I had nothing better to do, so I decided to also go read Shekinah’s medium post. I don’t think you did anything wrong (except maybe get in the habit of doing some foreplay?), but I do think that Shekinah was incredibly unprepared for that level of retreat intensity. Having your first retreat as a beginner meditator be a month-long where they ask you to do things like a 16-hour yaza is likely to be… explosive. I think you guys should either spell out more clearly the training you do on your website, or increase the minimum experience level of the people you’ll accept, a prior 10-day retreat like goenka’s might be a good start.
And as always, shame is a pattern of body sensations, to be seen as empty and impermanent just like everything else...
> I think you guys should either spell out more clearly the training you do on your website, or increase the minimum experience level of the people you’ll accept
Data point: this was my (much milder) experience at MAPLE, OAK’s parent org. I thought it would be too challenging for me, they assured me it would be fine, it was indeed much too challenging for me.
I read your blog post, and I think part of the challenge was the lack of an appropriate framework through which to see the structure of the retreat, which they really should have given you. For instance, you’re supposed to be meditating during the busywork you do, because eventually you’re supposed to enter a meditative state during all parts of everyday life. Once you can enter some state during sitting meditation, you try it in walking meditation, then you try it with a mindless task like sweeping the floor, then with a slightly more involved task, until you get to doing everything in a meditative state, and life itself becomes your meditation.
Another thing is that intellectual progress is not the point of a meditation retreat, you’re not supposed to think through your issues, you’re supposed to be observing the bare reality of your senses in intimate details, preferably from the time you wake up until the time you lose consciousness at night with unwavering focus. The discomfort also serves a purpose: if you observe the feelings of discomfort with interest, and completely let go of any expectation that they will get better, the discomfort changes in nature, and the pain stops being a problem.
It’s a real shame that some retreat centers have a cultural aversion to explaining anything to participants. Maybe it comes from zen, which uses the state of confusion and uncertainty as a teaching tool, but I’ve seen it happen in other retreats (like Goenka’s) too, and it really doesn’t mesh well with a rationalist view.
you’re supposed to be observing the bare reality of your senses in intimate details, preferably from the time you wake up until the time you lose consciousness at night with unwavering focus.
Wow I think they did even worse at that. I didn’t emphasize this because it wasn’t a big pain point for me relative to being cold and hungry, but the meditation instruction was absolutely unhelpful for me (and I’ve gotten helpful instruction elsewhere, so it isn’t just a me thing, although clearly it works better for some people).
> if you observe the feelings of discomfort with interest, and completely let go of any expectation that they will get better, the discomfort changes in nature, and the pain stops being a problem.
I understand that there are ways this can work really well for people but jesus christ the failure modes on that are numerous and devastating.
I understand that there are ways this can work really well for people but jesus christ the failure modes on that are numerous and devastating.
I really agree with this. The reason spiritual communities can go more quickly and more disastrously off the rails is because they are aiming to tinker with the rules by which we live at a really fundamental level, whereas most organizations generally opt to work on top of a kind of cultural base operating system.
I would generally find it unwise to tinker at all with one’s operating system except that our cultural operating system seems so unable to address some really really huge and pressing problems including, seemingly to me, all of x-risk.
I think part of what the rationalist community has done well (that incidentally I think EA has done less well) is be willing to discard some of the cultural operating system we inherited, in a deliberate and goal-oriented way.
Just noting here that Elizabeth wasn’t at one of MAPLE’s retreats (from what I understand; I’d never set foot on MAPLE at the time of her visit). MAPLE hosts a silent meditation week about once a month. The rest of the weeks are called Responsibility Weeks. While the residents are expected to meditate throughout the day during these Weeks (but it’s really hard to because they have to use computers and stuff), guests are not expected to. Guests can just experience a different way of living and being.
MAPLE has a handful of ‘jock hippies’. Jock hippies believe things turn out all right generally. Their visceral experience is embodied. They often experience pleasurable sensations. They’re happy despite a lot of turmoil. They like walking barefoot through nature, doing vigorous forms of exercise, and interacting with strangers.
Elizabeth was on the phone with one such person, who explained things to her in a way that failed to comprehend a more typical rationalist way of experiencing the world.
But it was good of Elizabeth to come and teach MAPLE something new, and MAPLE is always learning how to better engage with their guests. There are heated debates about this where people get passionate about giving guests a more comfortable experience vs. giving guests a more monastic experience. There is always a tension here, but I do think it’s worth MAPLE understanding how to treat different people and know where they’re coming from.
