Arms feel like spaghetti from carrying all those plates. Like legs after a long run.
I’m sorry you’re going through this and wish I could help.
One day at a time, things will get better.
Sorry to hear, Riverman.
So the retreat was at a venue in the Adelaide Hills, an hour or so out of the city.
It ran from Friday evening until Thursday afternoon. Meals (vegetarian) were provided and there were no duties to perform or anything like that, everything is taken care of. We were advised to keep talking to a minimum but it definitely wasn’t banned or anything like that. We were also advised to put our phones away and not read; I did use my phone to listen to music a few times and once took time out to watch a video, but otherwise stuck to this. The schedule for the days looked like this:
None of this was required - you could attend as much or little as you liked. Personally I felt a bit agitated on the first two days, so I took three-hour walks in the afternoons rather than do any of what was scheduled. I also didn’t attend yoga classes at all because I frankly find yoga annoying to do and I have a knee injury which inhibits my ability to do it.
The retreats are organised around particular subtypes of meditation - the one in July, which I didn’t attend, was simple calm and concentration, but this one was tantric meditation. This is the area where you start getting into talk of chakras and moving energy around and that sort of thing, and you could fairly ask why a rationally minded person would entertain this sort of talk. Shorn of all the mystical adornment, the idea is pretty simple. In our idiomatic language we have expressions like warm-hearted, cold-hearted, hard-hearted, heart-breaking, the heart sinking, gut feelings, gut-wrenching, butterflies in the stomach and so on. The idea here is that there are feeling-experiences which are correlates of strong emotions and that these feeling-experiences tend to cluster around certain loci in the body. You might not recognise how these things feel in the body in all the instances above, but hopefully there are one or two where you can understand the subjective experience this language is getting at. This is the same idea being expressed in Eastern cultures in the language of chakras and so forth. The idea of tantric meditation is basically that one becomes better acquainted with these sorts of feelings in the body, and gradually one learns to manipulate them, subjectively, in order to obtain desired subjective results. In the past I have had subjective anxiety which has caused me gut upsets, and I have also had gut illnesses which have resulted in subjective anxiety. Similarly, the idea here is there is a two-way correspondence between these feeling-experiences and emotional wellbeing; either may influence the other.
The teachers where I learn (as well as other practitioners in general, obviously) say that they are able to use these techniques to attain rapturous states of bliss and I have no reason to doubt them. What I like about where I learn is that I’m not required to sign on to any kind of doctrine; instead it’s, here are the instructions to follow (subjective techniques, breathing exercises etc) and here are the subjective results you should eventually start to attain. There are no claims about what is “really going on” here in terms of neuropsychological or metaphysical underpinnings or anything like that, and it doesn’t make sense to point the finger at placebo effect or auto-suggestion or similar, since subjective benefit is what is being sought. Saying “I’m tricking myself into achieving greater subjective wellbeing with these techniques” is simply a pointlessly pejorative restatement of “I’m achieving greater subjective wellbeing with these techniques”.
On to my experience. I’ve been increasingly agitated over the last couple months; I have a tendency to work myself into these states for no good reason, something a lot of politics followers can probably identify with. I was therefore expecting the retreat to be difficult. On the first night I had a lot of mental resistance; I really felt like I didn’t want to be there, my brain was bombarding me with “are you for real, this sucks, let’s go to the pub and get a steak”. I woke up the first couple days with serious body over-arousal; a wired, buzzing sensation through the body, jaw clenching, mental agitation. As I said, I dealt with this energy by going for long walks, and over the following days it calmed significantly. The mental resistance also went away completely and I started really enjoying being there and appreciating the experience. Although the focus of the retreat was tantric meditation, this requires a state of calm focus as a baseline, so there were a lot of calm and concentration exercises the first few days. In the middle and end of the retreat I was able to get to periods of what I can only describe as a spiritual calm and joy; it’s difficult to describe these experiences if you haven’t had them. I am close to a rank beginner at tantric techniques, but I was able to make some pleasing progress in that area; again, trying to describe this in detail would probably sound meaningless. I will mention that I had a minor experience of what seemed to be something called “inner heat”, where you raise the temperature of your extremities with meditative techniques. I didn’t have a thermometer handy so I can’t confirm this for sure but did get a flushed face (which another student commented on) and hot, sweaty palms, so that was kind of interesting.
Emerging to the outside world has been a bit rough. I have heard the founder and director of the centre (who once spent a full year on retreat like this) say that being in the world is easy, and being on retreat is easy, but moving between the two is difficult. I definitely found this to be true. This was my first retreat of this length. I have previously been on two mini-retreats which are not even two full days in length and this was quite a different experience.
