Openness, Emptiness, Awareness

I just got back this weekend from a retreat I led at Rivendell Retreat Centre in Sussex, England. The feebdack on the retreat was excellent, and for me the retreat was an excellent opportunity to deepen my practice after the rather exhausting ordeal of repairing my flooded house (more of my belated flood-reports later…).

The retreat was called “Big Sky Mind” and was an exploration of different aspects of mindfulness and pure awareness practice.

Openness was an exploration of mindfulness and acceptance. I emphasized keeping a broad awareness during meditation rather than prematurely focusing. Often when we zoom in on the breath we end up excluding parts of ourselves from awareness, producing a subtle form of repression. Starting meditation in a wide-open way allows us to acknowledge our experience more fully so that we can then become more wholeheartedly focused. This process of being aware of the breadth of our experience also involves fully accepting whatever we find in our experience.

I also emphasized the aspect of mindfulness known as “dhammavicaya,” or “investigation of mental states.” This involved exploring and noting the qualities of our experiences, and especially of our “distractions.” So an itch or physical pain comes to be seen as a collection of different sensations, rather than just a unitary experience, and an emotion becomes a field of energy within the body. Often when we observe an emotion, such as anger, we notice that there is an underlying sense of pain or hurt that has to be acknowledged before we can fully process the emotion itself. Dhammavicaya is an important aspect of acceptance and mindfulness.

Emptiness was an exploration of impermanence and interconnectedness. In this phase of the retreat we noticed the impermanent nature of each experience that we focused on. It’s tremendously liberating to realize that our distractions are simply short-lived phenomena that arise within experience and then pass away, rather than fixed “things.” With persistent observation we can come to see that our distractions are not ultimately a part of us, any more than a cloud is a fixed part of the blue sky. This is liberating too. In this part of the retreat we also did the Six Element practice, in which we reflected on how everything that makes up our physical being is borrowed from the wider universe, and that within this human form there is nothing we can call our own. What we call “me, myself” is composed of rivers, clouds, trees, soil, and the sun. We come to see that there is in fact nothing we can grasp onto in life, least of all ourselves!

Awareness is the hardest part of the retreat to describe. At this stage of the retreat we weren’t simply exploring mindfulness, but were exploring the difference between “Mind” (our mental states) and “Awareness” (used here to mean the intrinsic, illuminating, blissfull state that contains those experiences. We practiced letting go of our identification with Mind, and instead relaxed into an identification with Awareness. There’s no question of our creating Awareness or of our striving to attain it. Awareness is intrinsic and ever-present, and it simply has to be experienced.

There were nineteen of us on the retreat, and I was impressed by how harmonious the group was. From time to time there will be someone on a retreat who is “difficult” to work with, but I found everyone who attended to be very receptive and appreciative. Rivendell itself is situated in beautiful grounds, and we were very well looked after. Although I’ve been back at work for a couple of days now, the effects of the retreat are still very much with me.

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