My First Experience of a Meditation Retreat

Over the last few months everything I have read seems to have been guiding me towards the practice of meditation as a way of calming the kind, and developing a happiness from the inside regardless of what is happening externally. I have tried to meditate a few times but I have met nothing but frustration - my mind races like a crazy thing, I fidget, I get an itchy nose, I’m anything but calm! So I figured that I needed to get some expert tuition so I decided to go on a meditation retreat.

Finding a Retreat Centre

I specifically wanted a retreat rather than just a day-course because I wanted to be able to immerse myself in the experience, and take some time out from daily living and that included my laptop! I was looking not only for the meditation tuition but also the chance to just get quiet and be by myself with my thoughts for a little while. I didn’t really know where to start so I just Googled around ‘meditation retreat’ and that started to bring up results fairly local to me.

Many of the retreats I found initially seemed a little more ‘hardcore’ than I was looking for - silent retreats providing only dormitory accommodation. I wanted to have my own room so I could be alone but I also didn’t want a silent retreat either. You may recall that I did an experiment in silence a couple of weeks ago - my results were pretty pathetic and I was quite amazed at just how much I chatter away to myself even when I’m alone :-) My experiment was cut short after only a few days due to a tummy bug but it was long enough to discover that silence does not come easily for me!

I finally found a weekend-long retreat a couple of hours away from me in the coastal resort of Brighton in the UK. It was run by the Bodhisattva Centre which is a Buddhist centre and part of the New Kadampa Tradition of Buddhism. Although I knew next to nothing about Buddhism I knew that their basic philosophy was one of kindness and compassion so that appealed to me. I have since discovered that this Kadampa tradition is an effort to bring Buddhism to the west and the centres are open and accessible to westerners hence the relaxed rules about silence and so on!

Initial Impressions

When I first walked in through the door I was immediately greeted by a mouthful of cherry and chocolate chip icecream - seriously! This isn’t a standard way of welcoming newcomers, there just happened to be a woman there eating icecream and she simply offered me some! I was quite overwhelmed by that simple act - I was a complete stranger off the street and yet she offered me a huge mouthful of her rather small pot of icecream. I later found out that this woman is recovering from breast cancer.

I had expected everybody there to be ordained monks but they weren’t. The icecream lady, Leslie lives at the centre but is not a nun. Similarly, the man who conducted the actual meditation sessions was also what they call a ‘lay Buddhist’ - somebody who considers themselves Buddhist but who is not ordained and therefore is free to live an ordinary life. This really helped me feel at home. I was also mildy amused to see the monks and nuns with mobile phones! I didn’t think monks were allowed things like that :-)

The atmosphere at the centre was immediately welcoming. I was shown to my room, which was basic but comfortable. I dropped off my coat and my bag and made my way down to the lounge. I am quite a shy person in new surroundings with unfamiliar people and I started to feel nervous but this didn’t last. Leslie was in the lounge and started chatting to me straight away and made me feel at ease. A few other visitors arriving for the weekend retreat turned up over the next hour or so and before long I was in deep conversation with a whole bunch of strangers which was quite odd for me!

The Welcome Talk

The retreat officially starts on the Friday night with an introductory talk but the main meditation sessions are held four times on the Saturday and then twice on Sunday morning. The introductory talk made me feel at ease straight away. The fact that it was not a monk who was conducting it helped and he talked about the everyday little annoyances that cause us frustration. He was actually very funny and had us all in stitches many times which I wasn’t expecting.

The whole atmosphere of the centre was welcoming and cheerful - I had expected a somewhat sombre experience but it wasn’t like that at all so I think I found the right retreat for me.

The Meditation Sessions

There were six sessions in all, lasting around 60-90 minutes and each one started with a talk about a certain topic such as happiness, anger and so on and then we did a guided meditation. These only lasted around 15 minutes which was just right for beginners I think. I found that as before, when we started my mind immediately began to race despite the calm atmosphere but this subsided and by the end of the 15 minutes I was feeling a deep relaxation and my mind had quieted down immensely.