MAPLE’s ‘demographic’ is one of the most diverse (culturally) that I have seen (for something that is super niche and not mainstream or well-funded), and it brings up a lot of complex scenarios. Each different cultural demographic uses language and communication in different ways, and so lots of communication errors are possible. I believe trial and error learning is needed to grow in this area.
But it would be nice if there were a way to feel more resolution with Elizabeth in particular. I will consider it myself, but, Elizabeth, if you wanted to let me know what would be beneficial for making things right, that would also be helpful.
> “There are heated debates about this where people get passionate about giving guests a more comfortable experience vs. giving guests a more monastic experience”
This seems irrelevant to my point that the experience was not accurately described (or rather was, but then was countermanded).
> “Elizabeth was on the phone with one such person, who explained things to her in a way that failed to comprehend a more typical rationalist way of experiencing the world. ”
I do not like the way you are pinning this on me being a weirdo. Living in a barely heated retreat that restricts food and sleep is the marked choice here, and if someone is incapable of noticing that is bad for some people they probably shouldn’t be the one handling inquiries from potential visitors.
> Just noting here that Elizabeth wasn’t at one of MAPLE’s retreats (from what I understand; I’d never set foot on MAPLE at the time of her visit). MAPLE hosts a silent meditation week about once a month. The rest of the weeks are called Responsibility Weeks. While the residents are expected to meditate throughout the day during these Weeks (but it’s really hard to because they have to use computers and stuff), guests are not expected to. Guests can just experience a different way of living and being.
This is inaccurate. I was indeed not at a formal retreat, but we visitors were following the same schedule as the residents for the first (several days? week?), until we complained. This schedule was similar to the one described on MAPLE’s current website as a responsibility week and included many hours of meditation per day, the timing of which restricted sleep to (6.5) hours if one could fall asleep immediately after the last meditation and wake up moments before the first one. (which I definitely can’t do). The 4 hours dedicated to work were not free time for us, I think probably we had more chores? I definitely wasn’t allowed to nap during them. When I first deviated from this schedule people definitely noticed and pushed for me to adhere to it, although some of that was relaxed later in the visit.
> But it was good of Elizabeth to come and teach MAPLE something new, and MAPLE is always learning how to better engage with their guests
I have no way of knowing what goes on inside MAPLE but this has not been evident in any of their engagement with me since, and I’m generally grossed out by the framing of “oh it all worked out because we learned from it”.
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.
I had nothing better to do, so I decided to also go read Shekinah’s medium post. I don’t think you did anything wrong (except maybe get in the habit of doing some foreplay?), but I do think that Shekinah was incredibly unprepared for that level of retreat intensity. Having your first retreat as a beginner meditator be a month-long where they ask you to do things like a 16-hour yaza is likely to be… explosive. I think you guys should either spell out more clearly the training you do on your website, or increase the minimum experience level of the people you’ll accept, a prior 10-day retreat like goenka’s might be a good start.
And as always, shame is a pattern of body sensations, to be seen as empty and impermanent just like everything else...
> I think you guys should either spell out more clearly the training you do on your website, or increase the minimum experience level of the people you’ll accept
Data point: this was my (much milder) experience at MAPLE, OAK’s parent org. I thought it would be too challenging for me, they assured me it would be fine, it was indeed much too challenging for me.
I read your blog post, and I think part of the challenge was the lack of an appropriate framework through which to see the structure of the retreat, which they really should have given you. For instance, you’re supposed to be meditating during the busywork you do, because eventually you’re supposed to enter a meditative state during all parts of everyday life. Once you can enter some state during sitting meditation, you try it in walking meditation, then you try it with a mindless task like sweeping the floor, then with a slightly more involved task, until you get to doing everything in a meditative state, and life itself becomes your meditation.
Another thing is that intellectual progress is not the point of a meditation retreat, you’re not supposed to think through your issues, you’re supposed to be observing the bare reality of your senses in intimate details, preferably from the time you wake up until the time you lose consciousness at night with unwavering focus. The discomfort also serves a purpose: if you observe the feelings of discomfort with interest, and completely let go of any expectation that they will get better, the discomfort changes in nature, and the pain stops being a problem.
It’s a real shame that some retreat centers have a cultural aversion to explaining anything to participants. Maybe it comes from zen, which uses the state of confusion and uncertainty as a teaching tool, but I’ve seen it happen in other retreats (like Goenka’s) too, and it really doesn’t mesh well with a rationalist view.
Wow I think they did even worse at that. I didn’t emphasize this because it wasn’t a big pain point for me relative to being cold and hungry, but the meditation instruction was absolutely unhelpful for me (and I’ve gotten helpful instruction elsewhere, so it isn’t just a me thing, although clearly it works better for some people).
