Winter Retreat Debrief
notes on spaciousness and living more openly
Two weekends ago, I spent three days at a silent meditation retreat at The Alembic. Michael Taft has quickly become one of my favorite teachers—his insight, playfulness, use of metaphor, and profound humor all allow for a more resonant and direct transfer of his wisdom to one’s own practice. The weekly sits get live-streamed and I had been following along virtually for a while, so I was really excited to get up to Berkeley to be in person after many weeks of convincing myself that the 1hr+ drive was just a little too much for my schedule.
I’m fairly certain I got a lot out of the retreat. But it’s been a fuzzy process when I’m asked about how it went. Some of it really stood out, and some of it was less memorable but may have seeped in on a subconscious level to be revealed at a later date (or maybe not!). A wide range of physical and mental experiences, which, as I’ve come to realize thanks in part to Michael’s guidance, all fall under the umbrella of the mind and its constructions. I wrote down a bunch of stuff in my journal, so I’m going to try and write it down again in a way that I hope inspires an extra inkling of curiosity about the experience you’re having right here, right now.
A note that, though they really excite me, I am a relative infant to a lot of these ideas. As I stumble my way down the pathless pass toward a deeper, more experiential understanding of what I’m putting on the page here, maybe this can be a post that you and I return to later on with greater clarity. That may not sound encouraging in terms of you reading on, but oh well. A lot of this that’s coming from my journal came directly from Michael and the awesome questions/thoughts put forth by fellow retreatants in the Q&A sessions, so big shoutout to everyone :)
The big theme of the retreat was spaciousness, which seems to be synonymous with emptiness1, and sort of synonymous with awareness2. Open, vast, spacious awareness. Spaciousness is welcoming, and it has more than enough room for everything.3 It is from this vast, clear, bright spaciousness that everything arises—thoughts, feelings emotions, ideas, etc. But we forget this a lot.
Think of your mind as a big, clear, wide-open sky (doesn’t that already calm you down a little?). The sky welcomes all, including “good” and “bad” thoughts/feelings/emotions—they are all the wind, in a sense, with tons of space existing in and around them. “Bad” thoughts or emotions don’t get blocked out or avoided—they’re there, too. It’s how we regard them that matters…
We tend to run into trouble when we grab onto a thought, feeling, or emotion, and it starts to grow and grow until it feels as though it’s filling our entire mind or awareness. Again, this is not actually the case, but it feels that way. All of a sudden, we feel like we’re about to burst and we act reactively or impulsively, caught up in the narratives we’ve come to believe about ourselves, certain beings, certain ideas. This reactivity originates from the initial grabbing, which is often done out of a desire for control. We condense and constrict our open, vast awareness into this little portal and, for that moment (or longer), it seems that all that exists is the thought/feeling we’ve grabbed onto. This is an illusion, yet it can often lead to outcomes that aren’t great not just for ourselves, but for those around us (or really far away somewhere else). If the intent is to reduce suffering for ourselves and others—with whom we are utterly interdependent—this grabbing and grasping usually leads to the opposite outcome.4
Recognizing the spaciousness in and around everything that arises—embodying the big sky of the mind—can help us be with that which arises, not judging it or fighting it, rather than trying to block something out, to control something that is impermanent, etc.
Importantly, spaciousness (or emptiness) isn’t this boring, dull thing that we English speakers tend to associate with such words. That’s a label we have applied to the concept. As Michael explained it, spaciousness itself is aware, it is awake, it is utterly clear. And it’s always there! That’s pretty cool, because the practice becomes about recognizing something that can then change the way we experience life, rather than needing to create something from scratch.
With this in mind, we can begin to cultivate a more persistent level of open-mindedness to everything that arises, realizing that we don’t have to grab onto the thoughts and emotions that blow about as winds in the big sky of the mind. Extrapolating from here, we can cultivate not just open-mindedness, but open-heartedness and open-bodied-ness, too.
This really hit home with me at the retreat. When we pay attention to our present experience, we can more easily notice when we become closed off and start defending our hearts, minds, and/or bodies. Think back to a time you felt closed off, constricted, or defensive. Was that a good place from which to approach relationships, complex societal problems, or traffic? Unlikely. It’s very limiting and can narrow what we see as possible in any given situation. When we notice how vast and open awareness really is, we also notice that there’s enough kindness, enough love, and enough compassion5 for ourselves and all other beings, because it’s not contained within this small skull container.
From a place of open-mindedness, open-heartedness, and open-bodied-ness (open to all possibilities, aware of the various and elaborate constructions of the mind), we can “step outside” the limiting ideas and constructs that we may have viewed as incontrovertibly true prior to engaging in this type of inquiry. In noticing the space and impermanence within all that arises, we can engage with thoughts, emotions, ideas, problems, and more with equanimity6 and compassion.