I had a strange problem in a couple of the sessions though - I kept falling asleep! In one of them I nodded off 8 times, I just couldn’t stop myself. I spoke to somebody else about it and they suggested that it might have been a posture problem - leaning too far forward instead of keeping upright and sure enough I was able to stay awake for the next session thankfully. I don’t think anybody noticed me nod off, my head would tilt forward and then I would wake and make a little jump but everybody else had their eyes closed :-) Took me back to my uni days of falling asleep in lectures hehe.

Final Thoughts

Although this retreat was held at a Buddhist centre, at no time was buddhism pushed on us. The talks did introduce some of the concepts such as the destructive power of anger, the benefits of virtues such as patience and compassion, karma etc but these were discussed in relation to the goal we all share - to find happiness. If you are looking to start meditation and need some help I can highly recommend the NKT and they have centres all over the world.

It is my understanding that they are a non-profit organisation so the retreats are very cheap. I paid £95 which is less than $200 for the whole weekend including the medidation sessions, and full board accommodation - all meals were included. Normally you’d be hard pressed to find just a Bed & Breakfast room at these prices never mind food and tuition as well!

I loved the weekend, and not just for the meditation but also for the friends I made. I met around 15 people on the weekend and very much enjoyed their company. Many of them I will never meet again as this centre was not local to me but I did find out that there is one about an hour from me that holds evening meditation sessions so I’m going to try those out. I plan to go back on a regular basis to renew my knowledge of meditation and just for the sheer enjoyment of the weekend.

Returning to Normality

I came back from the retreat on Sunday evening and when I switched my computer on I had almost 100 emails waiting for me! I had made the decision that after this weekend I would meditate every day and so far I have kept to that but I have found it more difficult to do at home. The inputs that we have in our day - the work we do, the TV we watch, the conversations we have, all of these sink into our minds and cause incessant noise which makes it very difficult to meditate but it does get easier.

On Monday I found myself fidgeting, I couldn’t get comfortable and I was starting to think that I was never going to be able to get it right but after a few minutes the noise began to quieten and when I opened my eyes I realised I’d been meditating for 15 minutes. My experience yesterday was similar so this is now a new daily habit for me. In future posts I might talk more about the meditation itself when I am a little more familiar and experienced with it.

5 Ways to Keep Going in Times of Crisis

Human lives are complicated entities. We all need many elements of life to survive and to thrive but when some kind of crisis occurs, it is very easy to get fixated on the one area that is most affected and forget that there is more to life than any single aspect of it.

Life is a Complex Web of Needs

We all have some very basic human needs - health, food, shelter, clothing, human contact and so on. If one of those needs isn’t being met then we aren’t even surviving, let alone thriving. But once those basic needs are met there are other needs over the top and these will vary from person to person. Most people value money/materialism in some way - a career, a home, a car and so on. Most people have needs for intimate relationships, family & friends. Some people need to be very physical, perhaps in some kind of sport. Others have a strong need for religion or spirituality etc.

Whatever our needs are, when something happens to damage one of them such as loss of a relationship or job, or even worse - a loss that affects several of them at once, it causes us to suffer greatly and it feels like our whole world is collapsing. Unfortunately in times of crisis like this we find it difficult to see what is still working in our lives because all we can see at this time is our problem area which feels all-consuming.

Here are 4 ideas that may help keep you going through these hard times:

1) Never Lose Hope

The past is over, the future does not exist, all there really is, is now. But when your now feels bad, how do you get through the day? Hope.

Hope is the one thing that you should keep at the front of your mind whenever you feel really low. You just never know what is around the corner. There are hundreds of stories of people who seemed to be facing circumstances that offered no hope and yet some kind of salvation or solution arose that could never have been predicted.

We have to have hope that things will not always be as they are, that life will get better, and that we’ll find a way through the crisis and find the happiness at the end of it. Without hope, we are lost! Never lose hope, you just never know what today will bring.

