Making Retreat Real

One thing I brought home from retreat was an altered view on making my practice real.

I have struggled with resolving a split identity. There is my conventional self with its varied life roles and pragmatic need to integrate with the world of other people. There is also my secular buddhist self with its clear understanding that much of what happens in the conventional world is contrary to my view of cultivating the path.

Of course the notion of self is empty, as is the notion of others. They are simply useful tags for the purpose of discussion.

The change was one of framework or context. I tend to take a monolithic and ideological approach to implementing my practice. It has to exist in an idealised global framework, into which I try and shove the whole of my perception of reality. It is probably a similar human tendency that led to the construction of religion in the first place.

On reflection, and on receipt of some deft guidance, I realised two things. First, the global framework is not real or even very helpful. All I have is my buddhist foundation. Second, that this is practice. It is not striving for perfection. In fact striving is probably anathema to the perfection to which I aspire.

Suddenly, all I can do is look for opportunities in every day life to act as I believe I should - to cultivate the path, to understand dukkha, to see its arising, to realise its cessation. Everything outside of 'me' does not need to fit this. What a relief!

Instead of worrying about the big picture and where I exist in that context, I can simply look for opportunities to practice my aspiration at every moment in my life. Mindfulness. If I 'succeed' or 'fail', these notions are empty too. I can respond with compassion, loving-kindness and sympathetic joy.

I suspect as I cultivate this path, my secular buddhist foundation will increasingly influence my responses to my perceptions of reality. At some stage, the feeling of a split identity will probably disappear.

Retreat

I have just returned from a week of silent retreat with Stephen and Martine Batchelor. I was not planning on attending, but they were in the country and the week opened up free of significant engagements.

It was my second retreat. The first was seminal, cementing my commitment to Buddhist practice. It set me on the path to farming without suffering. It also provided the first significant breakthrough at a personal level. An insight into my own version of dhukka, and the release of a reservoir of retained 'suffering'.

This time I did not commence retreat with any particular expectations. Instead I was looking for nourishment from practice with a group of similarly motivated people, and further guidance from Stephen and Martine, my Buddhist mentors.

The first two or three days of retreat always seem so... questionable? Why am I here? Is this really going to help? Why am I struggling to concentrate and stay awake? Is this really the path for me?

By day 4 I had found my level, and by the last day I did not want to leave, and I certainly did not want to break silence.

Needless to say the nourishment and guidance were there, albeit in slightly unexpected and occasionally unnerving ways. So was a deepened understanding of my practice.

Interestingly the work of retreat has continued in the week since it finished. Trying to bring the personal shifts and realisations back home has been a challenge. I feared that they were too ill formed and fragile to expose to the reality of day to day family and farm life.

So far my sense of calm and clear purpose has endured. The changes have not been so fragile and ephemeral as I expected.

Gardening as Practice

The garden is my preferred place of work. I think the garden encompasses two key influences.

First, the garden provides for a very basic need, food. We can intellectualise our needs, but they are also self evident. They require no justification. To eat is part of the process of life, to grow the food for eating directly supports the process of life. I never spend any time wondering why I am in the garden.

Second, the garden provides extended intimate interaction with the natural and living world. I have spend the last 25 years of my life training and working as an ecologist. I have directly managed ecosystems from the micro-scale of fungi and bacteria to the macro-scale of forests covering hundreds of thousands of hectares. The more I learned, the more I understood how little I knew. 

In the end I realised that my 'scientific' framework was an inadequate and deadening conceptualisation of the reality of living systems. Anything we do with science, even the most complicated and sophisticated of our models of understanding, is simply a poor facsimile of the reality of the continuous complexity of nature.

My move to farming, a form of applied ecology, was a reaction to this realisation. I wanted to really get to know a place. I wanted this knowledge to be holistic and intuitive rather than reductive and mechanistic. The only way I felt I could achieve this was through extended and direct experience. No amount of reading and extensive but superficial experience, no amount of conceptualisation was going to help me really understand.

My increasing alignment with Buddhism was another response to this realisation. I read a small passage from D T Suzuki once. He compared Zen understanding of a flower to that of an English romantic poet. Zen was holistic. Romantic poetry was, ironically, reductionist - dismembering the flower and reducing it to the sum of its parts. 

It is easier to maintain the focus of my practice when I work on something as basic as providing my family's food. It is easier to understand the emptiness of concepts when I am in an environment that cannot be adequately described by conceptualisation. 

Physical Work as Practice

I like physical work. Perhaps it is the place where I first experienced the tranquility of meditation. Not that I was trying. The rhythm of whatever I was doing took me to a different place.

Work is not really meditation in a strictly buddhist sense.

Access to Insight describes meditation as the process of mental clarification and direct perception. Meditation is aimed at overcoming the condition of suffering. The root-causes of suffering are concepts. Concepts result from ignorance and proliferate desires. In essence, the meaning we give to what we sense is a delusion. In pursuing that meaning we grasp at illusions that we expect to be substantial. We will always be disappointed.

Buddhist mediation is aimed at gaining more than an intellectual understanding of this truth. With this understanding comes liberation from the delusion and freedom from suffering.

Robert Pirsig, in describing romantic quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, refers to the existence of pre-intellectual experience. One that does not pass through the filters and classifications of our mind.  

Almost any type of repetitive physical work that does not involve active thinking can help create a sense of space. There is generally too much of the task in work to allow mental clarification but the space does allow a more direct perception what I am doing.