Back From Retreat

We’ve just finished a three-day meditation retreat here at Boundless Way Zen Temple. We host five Zen retreats a year; ranging from three days to three weeks. Each one is an opportunity to enter deeply into the experience of being human. As you may guess, these retreats are both wonderful and incredibly challenging.

Sitting still and walking in silence allows us to become more aware of the thoughts, emotions and sensations that are constantly arising and passing away in our experience. In the Zen tradition of Buddhism, we’re not trying to get rid of, or even control. what arises. We are simply practicing the discipline of not getting carried away by what is arising. Or more accurately, we are practicing getting carried away and then returning.

Zen is not a religion of beliefs or creeds. You do not have to believe anything to join in. The teachings of Zen Buddhism are all considered to be pointers to turn us to our own experience where we can see for ourselves what it is like to be human. The wisdom that guides us is not somewhere else, but arises in the immanence of the moment itself.

I always emerge from these retreats astonished, grateful, and slightly disoriented. I am astonished at the beauty of life itself—at the way life is always giving itself so generously to us all. Now in the form of the snow gently falling. Now in the form of the slight ache in my back as I slump in the chair with my computer on my lap. When I meet what is here without wishing it were otherwise, I see everything is indeed sacred.

And I am grateful to be part of the human intention to wake up. We are all called by life itself to wake up to something beyond our small self-interest—beyond our selfish complaints and wish for immediate comfort. The forces of self-interest are strong, both within and without. But on retreat we are so clearly working together in the silence to remember and open to the source of life that sustains and contains us all.

And I return to everyday life slightly disoriented. I often feel like I am putting my life on like a suit of slightly strange clothes. I see that I am NOT the things I do or the things I possess. All of this doing and having are temporary condition and not the essential thing. So I put on the clothes of my many roles with new appreciation of their ephemeral quality. And I vow to remember the essential as I move as kindly and truthfully as I can through this amazing and varied world of life.