LA Times Interview About Retreat with Venerable Sumati Marut - Part I
Journalist Duke Helfand interviewed Lama Marut for an article that appeared in the September 7, 2009 Labor Day Edition of the Los Angeles Times. We’re happy to present Part I of this amazing conversation about retreat. Part II and III will appear in the next two editions of Awakening Journal.
Duke: The great retreat; tell me a little about why you want to do it; for yourself and your students…can you reflect on that for a bit?
Lama Marut: We believe pretty strongly that the way to really make changes in your life is two-fold. One is to work hard for other people, to serve other people, and we try to do that through teaching, through offering classes, and through other ways of helping people. Teaching is the highest way to help others, to teach them how to help themselves - but service in all kinds of ways. So that’s one element of the ‘project’ you could say.
And the other element of the project is really wrestling with our own minds, and with what we call the mental afflictions that destroy our happiness and our abilities to serve others properly. It’s very important to try to put our own mental afflictions to rest so that we can help others fully. Because unless we have fixed ourselves we can’t really dedicate the time and energy that is needed to really serve others properly – because we’re too busy worrying about ourselves.
So, for the second project – the second part of the enterprise – we have to really wrestle with our own minds. And we try to do that on a daily basis in the world, as we’re going through our daily lives, by cultivating a meditative practice of 30, 40, 50 minutes a day at least. And that’s ok as far as it goes, but the pressures of the world, the anxieties and so forth are omnipresent, and there’s only a certain amount of progress that you can make in meditation while living in a daily modern life.
And so when we go on retreat, it’s as a way to really get serious about the meditation aspect of our practice with the understanding, with the idea that we will ultimately be able to help others by fixing ourselves, by working on the hardness of our minds in a way that can only be done in an isolated, quiet, removed situation. Retreat should be understood to be a condition of possibility for us to serve others better. Sometimes people get the idea that, well, “You’re just retreating from the world, you’re just running away. You’re just going away to contemplate your navel in the cave.” That’s not it at all. It is a necessary component in the larger project of learning how to help others by fixing ourselves first.
Lama Marut at an Abbey in Massachusetts
Duke: Until now what’s the longest retreat that you’ve done…?
Lama Marut: Up until now the longest I’ve done is about 6 weeks.
Duke: So this even for you will be a significant jump.
Lama Marut: It will. We’re planning to have a three-month retreat next summer as a way of getting some practice in what it’s like to be in long-term retreat. Four to six weeks is a long time, but it’s nothing like nine months or a year or three years. So I think three months will be a minimum preparation for a longer retreat.
Duke: Can you talk to me a bit about the retreat itself? The mechanics? The routine? The day-to-day. Is there any communication at all between the retreatants? Is there any communication at all with the outside world? Help me understand, what’s the level of seclusion?
Lama Marut: We are trained and taught to be very strict in our retreats, which means we do not have access to the outside world; no phones, no internet, no email or anything like that. There is a certain amount of communication that needs to be done between yourself and the person serving the retreat. When we’re in a deep retreat we will need people who get food for us; when we run out of toilet paper, they bring it. So there’s a certain amount of that kind of communication that needs to be done by notes only. But other than that, the communication should be pretty much severed. The stricter you can be about that, the more you’re forced to go into inside, inside your head and work on the hard disk. Communication in general takes us outside of ourselves. We dissipate the concentration of our own mind by communicating with others and by the distractions of the external world. So a strict retreat will eliminate as many of those distractions as possible to force the attention inward.
Duke: And, would retreatants communicate with each other by note? Or is the expectation that that would not happen?
Lama Marut: If retreatants were doing retreat with other people in the same location, the expectation is that that wouldn’t happen. And many of us will be doing retreat alone, so not in the context of other people, but isolated.
We’re thinking about how we can help each other, by rotating people through different roles. People who are in the retreat need people who will serve their retreat. So there would be a role like that for some people: serving the retreat, which then helps create the karma for them to the position of going into retreat themselves. And then the person who was in retreat comes out of retreat and serves the person going into retreat – help each other like that.
To be continued in Part II