Loving yourself to death: a retreat review

Image by Archangel27 via Flickr

I recently returned from a four week training at Gaia House which was a taught retreat on the theme of emptiness and was led by John Peacock (UK’s leading Pali scholar/Dhamma teacher) and Rob Burbea (resident teacher at GH whose main teacher has been Thanissaro).

It proved to be easily the most hardcore taught retreat I had participated in, thanks in particular to what can only be described as a bravura performance by Rob Burbea.

So as to help you get a feel for the level of teaching the last set of four instructional talks were:

• seeing the emptiness of awareness
• seeing the emptiness of time
• nibbana, cessation and the fading of experience
• the radical implications of emptiness

And while it was fair to say that some in the room were not necessarily that up for this sort of material, for me it was precisely the reason I sat the retreat.

Having never really made any notes on a retreat before, during this month I filled half a notebook with scribblings, diagrams and takeaways.  This was testament as to how important this retreat was for me, for while classical awakening still lies ahead, my understanding of the Dhamma and the accompanying depth of practice has certainly deepened.

I shall not attempt to go into the volume and richness of the areas explored since a) that would be quite boring for you and b) rather long and inarticulate.  Instead I shall outline my top four earning areas and see how that lands.  And in the next couple of weeks I hope to share some of the diagrams I drew of my understanding of the Dhamma and my own practice which are quite fun.

1. Trust your experience but keep refining your view.  This dzogchen saying is spot on.  For the last eighteen months or so I felt that my practice was perhapstoo comfortable and too flat but I wasn’t quite sure what I needed to do to nudge it on.  What shifted for me during this retreat was a deepening understanding of what the Buddha was actually saying.  Previously my understanding of the teaching was that “all dukkha is optional” which for me had settled out at a very strong level of “bare attention” mindfulness but without any more penetration than that.  I imagine this is a common hang-out point since life is really quite pleasant, experience is vibrant and most gross suffering is checked.   My current Dhamma synopsis has now graduated from “all dukkha is optional” to “all experience is fabricated” – a subtle move but one which has placed my practice’s centre of gravity in a much more subtle, fundamental and – quite frankly – more interesting place.

2. The Dhamma as jenga. A cursory google search shows me that noone has before (in text online at least) made the equation between dhamma practice and jenga so let me claim it here!  Paticcasamupada or dependent co-arising is the real core of the Buddha’s teaching, something which he repeated again and again – I teach only dukkha and the ending of dukkha.  So if the Buddha had had the ability to register URLs he would have gone for www.howstuffworks.com.  And his mechanic of how things work was that if any of the twelve aspects of dependent co-arising are in play, then so too will the rest arise…including dukkha.  Therefore the whole practice is experimenting by taking blocks out of the jenga-esque construction of self and world until in the Buddha’s words:

O house-builder, you have been seen.
And shall build no house again.
All your rafters are broken.
The ridge-pole is shattered.
My mind has attained the unconditioned.
Achieved is the end of craving

Or in a word…jenga!

So that’s what we do, see how the removal of certain building blocks remove dukkha and others don’t, with those marked push/pull and identification being particularly interesting.  And critically we have to have as much understanding as direct experience.  Experience without understanding is just a whizzbang (but not transformative) meditation experience.  And understanding without experience is just theory.  Marry the two though and you are rockin’.  And that is what the Buddha meant by knowing and seeing.

3. The erotic life of the breath. Thanks to my learning from this retreat I have now switched from open awareness (using the “sound of silence“) as a primary practice to an oldskool samatha-anapanasati/vipassana-body investigation style, supported by open awareness should I need to relax any gross clinging.  And it’s ace – helping me deepen out of the holding pattern I described above and at the same reconnecting me to some of my favourite hardcore 20th century teachers such as Ajahn Maha Boowa, Upasika Kee Nanayon and Webu Sayadaw.  And one of the things that really facilitated this homecoming of sorts was recognising that anapanasati can be a deeply intimate and erotic practice.  This may sound odd but it’s a personally useful way of how to frame my relationship to the breath and deepening concentration.  And it works both ways and can support ones presence in romantic relationships.  Some of you will know exactly what I’m talking about, I’m sure.

4. Time to bring time into play. In my recent end-of-year post I spoke about how my sense of time had become very light and wondered whether selft and time were related.  Theravadan Buddhism doesn’t really go into this at all, hence my lack of development in this area.  However in some Mahayana emptiness teachings it is made a main focus, especially in the work of the 11th/12th century Tibetan teacher Gampopa.  Rob Burbea taught it therefore as a key part of understanding emptiness, seeing through time as being as important as seeing through awareness.  [Aside: indeed his high-bar definition of a stream-enterer is one who has specifically had insight into the emptiness of both time and awareness]  This instruction to investigate time-sense as well as self-sense proved to be very powerful and will probably be a theme of my practice this year…playing with the “holy trinity” of subject, object and the time in which experience appears to happen.  This trinity, which Rob called the tripod upon which dukkha sits, and specifically this third leg of time feels like something I was missing from my practice so I’m excited to really get into it.

Finally a word or two about emptiness itself which I avoided defining above.  In my understanding, emptiness is a quality and a way of looking, recognising all elements of experience as not having inherent existence independent of mental processes.  In other words it is expression of dependent co-arising and therefore the heart of the dhamma.  For when self and world are progressively seen as empty, the mind progressively becomes untangled from the knots of identification.  This is what is known as freedom, as letting go, and in the end, as release.

PS if the title of the post seems non sequitur forgive me.  It was a phrase which summed up my learning and as I mentioned here, it is beyond my abilities to either share it all or tie everything together

PPS if you made it to the end of this post, I probably owe you a drink