that can be in our culture, but living simply is always a choice.

The transition from retreat back to daily life can be challenging for many people. Is returning from retreat also an important part of retreat?

GUY ARMSTRONG: We often say at the end of retreats that the first half of your retreat is over, and the second half begins as you make the journey back home. It isn’t an easy journey most of the time, especially for people who are going through it early in their meditation career. You’ve slowed down but the world has maintained its fierce and brusque and often unkind pace. But the bumpiness tends to smooth itself out after a bit of time.

How do you not only survive the transition but also maintain continuity with the quality of the retreat?

GUY ARMSTRONG: We long for the beauty of the retreat experience and that reminds us of the potential of our human nature. It builds motivation, even urgency. It may cause us to adjust our life to make the qualities we cultivate in retreat have a bigger place in our lives. It may also cause us to go into retreat more often.

ELIZABETH MATTIS-NAMGYEL: The longing is quite beautiful. It’s an expression of buddha nature. We may judge ourselves harshly at times for not being as connected to it as we would like, but when we feel that longing it shows how truly connected we are. As retreat begins to mature, our feelings of being isolated can decrease. We feel more engaged with life itself, so returning to everyday life from retreat has less contrast—it’s just living your life, as Shugen said. And yet there is some difference. Dudjom Rinpoche said that while it’s good to do solitary retreats, it’s also really important to mingle in the world.

GEOFFREY SHUGEN ARNOLD, SENSEI: It’s necessary to leave retreat so we can dissolve the duality. An old master said we need to test our understanding against the sutras. We also need to test our retreat against life itself, where the messiness will challenge our composure and compassion. The retreat is the extraordinary in some sense; we need to bring it to the familiar, and vice versa. As Master Dōgen said, we need to harmonize the inner and outer. Gaining insight on the cushion is the easy part. Harmonizing that with how we actually live our lives is the hardest part. There’s always a lag, it seems, between what we’ve understood to be true and what we’re able to embody.