By Gil Fronsdal
This article is the Introduction to Gil’s new manual for retreat practice, which will be available soon. The manual contains essays Gil wrote over many years to support those who attend retreats at IRC. Writing them was also an expression of his love for mindfulness, meditation, and retreats. He hopes the book will inspire and support you in undertaking these retreats.
While the book is a guide for insight meditation retreats, I often think the word return better expresses the benefits that come with these periods of meditation practice. Return more accurately conveys the way in which meditating in a contemplative setting can be a profound homecoming. Retreat, on the other hand, may suggest a withdrawal or a retreat from our ordinary life. Still, because it’s the accepted convention, retreat is the word I use throughout the guide.
In much the same way that deep rest revives our vitality, sleep restores mental clarity, and healing brings us back to good health, meditation retreats return us to wonderful states free from stress, preoccupation, and exhaustion. In the silent environment of a retreat center, our mind, heart, and body can settle into health and harmony. While meditation states are sometimes called “altered states of consciousness,” it’s actually the fragmented, distracted, and emotionally challenged mind of daily life that is better understood as an unnecessarily altered state. In contrast, time spent on a meditation retreat can return us to a wholesome and natural mind. Our inner life in meditation may seem altered when it is rarely—if ever—experienced elsewhere. Even so, when the mind is deeply settled, it gives us a taste of a natural mind, free of attachments and anxiety. Meditation retreats are training grounds for discovering and supporting our potential for a healthy heart and mind.
For the Buddha, mindfulness practice is a return to our “ancestral homeland,” which is always available here and now. He defined this native land by the four foundations of mindfulness: body, feelings, mental states, and mental processes. By settling into our body, opening up to our feelings– especially the more profound ones – discovering healthy mind states, and becoming wise to how our mind works, we “return” to a territory we may have lost touch with but have never actually left.
Over time, it becomes clear that meditation and meditation retreats are a return to natural states of peace, happiness, love, and wisdom. The more we are caught up with attachments, aversions, anxiety, and conceit, the more we withdraw from feeling whole, free, and harmonious. Understanding how much is lost in this withdrawal reminds us how beneficial it is to "return" to our homeland.
While meditation retreats are wonderful places for this return, even more importantly, they are training grounds for learning how to remain at home in ourselves. Any degree of calm and settledness can highlight how we lose this calm. On retreats—and in meditation in general—rather than being disappointed by this loss, we bring mindfulness to clearly see how the loss happens. We learn the tricks of our distracting thoughts, the pull of our difficult emotions, and the persistence of our desires and aversions. The wiser we are about how these tricks operate in us, the easier it is to avoid their allure and promise. It is a wisdom that can show us what and how to let go of anything that doesn’t support our inner health. The more we can let go of the mind’s tricks, the deeper we can settle into the wellsprings of well-being, stillness, and spiritual health. This, in turn, reveals even more profound, more subtle forms of attachments seldom seen in the busy mind of daily life. The repetition of this three-step pattern of meditative calm, seeing how the mind operates, and letting go can be a gentle, spiraling homecoming into our depths, the end of which is profound freedom.
The process, from the initial calming when we begin meditating to the most profound experience of freedom and independence, provides us with the understanding and tools for practicing mindfulness in daily life. It provides a reference for an alternative to a busy, scattered, and attached mind. If we return to this alternative, however partial the return may be, the practice we learn on retreat comes alive in the rest of our lives.
An invaluable aspect of participating in meditation retreats with other people is the benefit that comes from community practice. Meditation retreats can be challenging, especially for people new to the absence of social conversations and to the many meditation sessions throughout the day. The presence of others engaged in the same endeavor can encourage, even inspire, a dedication that lessens the sense of challenge and increases our commitment to practice.
Practicing with others on retreat also contributes to a deeper understanding of our reactions, judgments, desires, and fears in the presence of others. This, too, provides opportunities to become wise to the tricks of the mind and the vulnerabilities of the heart. We slowly learn what we can let go of and what we can strengthen to live wisely and kindly with others.
As the mind and heart become less reactive and more peaceful, we can appreciate that returning to our native land is not only returning to our individual selves but also a return to the collective “homeland” we share with other “homies.” With mindfulness, we bring with us, wherever we go, a profound sense of being home in ourselves that allows us to feel at home with anyone we are with. The freedom we discover through meditation is portable, so we can learn to be at ease and free anywhere. Wisdom teaches us to let go of the attachments that keep us separated from some people and attached to others.
Group meditation retreats are profound times to discover a non-separated, unattached sense of community. Meditating together in silence cuts through many of the usual projections, fears, and reactions we might easily have with others.
Meditating together, we sense people's sincere dedication to being mindful of their life challenges and their spiritual wholeness. As a result, by the end of a seven-day retreat, people sometimes feel closer to other meditators than they would if they spent the week talking with them.
In this way, retreats are not just a return to inner health but also a return to social health – i.e., a healthy, perhaps more natural way of relating with others. What we learn about generosity, goodwill, care, and respect for others on retreat shows us how to be in life after the retreat. Retreats train us to find our way back to this healthy way of sharing our native homeland with all beings.
This article appeared in the Winter 2024 newsletter of the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, CA. It is used here with the permission of the author. Gil Fronsdal is the primary teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA.