Just so you know though it was actually a 7-day meditation retreat within a one-month stay at the monastic community (and for the non-retreat weeks of the program we spend time meeting with each other, using computers, going shopping for groceries and such, in addition to 1-2 hours sitting each morning and evening). It’s true that the residents did a long yaza on one night of the retreat but it wasn’t required, though yes still quite a lot for someone who hasn’t sat a retreat before.
It was an intense retreat, and it’s true that Shekinah didn’t have prior retreat experience. One of the things that we’ve changed since then is making it more difficult and explicit for folks to enter the more intense parts of the training. But it’s complicated… the most intense retreats in my experience are the ones that are sublime and simple and don’t involve any big experiences at all but just open you to something so simple that you can’t ever quite forget it. You never really know what that’s going to happen for someone, and in any “consent” process most everyone will say yes they want to do this, but the aftermath of such happiness can leave one’s carefully arranged life in disarray.
This is one reason I think it’s so valuable to live full-time in spiritual community while doing periodic retreat, but as we are learning with Shekinah and others, it’s difficult to know what to do when folks come and have quite powerful experiences and then decide later that it was all a big trick of some sort. The grief and sadness that arises in this case is just enormous. You feel as if you’ve been tricked into believing, just for a moment, that everything you ever dreamed of is completely feasible, only to have it ripped out from underneath you upon returning to the heaviness of day-to-day drudgery. Then people get mad. What to do? Sign a disclaimer? Require people to renounce their whole lives before starting the training? It’s so hard. We do have a way to do this now but it’s such a band-aid. Would love to write/discuss more on this.
Ah, I see, if it was just 7 days of actual retreat then this is much more reasonable, I’m glad you clarified. Regarding the post-retreat crash into daily life, the thing that worked on me to help me deal with those crashes was to hear someone say “look, a retreat environment is a very special circumstance, you’ll get to places in your practice that you couldn’t get to with a daily 1 or 2 hours of practice, revelations that you are sure to be permanent will end, and once the retreat ends your practice will fall back down, but it will fall to a better level than pre-retreat. Over the years and the retreats, you’ll eventually get to a place where daily life itself becomes the practice, and then you’ll live your life from a place of grace.”
I can definitely see the immense benefits of a live-in spiritual community, but I think it might also create an artificial divide between “normal life” and the spiritual life. It might make people believe that they require a community to achieve insight, instead of the community merely being very supportive. You can perfectly well do walking meditation while shopping at walmart, and you can do metta while looking at your crazy boss. I remember crying of joy when I realized that queues, traffic jams, being put on hold on the phone, etc. no longer had the power to bother me, all these were simply opportunities for practice. Shinzen Young in particular is really great with this framing of “Life as Practice”, and I think it’s doing marvels to minimize the post-retreat crash, because, in effect, the retreat never ends, it just gets a bit more challenging. There’s also the fact that people have much more free time than they believe, I’ve personally managed a 4h/day practice in normal daily life, it just required some sacrifices. So unless I’m misunderstanding your community, it might be that people are getting the impression that it’s impossible to get awakened without renouncing their whole lives, yet impossible is very different from merely quite hard.
Yeah thank you for the note.
Just so you know though it was actually a 7-day meditation retreat within a one-month stay at the monastic community (and for the non-retreat weeks of the program we spend time meeting with each other, using computers, going shopping for groceries and such, in addition to 1-2 hours sitting each morning and evening). It’s true that the residents did a long yaza on one night of the retreat but it wasn’t required, though yes still quite a lot for someone who hasn’t sat a retreat before.
It was an intense retreat, and it’s true that Shekinah didn’t have prior retreat experience. One of the things that we’ve changed since then is making it more difficult and explicit for folks to enter the more intense parts of the training. But it’s complicated… the most intense retreats in my experience are the ones that are sublime and simple and don’t involve any big experiences at all but just open you to something so simple that you can’t ever quite forget it. You never really know what that’s going to happen for someone, and in any “consent” process most everyone will say yes they want to do this, but the aftermath of such happiness can leave one’s carefully arranged life in disarray.
This is one reason I think it’s so valuable to live full-time in spiritual community while doing periodic retreat, but as we are learning with Shekinah and others, it’s difficult to know what to do when folks come and have quite powerful experiences and then decide later that it was all a big trick of some sort. The grief and sadness that arises in this case is just enormous. You feel as if you’ve been tricked into believing, just for a moment, that everything you ever dreamed of is completely feasible, only to have it ripped out from underneath you upon returning to the heaviness of day-to-day drudgery. Then people get mad. What to do? Sign a disclaimer? Require people to renounce their whole lives before starting the training? It’s so hard. We do have a way to do this now but it’s such a band-aid. Would love to write/discuss more on this.
Ah, I see, if it was just 7 days of actual retreat then this is much more reasonable, I’m glad you clarified. Regarding the post-retreat crash into daily life, the thing that worked on me to help me deal with those crashes was to hear someone say “look, a retreat environment is a very special circumstance, you’ll get to places in your practice that you couldn’t get to with a daily 1 or 2 hours of practice, revelations that you are sure to be permanent will end, and once the retreat ends your practice will fall back down, but it will fall to a better level than pre-retreat. Over the years and the retreats, you’ll eventually get to a place where daily life itself becomes the practice, and then you’ll live your life from a place of grace.”
I can definitely see the immense benefits of a live-in spiritual community, but I think it might also create an artificial divide between “normal life” and the spiritual life. It might make people believe that they require a community to achieve insight, instead of the community merely being very supportive. You can perfectly well do walking meditation while shopping at walmart, and you can do metta while looking at your crazy boss. I remember crying of joy when I realized that queues, traffic jams, being put on hold on the phone, etc. no longer had the power to bother me, all these were simply opportunities for practice. Shinzen Young in particular is really great with this framing of “Life as Practice”, and I think it’s doing marvels to minimize the post-retreat crash, because, in effect, the retreat never ends, it just gets a bit more challenging. There’s also the fact that people have much more free time than they believe, I’ve personally managed a 4h/day practice in normal daily life, it just required some sacrifices. So unless I’m misunderstanding your community, it might be that people are getting the impression that it’s impossible to get awakened without renouncing their whole lives, yet impossible is very different from merely quite hard.