2) Work on the Unaffected Areas of Your Life

When a crisis first descends upon us, it feels as though nothing else matters, but if we can stop for just a moment and think about it, we know that’s not true. For example, the feeling that nothing else matters often arises after the loss of a loved one. People going through this stop caring about their jobs, their health and so on but deep down they know that if their loved ones were still with them, those things would be important.

What is important to us is a very individual thing - everybody is different and it usually changes over time as we age. It can be a useful exercise to have a look at your own life and pick out the elements that are important to you, and rate each of them on a scale of say 1-10 where 0 is the absolute worst possible scenario and 10 is ‘living the dream’. The chances are that even if there’s an area which is at a zero which is causing you massive pain right now, there are other areas that are much better. Now forget about the areas that you’re having the real problems with and look at the areas that are okay, can they be even better?

For example, let’s say you’ve lost your life partner and rate your relationship a 0 and that is causing you pain - how is your health and your career? Whilst they may be suffering a little due to your overall state of mind, they aren’t necessarily related to your relationship status. You could try to forget about your lack of relationship and work on your career for a while. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. You’ve lost your job but you’re married - can you make your marriage even better? Can you make more friends? Can you work on your health? Those other areas do matter, and when we see life as a whole interconnecting sum of parts, even if we lose a part - a lot of it is still there.

3) Fill Your Days With Good Feeling Moments

What is the real purpose of life? Whilst entire books have been written on that subject, I hope one thing that all readers of this blog will agree on is that life should feel GOOD! :-) No matter what we are doing in life, it needs to be enjoyable for us. We often face times of particular difficulty or hardship perhaps upon the arrival of a new baby or the start of a new business or any number of other circumstances. But even during the most trying times I believe that it is imperative that we try to do something that makes us feel good each and every day without exception. When going through a crisis, at the beginning it might be the only thing that gets us through the day.

What feels good to you? There are big things and little things and lots of things in between. Big things might include a nice holiday or something adventurous and little things may include soaking in a luxurious bath, eating chocolate cake, spending time with a friend or watching a favourite movie but find your feel good stuff. Make a list of all the things that feel good to you and make the effort to incorporate them daily. Then even if everything else seems like it is heading south at least we know there is a little bit of joy to be had every day which gives us another reason to keep going through our crisis.

4) Find the Lesson

There’s a saying that everything that happens to us in life happens for a reason and our hard times come to us in order to teach us something. Once we learn the lesson, we don’t have to keep repeating the experience. So, as the theory goes, as long as we keep fighting against the situation and can gain no benefit from it, we’re doomed to continue to endure it but once we can find the hidden lesson within the experience, we should find a way out of it.

I’m sure we’ve all had experiences in our past that were highly traumatic at the time but with the benefit of hindsight we could see something positive that arose out of the trauma. The difficult thing to do is to try and find the benefit or the lesson whilst we are in the midst of the crisis itself. If there is something, anything, that can be positive about the experience we can hang on to that and it helps us find a little bit of meaning to get through the days.

5) Meditate to Find Inner Peace

Perhaps this should actually be top of the list and not the bottom because if we were able to find true inner peace, then we would not even suffer in the first place. Perhaps the best known for this are Buddhists who are able to remain peaceful and calm amidst all circumstances. They want for nothing and they do not suffer.

Most of our pain comes from some kind of loss, or the inability to gain something which is really the same thing as loss - they both boil down to an attachment to something outside of ourselves. It doesn’t matter whether that attachment is to something material such as a home, or a person, or something intangible such as a reputation or political position. It is the loss of something to which we are attached or the inability to gain something to which we are attached which causes us pain. If we could truly let go of our attachments then we would not suffer.

However I put this at the bottom of the list as this is an extremely difficult thing for most Westeners to do, including myself. For me, I have made a commitment to finding this inner peace but for all I know, it might take a lifetime so while I’m waiting for that, I’ll work on the other four!

You Will NEVER Get Everything That You Want!

