Reflections on the Retreat and on the Path

About aspiration and longing, being on retreat, listening to talks, meditation practice, emotions and the path. (This is the Introductory Talk for the Boundless Heart Retreat)

So I'd very much like to welcome everybody here. A really, really warm welcome to Gaia House and to this retreat. And especially if you're new, if this is your first time, I really hope that you can feel, really feel, how very, very welcome you are here, and that that communicates. Just listening to Chris speaking so beautifully ... It's funny, teaching so much and living here, it could be easy to take all this for granted. Listening to Chris, and the reminder of what's actually obvious to me, but if you're new may not be obvious to you, of just how much goodness there is here. As Chris said, it's a safe place. There's goodness, there's generosity, there's kindness saturating everything that this place is about. And that's something really precious in this world, really precious. It feels to me quite rare. So I feel very privileged to be here, and privileged to be with you in this retreat, in this space, in this space of kindness, space of generosity, space of safety. There's a preciousness and a privilege to all that. There's preciousness and privilege to this whole movement that we're undertaking together to be on retreat.

I hope that it's possible to have a sense that your coming here, and your being here, and your choosing to be here is a gift that you're giving to yourself. It's so easy to overlook that. Can you see this is something absolutely beautiful that we are giving to ourselves? And through giving it to ourselves, we are giving it to the world. It's a gift of kindness, and actually that's all that practice is, ultimately speaking -- kindness to ourselves, and kindness to the world, in the deepest possible sense. Can I feel that? Can I let that in? Can I open to that perspective of what practice is, that when I relate to meditation, to being on retreat, to practice, to whatever, it's rooted in that perspective? So easily it goes into something else -- it's about self-improvement or something, and we lose touch with that underpinning of what all this is really about.

Then there is this ancient tradition. Probably -- almost definitely, I would say -- the tradition of going on retreat, putting oneself in a different environment, is probably older than history, goes back to prehistory, pre--written records, certainly. This is something that human beings have been doing from day one. Lost in the mists of time, this impulse, this movement, calling, feeling called to lay the busyness aside for a period, and to quieten, to let things quieten for a time, and possibly to open to something else, possibly. Maybe to answer the calling of what we feel might be possible for ourselves in this existence -- even if I don't know what that is; I just sense that something else is possible. And to ask, to ask very deep questions of life and of existence. All this has been going on since before anyone even remembers.

Now, I'm aware, I've put that out, and already we're in dangerous territory. Already that's complicated. I don't know if you can sense that. It probably lands, what I've just said, in different places in this hall. We're seventy-something people in here. How did that land? How does it land hearing that about this time together? What's my relationship with this whole idea of being on retreat, and this whole idea of making a container like that? Maybe more importantly, what is a helpful way for me to relate to this idea of being on retreat? That's probably the more important question. What's a helpful way for me to relate to this idea of being on retreat?

Very often as human beings, it's really helpful to sanctify something, to make something holy, to set it apart and then step into that, to create something in our relationship with something. That can be extremely potent and important for us. And sometimes it's really important to not make things special. So which? What? Special or not special? What's helpful? Do I know myself enough? So if I'm making this special, if my heart and my eyes and my relationship with all this is to sanctify, to make it special, to make it holy, then now I'm entering something tonight. Now here's a sacred space. Here is this crucible, this adventure that I'm walking into. Here's my time of dedication, my time of surrendering, my time of searching. I give myself to that searching.

And it's not special at all. Life goes on. We'll be sitting, and walking, and shuffling around, and eating, and going to the toilet, and sleeping, and eating again, and listening, and being quiet. Sometimes we make things special in a way that's not helpful for us. So I don't know. Do you understand what I'm saying here? Sometimes I need to not make something special, because I get hold of the whole idea of retreat and meditation practice in a way that just ties me in knots. And sometimes I really need to make something special.