Like, next time you feel angry or jealous or something, try to notice if it feels like it’s taking up all the space. Return to the idea of the mind as a big sky—does that change anything? Is there less contraction, less tension? The resulting openness (or even a sense that openness is possible) can lead to an “undefended-ness” of the heart, as Michael put it, that creates a much better foundation on which to take action from. The anger is still there, and that’s okay, but we can see it more clearly for what is it and proceed without any of the blind, vengeful rage that anger can often spiral into. To me, this seems to be the “so what?” of noticing spaciousness (see footnote 1 again)—as all kinds of thoughts and feelings arise in our experience, we can engage with them and act on them (or not act) with equanimity and care.
It felt really nice to be able to engage with these ideas/experiences for multiple days. For most of the first day, I felt like I was closing tabs in my mind—it went all sorts of places and when one thing was done, it moved to the next. Later on in the retreat, I was more easily able to settle into a kind of stillness that allowed for a bit more “soaking” in the feelings of spaciousness and open-heartedness. This created somewhat of a reference state for me post-retreat. Like, when I notice myself contracting or creating tension later today, I can more easily know what a more open approach feels like because I spent an extended period of time sitting with it.
A big mantra I took with me (from one of Michael’s guided sits) was “return and rest.” Your mind will wander to all kinds of places during the course of any meditation, and when you notice that—whenever it is that you notice that—you aren’t “doing it wrong.” Simply return to spaciousness awareness and rest there. Return and rest. The moment you punish yourself for wandering off or grabbing onto a looping thought, you’re actually grabbing onto more things and contracting further.
We all had a short interview with Michael where we got to chat about how the retreat was going and ask any questions privately. I asked him about hope, because sometimes it feels wasteful to engage in these practices when (among many, many other things) Norfolk Southern, a company with $12 billion in annual revenue, knowingly detonates a fireball of carcinogenic chemicals into a small Ohio town because, well, shareholder value. I liked his answer, which basically said that although meditation can seem passive to those around us, the “change the world” yearning that many of us have—and the resulting energy required to engage in such work—will never last without the ability to approach problems with equanimity, to recognize and embrace our interbeing, or without the capacity to feel joy and find peace within oneself. Without these, which take practice to cultivate, movements will burn out along with you. Rather than engaging in an endless “war on X” (drugs, climate change, the right, the left)7, recognizing and leaning into our interconnectedness to other people and the planet may just be super helpful. Engaged Buddhism! There’s a lot of Buddhism here, but these ideas apply to our literal experience as humans, so there are no real ideologies to plant a flag into.
There are many different techniques/methods that can result in the recognition of spaciousness. There is Vipassana, which involves breaking things down into the smallest subunits to recognize their impermanence and everchanging-ness. There’s also non-dual practice, which Michael is really good at teaching, and which Sasha Chapin writes about really wonderfully.
It was amazing to feel so close to people that I had never spoken to. Sharing that space of inquiry and curiosity about the mind and about the experience was really powerful. I’m really excited to get to know some of the other folks that attended, as many of them seemed to be more experienced in these practices than myself.
On that note, a fellow retreat goer posted a wonderful thread on Twitter about attention, awareness, spaciousness, and more. It helped me digest some of Michael’s ideas, and may make more sense to you than anything I’m writing in this post.
There was a lot of physical pain involved (mostly left knee and upper back/lower neck). During an evening sit later in the retreat, I had a cool “proud of myself” sit during one of the 50-minute sessions, where I came face to face with the sensations of pain in a way that didn’t make them go away, but allowed me to just be there with them. There’s a line between pain and injuring oneself—I knew this sort of feeling was just a really annoying one that I wanted to change, so the opportunity to work with it and not really have the option to move (I was in the main hall, where stillness was one of the few requirements) resulted in a really interesting experience, showing me that my initial urge to move was not inevitably going to get more and more unbearable.
The sit immediately following that one was my low point. I just wasn’t really getting the whole spaciousness thing, and it felt like maybe it just wasn’t for me. Part of the guided meditation mentioned that we are all already-enlightened Buddhas, and at that moment, I simply didn’t agree. After the sit, Michael gave a talk and almost word-for-word said what I had been thinking—that many of us in the room probably felt like this was all bullshit and we didn’t have buddhanature inside of us. Very few humans, he said, have become instantly enlightened upon hearing that they have Buddha-like qualities within them already. Rather, for most of us, it’s a long process of noticing little by little that spacious awareness—and the boundless equanimity and compassion that can flow from it—is indeed a thing. And then, bit by bit, we can try to notice more and more, making spaciousness (rather than constriction) a larger portion of the experience pie chart.