You will NEVER get everything that you want! Why? Because the moment you get something that you want, you’ll just find that you want something else and when you get that, you’ll want something else and… there’s a pattern here…

Over the last few years since I started reading books about personal development I have spent a lot of time thinking about my life, what I want to do with it, what I want to accomplish, the kind of person I want to be and so on. I brainstormed ideas, I set goals, I read more books, I set more goals…

I figured that if I could just come up with a plan for my entire life and then carry out the plan then I’d be happy. From that point on all I would have to do is maintain my state of perfect bliss which would be easy right?

There are so many things wrong with this picture!

Firstly, I found that the very idea created an internal conflict that I couldn’t work out how to resolve. The conflict was this - on the one hand it was clear that my life left much to be desired so there were things I wanted to change so I assumed that once I had fixed all the things that needed fixing, accumulated the possessions I wanted to own, became the person I wanted to be and so on that I would be happy and peaceful. On the other hand I had a nagging feeling that in fact doing / getting / being all those things wouldn’t really make me happy because I have always known that one of things that brings me the greatest pleasure in life is the feeling that I am working towards something.

If I got everything I wanted, what would I do then? What if I got bored? People often say that they want to win the lottery and then just stop work but I’ve always said that I’d never want to win money in that way because once I had bought all the houses / cars / clothes / gadgets I could think of, been on all the holidays that were available, and just done everything - what then? The novelty would wear off.

Do you see the conflict? It seems that changing some aspect of my life would make me happier which suggests that if some aspect of life is not how I want it then that must be making me unhappy. So it seems natural to work towards implementing the changes that would move my life so that it looked how I wanted it to look. If I did that in every area then I would have eliminated all sources on unhappiness but the very idea of there being nothing left to do, nothing left to go for, to accomplish, to be - that in itself just creates a new source of unhappiness!

I can’t win! I’m writing this post with the hope that I am not the only one who thinks like this!

Plus on top of that conflict, the idea that all we need to do is make our lives perfect is somewhat flawed anyway! I hear a little voice in my head saying “yeah right, good luck with that!” As I discussed recently, one thing that is constant in life is change! Everything changes and everything in this material world is temporary so trying to get to a place where everything is just perfect and then keeping it there is an impossible task.

This conflict nagged at me for years but over the last few months I have found some relief from these conflicts. First of all, it has become apparent to me that I actually enjoy the process of working towards something. I like building my business, I like seeing the readership on this blog grow (should hit 100 subscribers soon hehe!), I enjoyed working towards my University degree, I like building websites, developing software and so on. Even the kinds of computer games I enjoyed were the types where you work towards some long drawn out goal.

Knowing that I like to work towards something gives me a sense of satisfaction and it takes away the stress of knowing that I’ll get to a place where everything is perfect. As Esther Hicks says, “you’ll never get it all done”. The reason behind this is that as we experience our lives of contrast, we discover things that we like and things that we don’t like and this gives rise to our preferences. As we move towards the things that we want, our life experience changes but once again we experience contrast and a new set of desires is born. No matter what we achieve, what we get, what we become, there is always more to do, be or have.

On the surface this can sound like a bad thing but it depends on how you feel about this new desire. If the moment you express a desire for something new you begin to create a deep need for it and become attatched to it then you are in for a world of pain. However, that’s not usually how it works. As you start to realise some of your goals and give birth to new desires you can be happy with your life as it is right now (acceptance of what is) and be in a state of eager anticipation for the attainment of your new desires without being attatched to them.

Of course, this state of non attachment is where we should be anyway no matter where we are starting from and what the desire may be but this if more difficult to do if you are starting out from a particularly low point and are finding it hard not to feel attached to the idea of wanting things to be different.

This has been a fairly long, rambling post! The point I want to try and get across is that if you are the kind of person who is thinking “if only I can get X then I’ll be happy”, then know that you will never be happy because as soon as you get X you’ll just give birth to a desire for a new X and so on it goes. You’ll never get everything you want because no matter what you get, there will always be more that you want!

