Take an Inside Journey into a Three-Year Retreat – Part I

By Lama Ani Thupten Pelma

 In 2003, Lama Pelma completed a silent three-year retreat in the high desert of Arizona. In December 2010, she entered her second three-year retreat near Bowie, Arizona. We’re happy to present Part I of this three-part series she composed about preparing for her second brave journey into silence.

As I prepare for my second three-year retreat, I see it as another small journey in my life, like one of the branches off the main trunk of a tree. I ask myself, as I look back over the past twenty years of my spiritual quest, what makes this journey a journey? It’s the unknown elements; the challenges I face to reach the goal and, more importantly, the spiritual growth and development that are obtained for the benefit of others.

Nothing is as it seems
It’s very seldom that any journey we plan materializes exactly how we thought it would be. I remember having all of these visions about how my first three-year retreat was going to be. I had extremely vivid images of what I would be doing and even what my cabin would look like.  Looking back now, I see clearly the important lesson that I cannot control what or how mental seeds will ripen in my mind from my past deeds.  For example, I didn’t visualize clearly that I would be crying a lot on my cushion, for hours on end, when I saw how my mind worked. When I saw how every good thing that I did in the past was done with selfish motivations.

It is important to pay attention to all the comforts of the cabin, but the one thing that we can’t prepare for is what seeds will ripen while we’re there. However, we can certainly prepare to brace ourselves for the ride.  The ride of the unknown.

Firm Commitment to the Journey
It is imperative to prepare for the unknown in the best way that we can, but we can never truly be totally ready. One way that we can get mentally prepared is to make a firm commitment to stay inside our retreat, provided that we are happy and healthy. If our commitment is not firm, the mind will waver, and we will make excuses to leave. In the last three-year retreat, a retreatant left because she received news that one of her parents had died. Then she was faced with the decision of staying in retreat or leaving the tsam (boundary). This is a very difficult call to make. But if we truly decided to leave the world, then we would make a commitment to ourselves not to receive any outside mail of any sort.

A firm commitment is needed before we close our tsam. This comes from detaching ourselves from the world mentally, as much as we can, because it will be difficult to keep our mind focused on our retreat until the first year has passed. After the first six months of retreat, the feeling arises that if we died no one would care. Then it is easy to settle in nicely.

Keeping Boundaries Inside 
Three-Year Retreat

For me, this is the most important aspect of my retreat. How do I keep my inner boundaries inside the retreat tsam? During our previous three-year retreat, when we were working on the fire puja rituals and making tormas together, there was some hand signaling acting as a form of communication, and I didn’t enjoy it. It became a part of the retreat culture, and to me it was very distracting, although I lived with it. It is important when meeting as a group in retreat to remain still and have a notepad and pen just for emergencies.

Having a fence around my retreat cabin helped me to define my lerung (tantric retreat) boundaries, because I never went beyond the fence during previous lerungs. There is a certain power to staying within the psychic, spiritually protected boundary that you’ve committed yourself to. This is what made it so exciting during study meditation periods to unwind within the big boundaries of the retreat and take some quiet walks, which made my mind feel so expansive.

When you do take a walk, it’s a good practice to walk with your eyes down, if you are passing someone, to alleviate the desire to engage with them. In three-year retreat, we leave the world to be in silence. Holding the line here is very crucial. If we don’t, our retreat will become like some kind of a vacation.

One of the procedures our Lama implemented within the first month of retreat that greatly prevented this situation was when he mapped out the retreat property. Each of us had our own part of the property assigned to us, which ensured that we didn’t see each other by accident to interact. This was one way of shrinking our physical world down to enough room for only one person to peacefully reside within it.

Learning about Self-Existence
and Energy
When you are in retreat you discover a new awareness of the energy of yourself and others. Be careful about whom, if anyone, you let come into your meditation space during retreat. At the end of my retreat, I had ordained certain people to enter my meditation yurt and the energy stayed the same as compared with others who entered. It was the first time that I saw the power of the vows. After you have completed your retreat, you will have a totally different relationship with your energy and others.

Following retreat, you will need to go through a small readjustment period. What I noticed were noises, which I could tolerate before I entered retreat, I had a difficult time getting used to again, like the sound of an electric fan, a refrigerator motor or being with someone who talks a lot. Since coming out of my first retreat in 2003, I still don’t like to talk for long periods of time, unless I’m teaching a class. It becomes exhausting to talk about mundane things, which is quite a blessing. You learn to reserve your prana and speak more kindly and meaningfully.

To be continued in Part II.

Lama Thubten Pelma is an American Tibetan Buddhist nun who founded the Three Jewels Dharma Center in NYC. For the past 10 years, Lama Pelma has been a student of the masters at Sera Mey Monastery in southern India.