Somewhere down the road, we may realize that this awareness was there all along, that everything was already as it needed to be. But for now, it was really motivating to remain diligent in my practice, trusting that I would often be confused or just not quite getting it, but also trusting that if I paid attention to the moments where concepts and constructs dissolved, even momentarily, they could grow to become more frequent. In other words, we may not become a Buddha (or any enlightened being in your study of spirituality) right away, but in stringing together more and more “Buddha-like experiences”, the noticing can start to compound. Or something like that!
On the last day, I had an interesting realization that seems kind of obvious looking back: it’s not that serious. Realizing all of this is grounded in the ability to be playful, exploratory, curious, and open releases us from the need to “practice hard” or understand every term or concept so technically. It’s actually this “not that serious” mindset that allowed me to think more deeply about the themes of the retreat. The less we hold onto things, the more fully we can embrace them as they are. From here we can practice cultivating this light, spacious openness that puts, in my opinion, a more pleasant lens on our experience with ourselves and others. After all, if you think back to a moment in your life when you felt the boundaries between you and another person (or nature, or music, or XYZ) dissolve, it most likely involved openness and joy, not concentrated eyebrow-furrowing.
Overall, recognizing how astounding the mind is another thing that I have returned to again and again post-retreat. We can beat ourselves up for getting lost in thought or distracted or caught up in something trivial, or we can go “huh, where did that even come from, that’s interesting” and just sort of be fascinated by the mind’s everchanging and inherently creative nature. Coming from a place of awe rather than frustration allows us to engage with the mind more gently, seeing all that it generates but knowing we don’t have to grab onto anything or discipline the mind. All our ruminations are likely the result of habit energies, a desire for distraction/entertainment, etc., but they are all impermanent and subject to change as well. How liberating, knowing that thoughts/ideas/feelings will never cease but aren’t permanent either. This gives us room to explore, try new things, approach new concepts with a deep curiosity, and much more.
Ok cool! Not sure if any of that was coherent, as I kind of let my journal guide me through making this post, but I’m hoping it can be a document to look back at, as well as something that might be helpful in generating more inquiry into the whole “well, what’s really going on here?” question surrounding our shared experience.
ChatGPT puts this far better than I might: “In Buddhism, emptiness (or "sunyata" in Sanskrit) refers to the notion that all things lack inherent existence or self-nature. In other words, nothing exists independently or in isolation from other phenomena; everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions.
From a Buddhist perspective, emptiness is not a nihilistic or negative concept, but rather a positive one that helps individuals understand the nature of reality and see beyond the illusions of the ego or self. By recognizing the empty nature of all phenomena, individuals can let go of attachment and aversion, and cultivate a sense of compassion and wisdom towards all beings.”
From my understanding, coming into awareness involves seeing the spaciousness around and within all things. So being in awareness involves noticing spaciousness.
Spaciousness can be so vast because “your” mind is less contained than it may seem at first. Think about where your mind is—is it in the center of your head? If you cut your brain open, would you find your mind? Taking this as a starting point, it becomes apparent that the mind actually exists outside the body, constructing everything you are experiencing as reality. In this sense, bodily sensations are also constructed by the mind, which can begin to make sense when we think about how the state we’re in (open and curious vs closed and judgmental) literally affects how we feel and interpret signals from our bodies.
And that doesn’t mean we should beat ourselves up for it! Judgment is a classic example of grabbing/grasping, too. We only have the next moment, so if we do (or did) something we regret, it’s even less great to let that start looping into self-loathing.
Something Michael and other teachers/friends have also helped me realize is that compassion includes discernment. This isn’t about being blindly “nice” to everyone and everything, especially if they are causing real harm/suffering. This is why I am really drawn to Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of Engaged Buddhism.
Here, equanimity doesn’t mean emotion-less zombie (i.e. “I don’t feel anything because I’ve stepped outside of it”). Rather than not feeling anything, equanimity here means being okay with whatever it is your feeling, able to approach it with a welcoming and open mind.
From Charles Eisenstein’s Reinventing Progress: “Once habituated to the good-versus-evil storyline, a population is easy to manipulate. Systems remain unchanged as caring people stampede from one villain to the next, ignoring the context that empowered those villains to begin with. Furthermore, quite commonly the villain is just a subgroup of the population at large, which ends up expending its political energy on crusades against itself.”
What an excellent practice report!
“Return and rest” as well as “it’s not that serious” are takeaways for me. Stepping outside of one’s thoughts isn’t easy but it’s worth it! The retreat sounds so amazing. So happy you got to go! 🥰 Thank you for sharing what it meant to you!