Earlier today in a group interview, a retreatant was pointing out something which I think a lot of people are aware of who do perhaps many retreats: that being on retreat, being in an environment like this with the silence, with practice, etc., there can be, and there often is for people, a kind of falling away of what is not so important in my life -- the kind of entanglements and complexities and worries and things we get caught up in in our life, that actually somehow they take a lot of our time and energy, but they're not at the deepest of what's most important to us. There can be, over time, a falling away of that. It's a real gift. It's such a precious thing. And that gets quiet, that mud settles, and as it's settling other aspirations, perhaps, or what we feel more deeply, what's more central to our being, more loved, more core, that begins rising up and showing itself as this other stuff falls away -- our longing, our deepest longing, our deepest aspirations.

[8:58] And again, with seventy people or seventy-five or whatever in the room, it cannot but be that again, using those words, it's complex. It lands in different places. So this word longing can be very loaded, or it could go in fine. Personalities are very different. We are very different beings, and we should be. Some people, the language of longing, the movement of longing, is very present in their life, and they can really relate to that. Other people may not even relate to that word. When I say longing, if I'm using that language, I don't just mean a feeling. Longing is, in a way, deeper than the feeling of longing. And I'm aware it's Friday night, and for a lot of you it's been a work week. It certainly has for me. You know, a lot of busyness, it's the end of the week, there's tiredness, etc., trying to get here, and then suddenly this guy is speaking about your deepest longing.

So for some people, I know it's going right in and it's touching, and other people it's just, "I'm sorry, I just can't relate right now." All of that's okay. And it's also okay that we have different personalities and relationship to this word, longing, and this whole movement of longing. All that's okay. But I just want to say a little, linger on it a little bit. Because I also wonder, despite the difference in personalities, and despite the fact that it is the end of a work week for many people, I wonder in this culture if we've lost the language of longing. Do you know what I mean? Does the culture support that deepest movement of being in us? I saw a wonderful film a few weeks ago called Pina. I don't know if anyone saw it. Did anyone see this? Absolutely amazing. It's about Pina Bausch. She died a couple years ago. She was a sort of avant-garde choreographer, and working with a troupe of ballet dancers over many years. And at one point she asked her dancers, she said, "What are you longing for?" You see the passion they put into working on their art, incredible dedication. She said, "What are you longing for? And where does all this yearning come from?" She asked them this. And what was so striking was how rare it was to hear that kind of language. I don't think the culture supports that. We've lost it. We've lost that discourse. We've lost that connection. We don't speak to each other that way. So it's a bit embarrassing, maybe, when someone says that. Or I just can't connect. I don't know.

If I've lost my longing, or if that feels a little awkward, how is it that that's come about? How is it that that's happened in my life? It's not my fault if it's happened. It's probably not my fault. It's probably the culture's fault [laughs], I would say. And it's very hard to talk about this stuff without it landing in the inner critic. And someone's maybe thinking, "Now I should have this longing which I don't feel. Maybe there's something wrong with me, and I'm not good enough." No, no. I just want to raise something; it has nothing to do with judging oneself or where I should be or anything like that.

Maybe it's more of an open question: what do I want? What do you want? What do you want in life? What do I want in life? What do I want or you want in this week now? That's a question of love. It's a question of kindness. So, different -- rather than something to judge myself with, what would it be to take care of my longing? In this life, that I'm taking care of my longing. That's not a demand. It's not a 'should.' It's something about loving ourselves deeply.

So longing, wanting, aspiration, desire, all these concepts, really -- they're a double-edged sword. They're a double-edged sword. And I'm sure that's actually part of the difficulty that we have with them. Part of the sometimes hesitation, deep hesitation we have to relate deeply or inquire deeply into our deep longing, is because it's a double-edged sword. If I have a deep desire and a big aspiration, high aspiration, that's going to be painful for me. It cannot not be painful. To long is to experience the pain of longing. It's also to experience the beauty of longing. And the very force of that longing might open something up, because it's energy, and it's powerful. But there will be pain with it.

