| | In Dec. 2013, I participated in a Metta retreat led by Bhante Sujato. This was quite impressive, so I'm posting a bit of information about it in general, and about my experiences there, before the memory fades. I thought about posting this information on the retreat centre page, but since it was done in a rented location, I didn't. But: if you ever think about doing a retreat with Bhante Sujato, it will probably be similar.
This post has 2 parts. The first is about the organization of the retreat and the technique in general. The second contains my own experiences. I talked to some other persons and found that those varied very much, so I'm not claiming that what I experienced is what usually tends to happen.
PART I:
First, here is the schedule:
Tuesday 10th December 14:00 Arrival and registration 18:00 Welcome 18:15 Introduction, chanting, meditation teaching 21:00 Meditation (optional)
11th – 20th December 6:00 Guided meditation 8:10 Breakfast 8:45 Meditation & interviews 11:00 Lunch 12:00 Relax/informal meditation 14:00 Meditation & interviews 17:00 Afternoon tea, rest 19:00 Chanting & Dhamma talk 21:00 Meditation (optional)
Saturday 21st December 6:00 Guided meditation 8:10 Breakfast 8:45 Meditation & interviews 11:00 Lunch 12:30 Farewell gathering 14:00 Finish
Obviously, the schedule is very relaxed. Note that this was only a suggestion. Everyone was allowed to do whatever he or she wanted at any time, even not attending the dhamma talk would have been ok. Doing things like yoga or tai chi in between was totally allowed and even encouraged, too. Also, there was no strict rule of noble silence. Everyone could do noble silence or just not. A note on Bhante Sujato: He's really cool. He got somewhat infamous through a series of youtube videos in which he 'gossips' about some other Theravada lineages, e.g. Goenka, Mahasi, Ajahn Tong, Pa Auk (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3tUCtwmVGY). This makes him seem like a bit of a 'fundamentalist sutta head', but that impression is misleading. He's very pragmatic about practice, (in fact he's more pragmatic than all the goenka/mahasi teachers I've studied with so far) but knows a ton of stuff about the suttas. He denies that the MCTB-fruition is what the suttas describe as stream entry, but that's pretty irrelevant for practice, especially if you're going to take a Metta retreat with him. Sujato mainly leads Metta retreats, because hardly anyone else is doing it. The dhamma talks in the evening were a mixture of practical advice, stories from the suttas, and his own stories. They were extremely nice to listen to, very helpful and funny. After that, Sujato would answer all kinds of questions. (Everything from 'can you even ride a bike with those robes?' to 'I read this particular thing in line 123 of sutta 654, what's your interpretation of it?') Also, Sujato seems to do different dhamma talks every time. There were maybe 5% of stuff I recognized from his other Metta talks on the net.
The metta meditation method he teaches he's got from some teacher of him, Ajahn Maha chatchai. This is how it works: The metta consists of four stages: metta to self, loved one/friend, neutral person, the disliked person(i.e. "someone who's going on your nerves"). you start with the first, and after some days of retreat you can also include the 2nd person, and so on. Repeat the words "may I be happy" in your mind, and keep the rest of your attention in the body, e.g. in the heart region. When the feeling of metta comes up, let it spread through the whole body. This method is so simple, it's totally idiotproof. Which I really like about it. This can be done while sitting or walking. According to Bhante Sujato, the following is a good way to do a meditation session:
1. sit down and get settled in the present. for some minutes just be aware of the body in general, of the body sensations of sitting and of the skin touching the clothes. see how the mind generally feels now and accept that. 2a. start with stage 1 of metta meditation. Say the words "may I be happy" over and over again, as if you really mean it, "like Shakespeare". 2b. after some time go to stage 2 of metta. (aka the loved one) This happens by exchanging just one word: "May X be happy." 2c. stage 3 2d. stage 4: the disliked person. after this stage, the mind could go into jhana, but that takes a lot of time. 3. let the words of metta go. let the feeling of metta dissolve. watch how the mind goes back to a neutral state. (don't skip this! Note that this actually develops insight into anicca, too.) 4. reflect: what happened in this session of meditation? how did my mind behave? what was (un)helpful for the meditation? 5. send merits to anyone.
On the retreat, we also did general mindfulness meditation in whichever style we wanted to. The instruction was to do Metta just whenever it feels good to do so - otherwise do another meditation. So the task was implicitely to develop some intuition for that.
