Painful, frustrating… and such small portions!
The problem is the word “retreat”. When people hear that you’re going on a “retreat”, they see it as a holiday—they’ll often envision some kind of spa, a place of relaxation and comfort, where you can pamper and indulge yourself.
A meditation retreat is many things. It is, at times: gratifying, frustrating, painful, serene, boring, illuminating. Relaxing, however… it is not.
About a month ago, I went on a 10-day Vipassana retreat, in a meditation centre in northeastern Victoria. It was my second time, after completing one in Japan in 2019. Even though that first retreat had a profound experience on me at the time, I hadn’t kept up a meditation practice, so the end-of-year break (the first one post-Covid restrictions) felt like the perfect opportunity to start afresh. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del on everyday reality and reboot into the New Year.
A great number of people these days have some experience with meditation, usually through guided meditations on apps like Headspace, and I’m sure those 15-20 minute a day habits can have a positive effect on those who keep them.
But the experience of being on retreat, meditating (or, at least, trying to meditate) for 8+ hours every day, for a week and a half, is a completely different beast. It’s not only different quantitatively, but also qualitatively.
Or, to put it another way: I don’t think it matters how many consecutive days of 15 minutes’ worth of meditation you manage; you will never experience what you can in just, say, 5 days of 500 minutes’ worth of meditation. I bet you could do a 70-year streak of quarter-hour sessions, and it still wouldn’t even be close.
The simplest way I can describe a Vipassana meditation retreat is: a boot camp for your mind. It’s an intensive training course to help you clear your thoughts and, if you work hard on it, allow you to become more sensitive to what is happening in your body, at all times; and, in doing so, hopefully helping you to live a less reactive, more intentional life.
Of course, that’s just my interpretation of it, and this is simply one variation of one form of meditation among many. Other disciplines are very different, and even people attending the same retreat may have come out with different perspective. As a Buddhist practice, there is obviously a more spiritual, metaphysical vocabulary available—lots of stuff about "releasing deep-rooted sankaras", "keeping silas", the Triple Gem, the Four Noble Truths, etc.
None of that really registered with me, to be honest; but, then again, it didn’t need to. At its core, the practice is all about training you to feel the sensations in your body and, in doing so, help you learn to control your mind.
That’s the goal, anyway. And it’s one that’s a lot easier to grasp intellectually that it is to truly feel.
To feel it, you really have to put yourself in a situation where you are meditating for an extended period of time, and meditations is your sole focus. Some people try to do a weekend or a 3-day-long retreat, and unfortunately, that might be a waste of time. It does feel like there is a wall that needs to be broken, and you only have the weapons to break it after 4 or 5 days of dedicated practice. Two or three days might be all pain, with no gain.
Oh and I do mean pain. A big part of the Vipassana method are the Group Sittings, joint meditation sessions where you are asked to sit for an hour without moving or changing position. If you’ve ever tried sitting motionless for any period of time, you’ll know that after 20 minutes or so, you’ll start feeling uncomfortable; after 45, you’ll be in agony; then every minute that passes is pure Deer Hunter jungle torture.
But that’s part of the training. It’s like the obstacle course that you must run through in order to develop a mind that can be sharp, sensitive and non-reactionary. The idea is to be able to observe any sensation in the body, no matter how strong or subtle, then break it down into its components, and train yourself not to react to it.
If you can sit there in obvious pain and not distance yourself from that pain; if you can just observe the pain, find its source, dissect it clinically, after a while, something strange happens—the pain starts to… disappear. Or rather, the discomfort, and the suffering, disappear.
Eventually, the goal is to apply those same principles to much more subtle sensations. To help your mind be aware of all those minor feelings of discomfort throughout the day, the micro-anxieties that lead us to our compulsive behaviours. Those times when life gets tough, or frustrating, or just plain boring, and we allow ourselves to react the way we always do. Whether it’s a tub of ice cream, or a cigarette, or pornography, or nail-biting, or a scroll through Instagram.
That’s why, as transformative as the retreat experience can be, it doesn’t mean anything unless you can continue the practice afterwards. And that’s the really challenging part.
To extend the boot camp analogy: unless you manage to apply what you learned and incorporate it into your daily life—to get up early, run those mental laps, do those mental push-ups, day in and day out—you won’t able to stay in top mental shape.
The odd paradox of meditation is that the people who would most benefit from it are often the ones least disposed to do it. A person with bouts of intense, crippling anxiety; or someone with such deep-seated anger issues that they are in the car, driving back from work, still fuming after someone cut them off in traffic on the way to work, 9 hours earlier… those are the kinds of people that could see the most obvious benefits.
I am not one those people. Luckily. And, I imagine, neither are many of the others at the retreat. Instead, I feel like I was there to try to make my life 10% better (in fact, I believe 10% Happier is the name of one of the most popular meditation apps): to make myself that little bit more present, more creative, more giving, more efficient. And to build positive habits that will continue to compound through time.
Relax? Nah, thanks. I can do that at the pub.