If I don't go near that, and if I always stay close to a very modest aspiration, and not really using this language of longing -- well, that, too, is a double-edged sword, because maybe there is not enough energy in the being to discover something, maybe. Something else, curious, actually: it might be if my aspiration isn't high enough, the little stresses of every day are actually bigger. They take up more of my whole picture of life, whereas if I have a bigger aspiration, the little stresses are smaller in that.

[15:43] Anyway, longing changes. What we want changes, and it evolves, and it should, which is wonderful. I remember first starting meditation years ago. I was in university, and I saw a poster for a meditation class and something-something. I thought, "That looks cool." I thought what I was interested in was calming and concentrating the mind. And I was. But it turned out to be about 1 per cent of what I really wanted. So that evolves, that evolves over time. But I say all that, and it's like, "Let it be, let it be." What are you here for? It's not about me and what I think or anything like that. What are you here for? And can you respect what you are here for? It's not my answer. It's your answer. Can you really respect and love what you are here for, whatever that is? Can you open to asking what you're here for, and to the answers that might come? Because they're yours. They're not mine, and they shouldn't be mine.

Okay. So I want to speak a little bit also just about the practices and the teachings that we'll be exploring this week. Slightly unusual retreat, this. It wasn't in the description, but you're here now, so I'll tell you. [laughter] It's not a mettā retreat, by the way. A lot of people seemed to think it was a mettā retreat, so I hope you won't be disappointed by that. I don't think you will be. What we're going to be exploring in the practice is working with the emotional life, okay? Working with the emotions that come up in the being, and different approaches to working with them. Working with the emotional life in helpful ways -- that's what we're looking for, so that, in that, one is really caring for oneself and caring for one's life. I think if you just pause, just right here, and ask myself: how much of human suffering comes in relationship to my emotions, and the relationship not being quite in the possession of full ability, skill, capacity to handle well, to work with well my emotions?

So that's the starting point. How important that is for us as human beings. But it's interesting. We're going to, in a way, kind of be doing one approach as a starting point, one approach to the emotional life. I wouldn't even say that the approach that we're doing on this retreat is even -- it's certainly not the only approach that we could take to working with our emotions, absolutely not, definitely not. But it's one, and it's what we'll be doing. So I just want to really put that in the context. It's also, I wouldn't even say, the best approach. I don't even think there is a best approach. It's just what we'll be doing. And I'm pretty confident that it will be helpful.

When we think or reflect on emotionality and our capacity as human beings to know and feel and experience our emotions, I don't think we will ever exhaust the ways of looking at emotions, the ways of understanding human emotionality. There are so many different takes on that that we can have. So, you know, there are brain scientists and people who understand why we have emotions in terms of evolution and all that, and that's completely valid. That's one angle. Freud would say something about why certain emotions arise and what their -- da-da-da. Jung broke with Freud, said something very different. Modern psychoanalytic -- so many different traditions there, all with different perspectives, different things to say. Then the spiritual traditions and others, etc. Each of these reveal or will reveal something different about human emotionality. They will all kind of shine a different light and reveal something different, and they will all allow the experience or encourage the experience of emotions to unfold in different ways. So that's what we're doing. We're shining a certain light to reveal something in particular, some things in particular, and out of that, it tends to unfold in particular ways. I can never get to the bottom of understanding human emotionality in toto, because it's part of the infinite mystery, the fathomless depth of the psyche. It's impossible. Buddhism can't. Neither can a particular school of psychoanalysis or anything. I just can't. It's impossible.

So I'm aware in terms of practice that that's unusual, or it may be unusual. Usually one would come on retreat and probably start with breath practice or mettā practice. We're not doing that. We've got a different approach. Please don't think of it as advanced. It's not advanced. It's not even any more difficult than the breath or the mettā. It's just different. It's just a different way in. In terms of the unfolding of the meditation instructions, they won't be linear. But we kind of have to take our time saying stuff; we can't say everything at once. But it won't be linear, so it's almost like getting different pieces and different angles, or different pieces of a jigsaw over the days. So it might get to day four, and I'll say something, and you'll say, "Well, I wish you had said that on day one, for heaven's sake." But for someone else, it was really right to hear it on day four, etc. So we do what we can. We take it in pieces, and the whole thing kind of makes a maṇḍala which supports the whole process.

