The Sandwich Islands
Last year at this time, I reported back from my first Buddhist retreat, CIMC’s “Sandwich Retreat”, so called because it has all-day sessions on two consecutive weekends, and three-hour sessions every weekday evening in between. If you care, last year’s length summary can be found here.
It’s now been a week since this year’s Sandwich Retreat, and it was just as rewarding-and exhausting-as last year’s.
Like last year, I intentionally set my expectations low. I anticipated that we would sit a lot and walk a lot, and I wasn’t disappointed. I knew I was right on the money when I arrived on Saturday morning and read the following agenda for the day:
sit
walk
sit
walk
sit
lunch sit
walk
sit
walk
sit
tea sit
talk
walk
sit
At a high level, the retreat is all about bringing the practice into your regular life. As such, there’s a weeklong exercise that you are asked to bring into your daily activities during the work week. This year’s homework was to exercise full-body awareness.
The first couple days, I thought I did pretty well. I went back to first principles, which state that one can only know something through the six sense stores. However, most of the senses provide little insight into the body. Taste and sound are pretty worthless, and thinking more so. You can smell other people, but it’s hard to smell yourself. Sight is okay, but again there’s no major revelations to be had by gazing at your navel.
So my first understanding was that we primarily know the body through feeling. This was confirmed at that evening’s debrief, when everyone who talked about their experiences throughout the day started their description with “I felt…”
What are some of the things I observed? Well, you can feel things on the surface of your body, but there’s much more going on internally. There’s also a difference between what someone might be feeling (pain, discomfort, pleasure) and what might be apparent to an observer (calm).
Feeling can also be really subtle. Somehow, this sense tells you when you need to blink your eyes, when a sneeze is coming, when you need to crack a joint, when your belly is full, or when a pimple is forming. The blind read braille using their fingers, a feat of bodily sensation that has always amazed me.
But perhaps the most interesting feeling I observed was the innate human sense of balance. Walking is often described as a perpetual fall, and even standing still requires constant adjustments based on this innate sense. I spent one whole walking period standing on one foot, observing how rapidly my body adjusted to my sense of balance in order to keep me balanced and upright. And I had the opportunity to observe myself and several of my fellow meditators as our heads bobbed, on the verge of falling asleep. Even though our conscious minds were already asleep, the sense of balance caused us to start every time the body started to droop and tip. It’s amazing that such a sophisticated sense can operate even though the operator is unconscious!
The other thing I noticed is that it’s really difficult for me to observe the sensations of the whole body at once. Most of one’s other senses take in a small field: there’s only a limited number of things you can taste, smell, hear, or think at one time. But the sense organ for feeling is the entire body, and while it’s easy to observe discrete parts (my knee hurts, my nose itches), it’s very difficult for me to attend to the entire body’s sensations simultaneously, as a single sensation.
So all that-and a lot more that I’ll spare you-was what I learned from my first two days’ exercise in whole-body awareness. Then came Tuesday night’s debrief with Larry, one of CIMC’s three teachers. Almost the first thing out of Larry’s mouth was that we weren’t doing whole-body awareness practice in order to gain insights into the body, but as a way of using the body to ground our attention in the present moment, as opposed to endlessly drifting off to fears and plans about the future or reverie about the past. Doh!
So midweek I had to make a big correction, paying less attention to the body for itself, and focusing instead on using the body as a reminder to be present with what is. Unfortunately, at first I didn’t find whole-body awareness made me any more present than I was before. While it was good when I was doing something physical like walking or perhaps cycling, I found it less useful when sitting or conversing.
Wednesday I had my teacher interview with Michael. I told him about how I’d started out being too analytical about the full-body awareness, and how I was struggling with the body as too big a field to deal with at one time.
I also told him about my two other current practices, which are also both analytic. The first is just observing the vedenas, the feeling tones of pleasant/unpleasant/neutral that come up in response to every stimulus. I’ve gradually come to believe that the feeling tones aren’t absolute, but conditioned and somewhat arbitrary, such as a country-dweller finding a police siren jarring, when a city-dweller might not even notice it.
My other practice is to try to notice every volitional movement I make-even down to where my eyes track-and examine the motive and the quality of the intention behind that movement. And on the cushion, where you’re not doing any real volitional movement, you can examine the movements of your mind, and the motives behind them.
After hearing all that, Michael concluded that I was too much in my head and needed to be more grounded in the simple act of observing the present moment. What he suggested was to simply periodically check in and consciously relax the eyes and the muscles of the face. I expanded that to include my shoulders, which I’ve known for years carry a lot of tension, as well. For years I’ve futilely tried to consciously relax my shoulders while I’m cycling, where the tension induces a lot of neck pain.
For the remainder of the week, in trying that practice on, I found it made a huge difference. From the shoulders up is a convenient subset of the body to work with, and for me it feels like the base of where my thoughts and my feelings reside. As such, relaxing the face seems to produce a general relaxation, improving my mood, receptivity, and empathy, all attributes I’ve wanted to cultivate for some time. It reminds me somewhat of cognitive-behavioral therapy, where you model the way you want to be, even if you don’t feel it, and then it gradually starts to feel real to you; similarly, relaxing the face and shoulders might help me become truly more relaxed and receptive overall.