> if you observe the feelings of discomfort with interest, and completely let go of any expectation that they will get better, the discomfort changes in nature, and the pain stops being a problem.
I understand that there are ways this can work really well for people but jesus christ the failure modes on that are numerous and devastating.
I really agree with this. The reason spiritual communities can go more quickly and more disastrously off the rails is because they are aiming to tinker with the rules by which we live at a really fundamental level, whereas most organizations generally opt to work on top of a kind of cultural base operating system.
I would generally find it unwise to tinker at all with one’s operating system except that our cultural operating system seems so unable to address some really really huge and pressing problems including, seemingly to me, all of x-risk.
I think part of what the rationalist community has done well (that incidentally I think EA has done less well) is be willing to discard some of the cultural operating system we inherited, in a deliberate and goal-oriented way.
Just noting here that Elizabeth wasn’t at one of MAPLE’s retreats (from what I understand; I’d never set foot on MAPLE at the time of her visit). MAPLE hosts a silent meditation week about once a month. The rest of the weeks are called Responsibility Weeks. While the residents are expected to meditate throughout the day during these Weeks (but it’s really hard to because they have to use computers and stuff), guests are not expected to. Guests can just experience a different way of living and being.
MAPLE has a handful of ‘jock hippies’. Jock hippies believe things turn out all right generally. Their visceral experience is embodied. They often experience pleasurable sensations. They’re happy despite a lot of turmoil. They like walking barefoot through nature, doing vigorous forms of exercise, and interacting with strangers.
Elizabeth was on the phone with one such person, who explained things to her in a way that failed to comprehend a more typical rationalist way of experiencing the world.
But it was good of Elizabeth to come and teach MAPLE something new, and MAPLE is always learning how to better engage with their guests. There are heated debates about this where people get passionate about giving guests a more comfortable experience vs. giving guests a more monastic experience. There is always a tension here, but I do think it’s worth MAPLE understanding how to treat different people and know where they’re coming from.
MAPLE’s ‘demographic’ is one of the most diverse (culturally) that I have seen (for something that is super niche and not mainstream or well-funded), and it brings up a lot of complex scenarios. Each different cultural demographic uses language and communication in different ways, and so lots of communication errors are possible. I believe trial and error learning is needed to grow in this area.
But it would be nice if there were a way to feel more resolution with Elizabeth in particular. I will consider it myself, but, Elizabeth, if you wanted to let me know what would be beneficial for making things right, that would also be helpful.
Noting that I do not believe this is an accurate description of my experience but super do not feel like arguing it here.
I’m still mad about this, so:
> “There are heated debates about this where people get passionate about giving guests a more comfortable experience vs. giving guests a more monastic experience”
This seems irrelevant to my point that the experience was not accurately described (or rather was, but then was countermanded).
> “Elizabeth was on the phone with one such person, who explained things to her in a way that failed to comprehend a more typical rationalist way of experiencing the world. ”
I do not like the way you are pinning this on me being a weirdo. Living in a barely heated retreat that restricts food and sleep is the marked choice here, and if someone is incapable of noticing that is bad for some people they probably shouldn’t be the one handling inquiries from potential visitors.
> Just noting here that Elizabeth wasn’t at one of MAPLE’s retreats (from what I understand; I’d never set foot on MAPLE at the time of her visit). MAPLE hosts a silent meditation week about once a month. The rest of the weeks are called Responsibility Weeks. While the residents are expected to meditate throughout the day during these Weeks (but it’s really hard to because they have to use computers and stuff), guests are not expected to. Guests can just experience a different way of living and being.
This is inaccurate. I was indeed not at a formal retreat, but we visitors were following the same schedule as the residents for the first (several days? week?), until we complained. This schedule was similar to the one described on MAPLE’s current website as a responsibility week and included many hours of meditation per day, the timing of which restricted sleep to (6.5) hours if one could fall asleep immediately after the last meditation and wake up moments before the first one. (which I definitely can’t do). The 4 hours dedicated to work were not free time for us, I think probably we had more chores? I definitely wasn’t allowed to nap during them. When I first deviated from this schedule people definitely noticed and pushed for me to adhere to it, although some of that was relaxed later in the visit.
> But it was good of Elizabeth to come and teach MAPLE something new, and MAPLE is always learning how to better engage with their guests
I have no way of knowing what goes on inside MAPLE but this has not been evident in any of their engagement with me since, and I’m generally grossed out by the framing of “oh it all worked out because we learned from it”.
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.