But I also want to talk on this retreat, in terms of practice, on the relationship with practice. That feels really important to me. What's my relationship with meditation practice? So often we bring to it ideals that are not helpful, ideals and images of what meditation is or should be. For example, "I shouldn't have thoughts. I should be abiding in a calm, thought-free space, and if I'm not doing that, I'm not doing it right. I shouldn't be distracted," etc. Certainly it's possible to be without thought, absolutely, no question. And maybe that will even happen. Maybe on this retreat. But that's not the point. It's really not the point of what we're trying to do at all. It might be, and it probably will be, that you have thoughts most of the time, that you have thoughts most of the time when you're meditating. And you know what? That's absolutely no problem at all. It's completely not a problem, and it might actually even be helpful. Will you remember this for seven days? [laughter] Maybe write it down. This is really important. How much suffering we cause ourselves because of our image of what we think meditation should be.

So a question: what am I trying to do when I meditate? What are we trying to do? What's this all about? What am I trying to do? And am I setting up a problem for myself with it? I would say, in answer to that question, "What am I trying to do?", we are exploring and developing ways of seeing experience and ways of relating to experience. We're exploring and developing ways of seeing and relating to experience that lead to freedom and to understanding. That's what meditation is -- not anything else apart from that. It's a different way of seeing it.

We will start on this retreat with emotions as a starting point of this learning different ways of seeing that unfold freedom and understanding. And what we really want for this retreat is that what we learn here in terms of meditation is transferable, it's usable, especially in terms of emotions. You can be walking down the street, and something happens, and you can just check in and work with it skilfully right there [snaps fingers], quick, like that. I don't have to get in a pretzel position and all that stuff. [laughter] It's right there, quick. That's what I would like, what we would like to offer. It's portable, so that there is skill and confidence -- confidence in relationship to my emotional life, confidence in relationship to what comes up in me as a human being. That's often the piece that's missing with emotions -- I don't feel confident; I feel "Yikes, what if I feel this? What if X or Y emotion comes up and I feel overwhelmed?" or whatever. A lot of this is: can we move towards a place of actually complete confidence in relationship to our emotional life?

[25:39] So that, for me, is what meditation is. It's not about being in the moment. I'm not particularly interested in that. It's not about being present. It's not about being open. It's not about being with what is, ultimately. Those are all kind of helpful ways of looking at it, certainly, but they can also be dead ends. If I'm too tight around seeing, "That's what meditation is. It's about being in the moment. It's about being present with what is," that can actually be a dead end, and make a mistake about what reality is. We'll talk more about this.

So in the instructions that will be at 9:30 in the morning, and in the meetings that we have -- we'll talk about how that works, meeting with Chris and myself over the days -- what we are really interested in, in the instructions and the meetings, is meeting you where you are in your experience of the moment, and that you can learn more and more to do that, too, and do that really in a helpful way. Every evening, there will also be a talk, a Dharma talk in the evening. It will be approximately an hour, maybe a little less, maybe a little longer, okay? And in addition to meeting you, actually in the Dharma talks what we're really interested in as well is kind of exploring the framework of what we're doing conceptually.

So Chris and I have had several conversations leading up to this retreat and we decided to kind of split it in two a little bit (not so black and white). Chris was given an assignment to kind of lay out the Buddhist map of the territory, the Buddhist conceptual framework of how the path works, and what we're trying to do, and where we're going. That takes time to digest. It takes time to understand that and to really use that to help give one one's bearings. It takes time to consolidate that. So that's a really, really important part of what we want to explore.

