Welcoming everything in our experience - a report from a recent retreat

Meditation Room, Serenity Ridge, Shipman Va

Just back from a meditation retreat in the tradition of Tibetan Dzogchen Buddhism. It still amazes me that a spiritual tradition originating over 2500 years ago can still hold so much relevance to us today. Though Tibetan Buddhism is of course a religious tradition, this is not at all about being a Buddhist (or not), it is about the psychological ideas and practices that have survived for so long, with good reason.

According to the Buddhists, our mind is naturally spacious, open, clear and peaceful, and yet we often experience just the opposite in our lives, with stress, agitation, anger, impatience and frustration assailing us at every turn, it seems. These teachings tell us that these negative emotions and thoughts - obscurations - are not our true birthright, and that they are more the result of ignorance and delusion, not unlike the situation when clouds block out the sun, and for a while it appears we are thrown into relative darkness - the truth is that the sun continues to shine.

Buddhism has historically concerned itself with suffering and how to address it in everyday life. The sources of suffering are many and various, and we're not talking here just about, for example, our partner leaving us or not getting the job we wanted, we're talking about our response to such events and whatever else arises in our life, or what is referred to in the previous paragraph as obscurations, our reactivity.

By reactivity, I mean every kind of automatic response to a trigger, from being cut off by someone when I'm driving, to present day criticisms that may bring up difficult memories of interactions with parents or teachers at a young age. What unites all these inner phenomena is their quickness, how they just suddenly appear on their own, unbidden and often unappreciated. In fact, a good portion of our inner thoughts and feelings just simply happen, despite any attempts we may make to stop or otherwise control them. Right now, try not to think of an elephant, and see if you can do that.

Dzogchen realizes that this is the case, and stresses that we may have limited choice in what appears inwardly to us, but we do have considerably more choice in how we respond, which is what mindfulness and meditation are about, training our mind in new ways of responding.

We started the retreat with concentration meditation practices to enter a state similar to what is described above: open, spacious and calm, which is described (in translation from the Tibetan) as evenness. It is thought that very much like the ocean, the human mind gets progressively calmer and clearer the deeper we go into it, increasingly "pristine and unstained" to use descriptions from the texts. Without that taste of our true, deeper nature, it is difficult to see what the obscurations are obscuring, so to speak, and there would be nowhere to take refuge when reactivity emerged. This process takes some time and practice, though perhaps not as much as we might think. Regular practice over weeks, and months, will very much point us in the right direction. And there is a positive feedback aspect to this too; the more we recognize and tune into this vast spaciousness, the more we are motivated to meditate.

Once we were somewhat established in evenness, then the exercises began to demonstrate the various ways in which our habitually busy minds distract us from staying with ourselves. I was impressed with the thoroughness with which we were guided through numerous experiential exercises highlighting different aspects of our everyday conscious functioning, starting with "the activities of the body, the expressions of speech, and the recollections and conceptual thoughts of the mind."

Following this, we were led through the 6 senses (in Tibetan thought there is a sixth sense -how the 5 other senses impact the mind itself), and how these trigger reactions and in some cases old patterns. The "mass of conceptual thought" (a/k/a busy mind to most of us) was then taken as an object of investigation on its own, followed by exercises focusing on our external behavior and conduct.

The point of these somewhat exhaustive practices is that we were looking comprehensively into the depth and functioning of our own consciousness, in a way I certainly had not been exposed to before. Every kind of automatic reaction as laid out above, can be an obscuration or distraction if we do not notice what is happening to us; we get pushed and pulled everywhere by old patterns, in particular, and this effectively covers over the deeper openness and peace of our true nature, leading to the suffering of what can feel like an endless, but somehow overly familiar inner story, over which we have little control.

In Dzogchen, the idea is not to reject any of this material: it is first, to become aware of it, and then to accept whatever is arising without judgement in the present moment, "to welcome everything" as our teacher told us, and to simply observe it.

There are then three levels of response to this content that the student can train herself to attain over time. First, mindfully noticing what is arising, and then learning to deliberately let go and free the reactivity; second, with practice, this will occur more quickly, thoughts will arise and then free themselves immediately on being noticed, and lastly, after a lot of practice, thoughts arise and are freed on their own without effort - this is commonly associated with "enlightenment" in this tradition.

Though these may seem like impossible goals, the truth is that as we practice meditation, we may find that we are are coming in and out of each of these states at various times throughout our day, not just during meditation itself. Eventually, we can "rest in awareness" more and more during, and post, meditation. Being in touch with our true nature in this way is the goal of the spiritual life on this path, which naturally leads to more compassion and less judgement as the barriers and apparent separation that typically divide us from others are reduced and even eliminated.

So much of our everyday suffering, such as anxiety, and the consequent need to self medicate in addiction, comes from our habitual reactivity and discomfort with ourselves, so these practices (which ideally become a way of life) will aid our recovery.

This is most definitely not an empty promise, though there is a catch; if we want to reduce our suffering we need to get into the habit of regular mindfulness and meditation. Notice I did not say perfect daily meditation. Rather, we start slow and gradually and build up, so if you can find a group to work with (which we will need for instruction anyway), I strongly recommend this, as it is much easier than meditating exclusively on our own.

You can make a start by clicking on this link, and remember, the greatest motivation can be addressing our own suffering in an effective way, not using methods, like drugs and alcohol, that inevitably make things worse.

Dzogchen Meditation