Undoing the Knots that Bind You

insights from a meditation retreat

I am returning from a weeklong silent meditation retreat at a Thai monastery. Though influenced by recency bias, I regard the retreat as one of the most meaningful and beneficial experiences of my life. There's much I would like to say about this retreat, but I'll start with the key insights.

A bit of context: I went into the retreat a novice meditator. My only deep meditation experience was a 10-day silent Goenke Vipassana retreat in 2017.

The present moment is a lovely place to be

My first insight came when I finally managed to wrangle my mind into being present, to actually be here now. I discovered that I had been living in a fantasy world made up by my mind. In this fantasy I was either critiquing a perceived past, or roaming fantasies of the future. I was rarely perceiving and interacting with reality as it was, in the moment it could be influenced.

This is unfortunate, because it turns out if you are in the present moment for long enough, there is a pervasive serenity and a resounding feeling of enough-ness. I was embarrassed to catch my mind rehearsing how I would describe whatever I was experiencing to a friend. When I returned to the present moment, I asked myself: "Do I really need more? Do I need to tell a friend, or is this enough?" If I was deeply present, there was a sense of transcendent completeness—like I was sharing the moment with the divine. The moment would feel like it was at once melting away and also in a still and sacred eternity."Buddha resides in the present moment," I observed.

Being present is something that deepens. If right now you close your eyes and focus on your breath, you will feel at least a certain sense of being in the present. But if you stack enough of these moments one after another, the present becomes densely luminous.

The retreat took place on a lush jungle mountain. When I arrived, I thought it was nice enough, lots of nature. But when I became present I could see that it was heaven on earth—the playful dance of an evolving cast of animals and insects, jasmine's angelic breath carried by the sea breeze, the entrancing hum of cicadas, the changing tones as the clouds rolled across the sun... everything a ceaseless spiraling celebration of being. How had I not seen it before?

It reminded me of coming out of a mushroom trip to discover that the arrangement of autumn leaves on each square foot of ground was an artistic masterpiece.

There's no permanent self to build up and defend

Day two's lecture was about the Buddhist notion that there is no permanent self. The teacher described it like this: Consciousness is something that emerges in the human organism. And there is also the mind. The mind is shaped by all the experiences, ideas, and impressions it is exposed to. And little bits of sense of self are formed each time there is a craving or aversion that is clung to. But it's all changing as new experiences come in. It's all organic, just nature metamorphosing as it does in every other natural cycle.

I'm not sure if there’s a permanent self or not, but I reflected on it and it feels true to my experience. I'm not the same person I was even two weeks ago. Sure, there's continuity there, but it's continuity like how a cloud slowly changes shape as it blows across the sky.

For whatever reason, this notion that there's no permanent self liberated me from a twisted knot of suffering. I saw how I was spending so much energy trying to prop up, validate, and defend some good-enough sense of self. But it never worked. No matter the achievements or love affairs or possessions or experiences, it was never enough. And building up a good-enough self was like a Chinese finger trap—the more I engaged with it, the tighter I was bound.

So to see myself as nature, as a human that was born due to a string of events stemming from the big bang, as something evolving and fading away—well, then I didn't need to play the game of 'trying to build a good enough self' anymore. I'm just a human. I'm just consciousness and a mind molded by events and all the relationships, just one loop in the immense tapestry of the world. I can't be good or bad, I just am. Just like the ants, just like the clouds, just like everything else arising and passing in this world.

Do no harm. Do good. Purify the mind.

In the absence of the compulsion to uphold and defend some sense of self, there arose a deep desire to be of service in the world. This had been arising in me for many years, but it seemed that my project of building a self took most of my energy, with little leftover for doing good.

This reflects on the Buddhist wisdom that one should do no harm, do good, and purify the mind. I had the ‘do no harm’ and ‘do good’ part figured out, but I needed to purify the mind in order to enact the doing good, and to stop doing harm in the way of wasteful consumerism driven by self fixation.

In one meditation, I cried realizing that Mother Teresa was my idol. It felt like I had suppressed this from myself because it felt so trite, something I needed to hide because others would make fun of me for it. I wanted my life to be an endless practice of giving care and love and kind deeds into the world, hands going from the heart out into the world, over and over, over and over.

And yet the retreat confronted me with my petty selfishness as I navigated the ins and outs of retreat life with my fellow participants. How high my intentions, how clumsy my actions.

But meditation revealed answers and helped me overcome my limitations. I trusted that if I kept following this path, if I had patience, if I could accept myself as an evolving piece of nature while taking slow and practical steps forward, I could make progress.

“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

— The Dalai Lama

Cultivate the mind and a simple life is all you need

The meditation retreat was uncomfortable: waking up at 4:30am, sleeping without a mattress on a wood platform with a wood pillow in a noisy dormitory, cold showers, no cell phone, no internet, no reading or writing, food limited to two meals before noon and a banana at tea time, struggling to get an aching body to sit still, and not least of all spending all waking hours attempting to pay attention to the breath or the meditation object du jour.

And yet... I reached so much profound joy, wonder, awe, and gratitude. It made me realize how little I need to be happy if I can properly cultivate a quiet state of mind. Though being in beautiful nature surrounded by wholesome-oriented people helps, of course. :)

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There's many little treasures from this retreat to share, anecdotes and scraps of wisdom, but I think that's enough for now.

If you're interested in the retreat, you can learn more about it here, or let me know if you have any questions. The course is by donation.