I was given a different assignment slightly, which is to stretch things at the edges, and to question things, and to challenge -- to challenge you, in fact, and myself. So every time when I say challenge I also mean challenge myself, and in question I also mean question myself, and in stretch I also mean stretch myself. So some of what goes in the talks might be a little subtle in terms of the ideas involved. It might be complex. It might be difficult, maybe. We're not just interested in the now, how you feel during that hour when one of us is talking. I'm not just interested in that hour. I'm not interested in you having a pleasant hour of listening to one of us talk. I mean, I hope you do, but. [laughter] That's not the primary interest. It may not even be right where you are at this moment. So certainly with the talks, I think -- I've always thought about talks this way -- it probably will really pay to re-listen, in the evening talks. There will be quite a lot in them.

So we have this heart, and that's important. And we have ideas. We have a head, too. The Dharma is said to address suffering. It addresses dukkha. This word, dukkha, means 'suffering,' 'dissatisfaction.' What does suffering need in my life? What does it need? Sometimes what it needs is heart, and we're talking a lot about that on this retreat. It needs the heart to open, to soften, to bring forth compassion, to relate differently. I talk a lot about that when I teach, a lot about the heart's relationship with suffering, because it's so crucial. But I would also say something extra. What does suffering need? It needs the heart, but it also needs to engage my intellect and my imagination. Suffering needs to engage my intellect and my imagination. Very often as Buddhists we tend to leave those things out: "Imagination? What on earth could that have to do with it? And intellect?" By those, I don't mean imagining what I could do with this problem, or having a bright idea about a possible solution. I mean my ideation and my whole way I'm imagining myself and the whole scenario. We'll talk more about this.

This is one of the things I want to emphasize now because it will run through the retreat a little bit, and pick it up: an idea, a concept, a view that I have -- it doesn't just exist up here [in the head]. It has enormously powerful effects psychologically and on my heart, on my eyes. It has an enormous influence on the way I see things. Going back to what I said earlier, Dharma practice is practising, developing ways of seeing, and that comes out of ideas and concepts. They don't just stay up here. Actually, I think we're always in the grasp of some idea or concept or view or other. We're always, always in the grasp of it. So it's not abstract. If we talk about ideas in the evenings, it's not abstract at all. We're talking about what actually is gripping my heart, gripping my sense of existence, my sense of self, gripping the way I see. I may not be aware of that. So we're also interested in, as someone put it, unwrapping the unconsciousness that surrounds ideas. That's really, really key. And sometimes that's a little troublesome, isn't it? It can feel like there's a rub with that, there's a conflict, even. Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic philosopher; I don't even know when he lived, thousands of years ago. Actually a lot of people more recently regard him as the first real psychologist or the first psychoanalyst in a way, not so much a philosopher. He had a real deep understanding of consciousness and the psyche. He said the Greek polemos, which we get our word 'polemic' from, which means 'strife,' "Polemos is the father of all things."^[1] So no rub, no fruit. Even Buddhist ideas, you know, sometimes we don't see how we're wrapping contemporary assumptions around that. In the Buddha's time, they wrapped, and he did, too, his contemporary assumptions around that. So all this feels very important, and we will be going into it.

You will experience calm on this retreat. You definitely will. [laughter] I was going to say "I promise" -- but is that wise? [laughter] You will. But we're not into quietism. In other words, that's really not the main point. The retreat is also about questioning deeply, really questioning deeply. Sometimes that questioning deeply brings agitation. It brings agitation to the being, and that's uncomfortable, but it's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a blessing.

So I don't know; it may be in some of the evening talks it may feel a little dense. It may feel like it's too much, too many ideas. What happens to me if I don't understand something completely? That's important. But it may be that for some of the evening talks that you come with a different attitude -- there's a different thing going on, and you bring a different attitude. And if you really don't like it, it's just an hour, about. [laughter] It's really not that much out of your day and your week. Like I said, it will probably pay, repeated listenings. That's why Juha is doing the taping here, and it will be on the web.