PART II:
So, here are some of my own experiences on the retreat:
I was kind of ill at day 1,5,9, so I slept over most of these days.(Sujato said that this isn't something which usually happens to people in Metta retreats so don't worry.) Also, I can't do walking meditation for long periods of time due to knee pains. Since I needed to balance walking meditation with sitting, this also reduced my sitting time. Apart from that, I felt too undisciplined to strictly adhere to the noble-silence rule. All in all, i never felt as lazy on a retreat as on this one. So I probably only did 30-50 hours of meditation in total, which still turned out to be quite impressive.
Day 0: Introductory talk. Everyone got a picture of a teddy, and of a young cat (or other animal) Cute! Note: teddy is a meditation master. Whenever you don't know what to do, look at teddy. he meditates all the time, and he's so good at it! Teddy was sitting at the front for the whole retreat.
Day 1: This day was about establishing some mindfulness first with whatever technique we felt comfortable with, so no Metta yet. When I told Sujato that I felt horrible, he told me to go and get some sleep. So not much happened on this day. In the evening, Sujato introduced the Metta meditation method first. He talked a bit about something he called 'the problem of subject-object-duality'. In his experience, people often think things like "this or this has to vanish from my mind, so I can do the metta meditation properly. He insisted that this attitude futile, and that we need to accept our responsibility for everything that's going on in our mind. This seemed quite important for him, but I'm still not really sure of what he was getting at.
Day 2-4: I did some really good practice here. On day 4 or so, the 2nd stage of metta was introduced. The mind slowly became calmer, but also quite tired. I added walking meditation to the mix, then the tiredness vanished. I asked Sujato, whether we needed to concentrate on the intention of Metta, or only on the words. He said that the intention is somewhat subtle, and it is best to start with the obvious thing - the words - first, and just go to the feeling when it arises, without worrying much about the intentions. The Metta feeling sometimes showed up, but usually didn't stay for long. By day 4, it got more reliable. It seemed to turn into a disposition, like a subtle undercurrent, which was always there. I felt like a genuinely friendly person by this time. Cool!
The words sometimes changed their appearance in the mind. At the beginning, the mind would often start to play around with the words. I saw the words (i.e. the actual letters) in my head changing their size, their colour, dancing around... and doing all kinds of weird things. After a day or two, this stopped. After that, some random intentions seemed to 'mix in' with the metta phrases. So I would say "may I be happy" and notice that I was actually angry/resignating/sad/... when I said that. So I tried to say the words with more conviction again, and some other intention would interfere. It often took several tries to 'nudge' the mind back in the right direction.
On a side note, I have some problems with depression/anxiety/difficult unaccepted emotions. In meditation, some of those emotions would come up and I didn't really know how to handle this in meditation. Sujato taught me to hold them as a 'little child' for a while, so they would be soothed. ("but not all the time, or they become spoiled brats!") This seemed quite difficult at first, but then worked surprisingly well. (On Mahasi retreat, I was usually told to just notice them and go back, which wouldn't really help, so I was very positively surprised at this way of dealing with them.) Sujato stressed that all these things needed some experimentation, and that we shouldn't see it as failures if it doesn't work at once. He likened learning meditation to Edison's 10.000 tries of producing a working lightbulb.
Usually when I sat down to meditate, a lot of sadness came up. And some resistance to the idea of "may i be happy". But it never became more concrete.
Sujato also taught me a bit how to trust my intuition, so I could start and end meditation sessions without a timer (which was forbidden in the meditation room). I had virtually never practiced without a timer, so this was quite unusual for me. After some time, I really started to appreciate this way of practicing.
Day 5: I wasn't well for seemingly no reason at all (felt very good the days before), so I slept for most of the day. So not much happened here. I noticed that the feeling of metta would come more often and more reliably, and with the liked person it was much easier. When I started giving up on really wanting the Metta feeling to appear, it came just by itself. Usually, I would then invite it to spread in my whole body, and one of two things happened: a) something else (e.g. anger or distraction) came up, I would lose focus and the Metta would be gone. b) I would try to somehow force the Metta into spreading in my body. Then the feeling would soon vanish, too.
Day 6-7: This is where practice became REALLY interesting.
