Retreat Q & A

by Irma Gomés

What is retreat?
There are many ideas of what retreat can be. Going to a secluded beach house or mountain cabin to rest, catch up on reading, or finish a project can be a retreat in the sense of spending time alone in an environment without distractions. But what about a spiritual retreat?

A spiritual retreat begins with withdrawing from everyday activities. You stop and analyze where you’re at in your life. You set your motivation and mindset to spend the retreat alone without distractions focusing on your inner self. This precious time serves to discover what lies below the surface, recognize the sources of your unhappiness and apply tools to change them. This type of retreat transforms sources of suffering into sources of happiness.

With this understanding, your retreat can also purify unethical actions. You follow the basic principles of morality in your thoughts and actions, such as protecting life, speaking truthfully and rejoicing in the virtues and deeds of others. By cultivating this mindfulness, you retreat from grasping to external objects and internal afflictions such as anger, pride, attachment, jealousy and ignorance.

There need to be some elements of discipline for the retreat to be successful, such as a schedule of activities. But the retreat should not be uncomfortable for it to work. It’s about cultivating a better attitude, a good heart, forgiveness and compassion. Protect your mind from self-cherishing by thinking of others and making efforts to improve yourself by serving them better. Overall, you should feel good and happy during this time you’ve worked so hard to attain.

Why do we need to do retreat?
The motivation to go on retreat needs to be greater than getting away from life’s routine. We need to do retreat in order to develop benevolent qualities in our mind, practice thinking of others first and open our heart more. The Buddha said all the happiness we experience comes from serving others, and all the suffering we experience comes from self-cherishing. But the mind is very self-centered. Without retreat, it is like muddy water after the storms of daily life. When we go on retreat, our minds start to settle and the muddy waters begin to clear.

Retreat allows us to draw our consciousness away from everyday distractions and focus on what’s going on inside. To get a good look inward, we can use tools such as practicing analytical meditations, reading spiritual texts, and listening to a Lama’s teachings.

We start to notice how difficult it is for the mind to focus on the present. Buddhist texts say the mind is like a wild monkey and we need to tame it. This process takes time, discipline and great motivation.

Without great motivation, it is easy to give up when challenges arise during retreat. But if we think that the happiness of those around us depends on our practice during retreat, it’s easier to deal with any challenges. Meditations of loving-kindness prove to be very helpful with these situations.

Furthermore, we need to realize that the sources of suffering and happiness reside within ourselves. Because of our heightened awareness during retreat, we discover how we can change the suffering in the world by transforming our perceptions. We simply watch our thoughts and feelings arise, analyze them (noticing how often we think of ‘me’ instead of ‘others’) and we deal with them.

Retreat gives us a tremendous opportunity to deepen our meditation skills. Meditation is the primary tool we use to free the mind from the thoughts that cause suffering and to develop powerful antidotes. As we train the mind to be more observant of thoughts and feelings as they arise, we can bring this watchfulness to our everyday life. As the peaceful, happy mind starts to permeate our days more and more, we look forward to planning more and more spiritual retreats.

When is a good time to do retreat?
Anytime can be a good time to do retreat. It takes a lot of merit for all the causes to come into play to create the time for retreat, even if it’s just for a day. So start wishing very hard that you are able to do retreat.

At some point in life, we all have a wake-up call: we lose our job or our health, or someone close to us has a terrible accident or dies. In those moments, we gain some clarity about what’s important in life. It becomes clear what is a waste of time and what is an investment of time. Buddhism says part of true wisdom is knowing what thoughts and actions to give up and what thoughts and actions to take up in order to cause happiness.

Most authentic spiritual traditions teach us that happiness comes to us from serving others. But what do we do when we think we don't have much to give? Go on retreat. During this sacred time, we shift our focus to the heart and develop some renunciation of the worldly life. When we go inside our hearts, we realize that we do indeed have enough and in fact that we have plenty to give.

The first step is to retreat from the misunderstanding that happiness comes from serving our own desires first. Then we retreat from bad habits and meaningless, self-centered activities. Next we start to develop compassion, equanimity, wisdom and the power to truly help others. Finally we retreat from feelings of spiritual inadequacy, offering up all of our realizations and dedicating all we do consciously to the benefit of everyone. We wish that by the power of our dedication we may create the time to do more prosperous retreats

Email Irma with your questions about retreat at irma_gomes@hotmail.com