During the interview, I also inquired about having more of an ongoing relationship. I’m at a point where I’ve exhausted reading and dharma talks as learning tools. In a sense, I know everything I need to know about the dharma. The next step is to bring more of it into my daily life, and that’s where someone who knows my particulars can help. Knowing this, and knowing that opportunities to talk with the teachers are very rare, I arranged with Michael to have periodic check-ins every 6-8 weeks. This had been a major goal when I signed up for the retreat.
I picked Michael for a few reasons. I’ve felt some rapport and also some dissonance with each of the three teachers, so no one of them resonated more than the others. Larry and Narayan are more popular, but that also means they have less time and longer lead times for interviews. As a former intellectual, Larry might be useful in helping me overcome my analytic side, but it might be just as good to go with someone completely different. After a particularly good dharma talk a month or so ago, I finally decided I’d at least start out with Michael.
So those were the big themes of the retreat. Now let me go into a few of the smaller items, just so that they get recorded for later reference.
This year my weekend “yogi job” was end-of-day cleanup, which was great. That meant that unlike most retreatants I had our whole lunchtime break as free time, which I usually used to go sit in the sun at the Cambridge City Hall. On the long 9- and 12-hour weekend days, it was nice having that long break in the middle. I used one of those to hit the hardware store and pick up silicone sealant for my shower, which apparently has started leaking into the downstairs.
And, by luck of the draw, I shared this year’s yogi job with Shea, one of my dharma friends who only recently returned to the group. So that was a real pleasure.
In Larry’s first-day introduction, he used the “No matter where you go, there you are” line. I wonder if he knows he’s quoting Buckaroo Banzai…
As an object of meditation, you can choose the breath, the body, sound… or the smell of the onions cooking downstairs!
I generally haven’t got a lot of suffering in my life, but what I do have manifests itself as either irritation or planning. That seems to imply that I desire predictability and control more than anything else.
Ethics and religion really aren’t anything more than a radical acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions.
Don’t eat jawbreaker candy during a sitting.
While outside doing walking meditation in the neighborhood around the center, I met two cats. One was a calico doing a great imitation of a flower in a window box. The other was a very friendly longhaired tiger cat. For future reference, they were both on Cleveland Street.
Retreatants have one teacher interview on each weekend, and one during the week. Ideally, you’re supposed to get to talk to each of the three teachers, but this year Maddie stepped in to help due to the large number of retreatants. I got her, making this the second year in a row that I haven’t had any interview with Narayan.
There’s this Buddhist concept that the body is vague, permeable, that its borders are fluid and ill-defined. I generally disagree with this, but then one might ask whether dental work is part of you body. Or glasses? Clothing? A pacemaker?
Tuesday’s sitting was interesting, because it was election day, and everyone was on pins and needles anticipating the results. I wasn’t very nervous, because I didn’t expect any meaningful results before we broke at 9pm. But when they let us go, Michael noted that “Someone won Pennsylvania”, which caused everyone to cheer.
I missed Friday’s session because I was sick as a dog with nausea and a headache. I slept right through from about midnight to 5pm on Friday.
The food continues on last year’s pace of being edible exactly one time in four. I know, most of you would love the wholesome vegetarian fare cooked with love and all that rot, but I don’t. Fungus is fungus, no matter how you chop it. The one exception was the ominous-sounding “celery stew over rice”, which was surprisingly savory.
My interview with Larry could be summed up as “relationships are hard, and the form of practice is irrelevant-it’s all about how it impacts your life”. Then he got up and gave me a big hug. Larry?
I remain unclear about where the line is between practice and seeing practice as a self-improvement project.
Sunday morning, as we began our ninth straight day of sitting, I passed a note to my buddy Mark that read, “What’re we gonna do today, Brain?”. He was amused. The appropriate response is, of course, “The same thing we do every day: sit and walk, walk and sit…”
People often report that they have a hard time at the beginning of a retreat, but that when it ends, they felt that they were just getting on a roll. I have the exact opposite experience. I can fall into meditation pretty easily and stick with it for a couple days before I start getting restless. But by day nine of nothing but sitting and walking, I’m at the far limit of mental fatigue and I’m ready for a wholehearted binge of lying, cheating, stealing, drinking, having sex, murdering, eating meat, and lots and lots of sleeping!
The Sandwich Retreat is the only lengthy retreat that CIMC offers, and in my experience it’s the only place at CIMC where I got the sense of sangha, or community. It’s kinda hard creating community when you only get together once a week and spend those three hours together with your eyes closed and not speaking!
This year, that sense of sangha even more pronounced, as I fostered relationships with a number of people. Of course, I enjoyed the company of my dharma friend Mark, and it’s awesome to have Shea back, as well. I also met Dylan, who is a new resident at CIMC, and John, an MIT prof who is trying to get a group of guys together to go cycling, of all things. And it was good to see old friends like Tim and Amy and Whispering Deer, as well.
So despite nine days of sleep deprivation and mental fatigue, I think this year’s Sandwich Retreat was a success. I met my expectation of sitting and walking, achieved my goal of initiating an ongoing relationship with a teacher, cultivated more of a sense of sangha with new and old dharma friends, and of course learned more about myself and the world around me in the process.