Sujato introduced us to the 3rd stage of Metta, the neutral person. He talked a lot about how we need to develop the 4 'iddi-palas'(not sure if that's the correct term) because otherwise we would likely become too uninterested in the meditation and fall in the 'bawonga'-state. (i have no idea how this is written in pali) So before every session we should reflect on some things, among them our motivation to practice. I felt totally demotivated and it felt as if my mind was resigning before I had even started. I was absolutely convinced that it was impossible to develop Metta for the neutral person, and somehow also that it was actually a dangerous idea. I talked to Sujato about this - he told me that this means I'm not ready for the 3rd stage yet: "At some time, the mind wants to go there by itself, then it will be easy. Until then, stay with stages 1&2. This reaction is actually very useful, because it allows you to check how you're developing."
I started to see what Sujato probably meant with the 'subject-object-duality'. I could observe in great detail, how the mind was really 'estranged' (not sure about the translation here) internally, i.e. there seemed to be lots of conflicts. Some part of my mind always wanted some other part to disappear, or had some bad jugdment on it. The more I practiced, the more 'integrated' the mind seem to become. The conflicts seemed to vanish, and the mind slowly became peaceful and actually content with itself. The feeling of Metta often filled most of my body and started to feel a bit 'deeper' than in the beginning.
I noticed that I was always using some force when trying to be mindful of this and that. Finally, I could let go of this, and just chill out. I slept much better, and I actually started to wonder if I'm doing it wrong because the meditation felt so incredibly 'easy' and uncomplicated.
Also the difficult emotions mentioned above were gradually soothed. Although they were still there, they didn't try to 'torment' me any more the way they had done before. It felt, as if I had gradually invited all parts of my mind to really feel 'at home' under one common roof. Once they were there, I felt a bit 'reborn', and in a good way. I suspect that this state is what methods like ACT (Acceptance & commitment therapy) are trying to get at. And I'm truly puzzled why no one really advocates Metta as a method to actually get there. The most impressive instance of this was like this: I was doing the Metta meditation. There was a lot of metta feeling in great parts of my body. Then the feeling of anxious sadness came up. So I had a big block of metta and a big block of sadness beside that, both in my body. I was a bit confused what I should do now. Then, just on its own, the 'Metta block' seemed to console the 'sadness block' which in turn felt really good about it. Although hard to put in words what really happened, the experience was quite amazing.
Another thing that camp up was the wish to 'abandon the world' for some time and go an a really long retreat (like 6 months or more) as soon as the circumstances permit it. (i.e. 2-3 years down the road.) It seemed that this wish had been there for a long time, but the Metta retreat really enabled me to recognize and accept it.
Day 8: The above developments were quite cool. So I got really excited about them. The mind started to become totally enthusiastic about them, and spent some hours developing great plans what to do after the retreat with its newly-won Metta-superpower. I got a bit irritated, since this should usually happen on the last day of the retreat, but I had still 2 days to go... After thinking over its grand plans enough, the mind realized that all of this would still not be really satisfactory, and felt somewhat depressed. The feeling of Metta hardly reappeared, and it felt hard to actually go back to practice again and again. I felt like I was wasting precious retreat time, but couldn't really do much about it. Sujato said that all these things need some time to get balanced, and until that happens, these things can happen.
Day 9: I felt really bad and again slept for most of the day.
Sujato had introduced the 4th stage, the disliked person. He said that we should think about the disliked person as little as possible during the 4th stage. If we succeed in this, the mind would really get some energy in this, and soon go towards unification. He described in detail, how a nimitta would appear, and how the mind would finally go into Jhana. This sounded quite cool, but I was still strangely uninterested about it. He said that jhana was the place where the 'breaking down of the barriers' would happen, an experience where it is impossible to think of a distinction between different persons, i.e. who gets our metta (: I'm not sure if I will ever experience that but I'm sure there's yet a lot of work to do before. Since I didn't proceed to stage 3, I didn't even try stage 4 more than once. Sujato said that probably 80% of the participants wouldn't get past the 2nd stage on the retreat.
Day 10: After days 8 and 9 I couldn't really motivate myself to practice much. So not much happened any more, and the mind behaved largely as if it had already left the retreat. In the evening, Sujato answered a lot of questions instead of giving a talk. There was a big discussion about all kinds of things, especially bikkhuni ordination, religious fundemantalism and the destruction of the planet.
Day 11: Some more discussion about various sutta passages and the destruction of the planet. We were allowed to keep the photos of the teddy and the cats.
Reflections after the retreat: Good question. I felt as if reborn (see day 6-7) for a few days, but couldn't practice any more, so it gradually faded. I've resumed practice now, and am currently trying to get to a similar place like when I left the retreat. Let's see if that happens. |