I would definitely encourage anyone here to give this sort of thing a go, but it might be best to get a teacher and get reasonable proficiency in calm and concentration meditations first. And there are a lot of retreats out there that are more hardcore than this in ways that I wouldn’t endorse (i.e. sitting in awkward positions and doing vipassana for 8 hours a day) or have culty/religious trappings or whatever, so caveat emptor.
Any questions, hit me up.
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One of my really good friends who is absolutely brilliant recommended a 10 day silent meditation retreat to me and said it was one of the most impactful things of his life.
Silent as in no talking. I mean sure there probably was some, but you’re supposed to be as close to none as possible
Yeah - obviously there’s a lot of different variations around but many of those 10-day silent retreats out there are in the “do vipassana for 8 hours a day” category, which is awesome if it works out for you and not awesome if it doesn’t. Someone on my retreat had ended up with a back problem from attending something like that. I’m not a fan of the idea of teaching novices a single technique and then chucking them in at the deep end, it’s unnecessary imo.
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Nice report, l was thinking you did one more like what stim is talking about with no talking and tons of meditation.
I am reading “why Buddhism is true” by Robert Wright right now and he talks about going on those types of retreats.
Have to complain about today somewhere and here is where its going to land.
- Woke up, can’t remember my work password that I changed yesterday that I didn’t bother to update in my password manager. Great. Eventually make the call of shame to support at 10.
- Have a really shitty meeting at 11:35 with a bunch of assholes from another team who effectively want me to do a bunch of their work.
- 20 year old cancer cat not eating much and I feel terrible.
- Go out to expensive dinner in shitty suburb but literally spend 15 minutes looking for a spot FFS in a terrible city planning.
- Way home from dinner some lunatic is tailgating me and honking at me while I’m going 35 in a 30? What the fuck, big not fan of my FSM bumper sticker on my S5?
I pull over and he flies by. - Get home, go to take out the trash, slam the storm door on my finger hard AF. What the absolute fuck. Its not broken but I am in so much pain and the nail is already black. I’m going to shock you here: I am not black.
For penance I’ll have a great weekend and cancer cat will go to the vet monday and get cured and everything will turn out great right Anakin? Fuuuuuuck. =/. At least I don’t have fucking kids so I have that going for me.
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20 years is a pretty incredible run for a cat. I think the oldest my mom’s ever got to was 17, and she’s a retired vet.
Outside of not eating and um apparently having cancer again he’s doing great! Very active, lots of energy, up and down stairs, no real sign of arthritis or anything else. His blood work said “well his liver is shit but fine on red and white cells” so I’m hoping he can just go back on CHOP (lymphoma chemo) and come through this.
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How much does cat chemo run you?
I wonder how many American humans needed CHOP, couldn’t afford it, and decided to try to score some cat CHOP instead.
What is Karma, Alex?
IDK if you’re trying to shame me but to be honest if you are thats OK. Is the more moral thing to do is to buy someone who needs it chemotherapy than my cat? Totally. But yeah I spent 5k on my cat’s chemo last year and if it will save him I’ll do it again, in place of uh donating to some rando, every time.
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No shaming. I too have spent ~5K on a cat (broken leg). Wife really twisted my arm though. If left to my own devices I’m not sure I would have.
Just genuinely curious about both of those things (how much it costs and if desperate people ever tried it).
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Oh man, no way am I pulling over in this spot. I realize it’s a life leak and probably dangerous, but I’m probably slowing down to about 20, and then brake-checking this motherfucker if he doesn’t back off.
I’m a careful driver and pretty laid back in most circumstances, but for some reason I have a real propensity for road rage. I’m working on it, but tailgating just instantly sends me into orbit.
EDIT: Actually, aggro honking while tailgating might change the equation. I don’t think that’s ever actually happened to me. I’d probably assume it was an emergency and he was trying to get his pregnant wife to the hospital or something.
Got it thanks was a little hard to read between the lines on your comment and again yeah could definitely do a better moral thing with the $ but that guy has been there for me and I’m going to be there for him.
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I had 3 drinks at dinner and that factored in for sure (and yeah I was fine I can handle it just don’t want to deal with anything that could come from that).
If you’re on the road in an emergency put your hazards on and I’ll pull over immediately when I see it every time. This was just some asshole. Way better to just pull over and go on with your day IMO.
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Oh the irony lol