You Don’t Need to Experience Extreme Suffering to be Deeply Unhappy

As I begin to unfold my own personal story on this blog I relate various low points but I have never been through anything truly tragic. I have never experienced the death of a loved one, or lost the use of my eyesight, or been imprisoned or had my house burn down or <insert unimaginable tragedy here>. For that, I am truly grateful - but only now, years later when my perspective has changed.

Gratitude Doesn’t Always Come Easy

These days when I catch myself feeling sorry for myself it is second nature to stop myself in my tracks and spend 5 minutes thinking about all the things I am grateful for such as my health, my family, the freedom I enjoy with my work, my car, the fact that I live in a first world country, my friends and I can go on and on.

BUT, when you are in the midst of misery it’s not so easy to be grateful because the human mind is conditioned to focus on the bad stuff. What I found is that when I was unahppy the words of my mother would echo around my head. She always used to say to me, “There’s always somebody worse off than you”. Yes that’s true but that did not help me one little bit at the time! In fact, it made me feel worse!

When I was suffering in my own way I was in pain for my own reasons. On an intellectual level I knew that things weren’t all that bad and that there were plenty of people worse off than me but knowing that simply made me feel guilty for feeling bad about my own problems! Guilt is one of the worst of the negative emotions and it serves no useful purpose whatsoever. In my life, it has been my biggest demon and I still face it now - it creeps up on me when I don’t notice it.

Your Problems Depend on Where You Are

There is a concept of a hierarchy of needs. At the very lowest level we need things like food, shelter and clothing. If we don’t have enough food to eat we’re probably not too worried if our job is boring. However as our basic needs become met we turn our attention to the next problem which causes us pain. As humans we need security, we need friendship, intimacy, a sense of meaning and purpose and many other things that vary from person to person.

Whenever we are suffering in some way, it is usually because something that we need is missing. For example, my most pressing problem right now is the breakdown of relationships so this causes a loss of intimacy. I also need to earn more so that I can buy my own home but my need for intimacy is stronger so that has a much greater effect on me than my financial situation. If I was in a happy relationship then my financial situation would probably rise up and demand more attention.

Our attention will always be focused on the problem that shouts the loudest. This depends on where we are on that hierarchy but it also depends on our own values. Some people value money far more than relationships for example.

Your Problems Are Very Real To You

A danger here is that people put labels on problems, they tend to rank them and say that this problem is ‘worse’ than that problem. This is absolutely false!!!

Your problems are completely real to you and are valid! It doesn’t matter what somebody else may be going through, it is not a competition! If it helps you to think of other people who have ‘worse’ problems than by all means use that to develop some feelings of gratitude for the good things in your life but if those thoughts make you feel guilty then stay away from them as you will only make your own problems worse!

Never let anybody tell you that you’re problems aren’t real, or that you are being silly. You don’t need to experience some tragedy in order to be deeply unhappy. As we move around that hierarchy different problems rise to the surface and whatever they may be, they are real for us at the time. I spent years suffering from depression for ‘no real reason’, but of course there was a reason - I was extremely unsatisfied with my work and desperately felt like I needed to be doing something different.

Moving Forward

What can happen is that people become ’stuck’ in their problems by continuing to focus on them in a negative way and then never move forward. This can be the time when friends and family tell you to snap out of it. Again, this can be rather unhelpful if you are not yet ready to move forward.

No matter what the problem is, and whether there is an obvious ’solution’ or not, you can’t move forward until you are ready to do so. Even if there is physical action that you can take that first needs to be preceeded with a change of mindset. This is a personal journey. Nobody can do it for you - you can only do it for yourself and you have to be willing to move forward. Of course, If you are reading this blog then the chances are that you are ready so acknowledge that and congratulate yourself!

In future posts I’ll be exploring just how we go about solving our problems, and accepting them if they are situations that are beyond our control - death for instance. For now, just understand that your problems are real, you are entitled to feel the way you feel and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise!