From Tricycle: 5 Things that might surprise you about meditation retreats
This article promoted the following thoughts and in typing them out, I realised that this is a good opportunity to wish my Muslim friends Ramadan Kareem.
It’s been a while since I sat a structured, silent 10-day retreat. Staying at monasteries is different: there are chores to do, interactions with laypeople during alms food offering, evening chanting, and a different (and in some ways a more difficult) challenge of committing oneself to the fruitful use of personal free time to actually engage in Dharma practice rather than be idle. But in both cases, I’ve had people comment that I must have had a wonderful, relaxing time going on retreat. Not really. It is not the spa treatment luxury enjoyment that they are evoking when they say ‘wonderful, relaxing time’. Well, for a start, along with the one meal before midday routine, there isn’t even a proper bed to sleep on, just a rubber or foam mat on a low wooden frame, because one of the additional precepts taken on retreat is to abstain from luxurious beds.
But these self-restrictions around diet, dress code, speech and behaviour, and sensual indulgences—all of which would, at least in the initial phase, agitate the body-mind and provoke all sorts of habitual resistance—these are the constraints within which freedom from the constraints of the self-serving ego may be invited, whereby one gives oneself over to something other than the self.
Ramadan Kareem, my friends.
spacetimemattering 