Why Sesshin?

Our recent virtual retreat was a great success. Forty-one of us gathered from around the region and across the ocean to practice Zen together. For two days, we wove formal silent meditation practice with everyday life—going back and forth between sessions on Zoom and informal practice at home. By our final gathering, it was clear that even though we had not been in physical proximity, the power of our combined efforts over these past days had touched us all.

Every spiritual path I know of involves at least a periodic withdrawal from everyday life to gather in community for intensive practice. Even the great spiritual teacher Jesus periodically withdrew to the hills to escape the crowds and pressures of his life. Stepping back from busyness appears to be essential for human beings who want to see beneath the surface—who want to break free from the trance of everyday life.

In the Zen tradition, we refer to these retreats as ‘sesshin’—a Japanese word which literally means ‘to touch the heart-mind’. Sometimes we also call them ‘training periods’ because, as anyone who has been on a Zen meditation retreat can tell you, ‘retreat’ is a rather misleading term. We are up early in the morning and spend our days sitting in stillness and silence. Though sitting meditation alternates with walking and with other practices such as eating, chanting, listening to Dharma talks and meeting individually with the teacher, a sesshin requires great effort on the part of each participant.

But the point of sesshin is not simply to work hard or to be uncomfortable, but to practice cultivating a basic friendliness toward ourselves. As human beings, we usually spend a lot of our time evaluating and judging ourselves and our situation. We want to be comfortable and peaceful. We don’t want to suffer or be agitated. However, the truth of human experience is that discomfort and pain cannot be avoided.

No matter how positive you are or how many skillful techniques you have for calming your mind, your life will not always go your way. You will not always get what you want, people you love will go away, you will sometimes be sick and, ultimately, you will lose everything you think you have. I don’t say this to be depressing, but rather to honor the truth of our experience as limited and mortal beings.

The question then is not how to escape the natural suffering of being alive, but rather how to meet and appreciate this life of ten thousand joys and sorrows. One of the wonderful things we can learn on a sesshin is that even though almost nothing is happening – we’re just sitting and walking – our minds still run through the whole spectrum, from ease to anxiety, from clarity to confusion. No one outside us is ‘causing’ us to feel however we are feeling.

On retreat, with the time and the simple structure of practice, we can begin to see that the difficulties of our lives actually come and go within the boundaries of personal awareness. The problem and our subsequent suffering that seems to be generated by our situation or by the people around us is in fact the transient (and natural) working of our minds. Over time, if we are willing to stay, we see that sensations, thoughts and mind-states simply arise and pass away. It’s almost like everything that feels so personal and real is just a kind of weather that comes and goes on its own.

Of course there are wonderful ways to work with the mind and powerful techniques to meet our life more skillfully, but in the end, our life is beyond our control. We can, however, learn to appreciate our life for the wonder it is. We can cultivate the capacity to meet whatever circumstances we encounter, even when we are overwhelmed and lost, with this basic friendliness. Rather than judging ourselves and others, we can open our hearts, see what is here, do what needs to be done and appreciate this precious and fragile gift of life.

While this may be easy to read or even write about, it takes a lifetime of practice and intention to live in this spirit. This is why we go to sesshin.

Personal Practice: Play around with the idea of meeting your life with this ‘basic friendliness’. Maybe take ten minutes to sit still and just allow yourself to be as you are—being present to whatever thoughts, sensations and feelings are present—without having to evaluate or change anything. Let yourself be as you are. You don’t have to like what is arising or feel good about it—but you can just let it be.

Or maybe hold this spirit of basic friendliness with you as you go about some of the activities of your day. What if it’s all OK, even right now? What if you can just be who you are and allow others to be who they are?