How your practice can unfold as yhou leave retreat includes seeing it as a path of happiness; value of opening to suffering; learning to listen to the truth inside and expressing your caring as compassionate action.
First inclination is towards that which is for one’s well-being. Attention settles on the body and breathing. Then make a practice of disconnecting and unplugging, not getting interested in other stuff that comes through. Keep asking, what’s appropriate and helpful now?
Aimless wandering unplugs compulsion. So move around a moment at a time, aimlessly, following the gentle zig zag of the movement and inclination. Pause when feeling compulsive or hurried. Keep coming back into exploring this amazing here and now.
One feature of programs is they cause contraction. When standing, then, it’s helpful to acknowledge space as an experience. In front of you, behind and above you, let the body experience the lack of intrusion and obstruction – space is open and free. There are no tyrannies in space.
On attention and awareness. Attention locates an object, and what we give attention to gets energized. Awareness, when exercised brings opening and cooling. Unhook from attention and let awareness widen and soften. Take in the feel and energy of the subtler qualities of what arises. Not excluding anything, just not hooking onto anything.
Meditation offers the opportunity to encourage the body to open into a more steady state of pleasure than is normally attainable through sense contact. This internal happiness has to do with the body’s subtle energy. Guidance is given to sense the subtle body and experience this internal happiness.
When we experience hostility and ill will, rather than simply acknowledging it, we stick it into ourselves, and begin to assume we’re unwelcome or unworthy. We can use meditation to change the flavor of the heart, steeping it in the qualities of the brahmavihara (goodwill, compassion, gladness, equanimity).
Seeking comfort, both physical and psychological, we’ve developed programs to avoid and deflect the experience of irritation. But these are tyrant programs. They can be cleared through the willingness to open and feel without compulsive actions and reactions.
In walking meditation, mental patterns are bound to well up. If you don’t go into decisive action around them, they will fade. Give attention instead to the fluidity of the body while walking. Let things work themselves out; it’s not up to us to claim or reject. Come back to the here of breathing and body; realizations occur in that process.
We fall for the tyranny of institutionalized systems and fixed structures because they promise stability and certainty. But there is no empathy in such tyranny. Embodied presence enables empathy. Our own bodies provide the stability we need to be with our mental stuff without reacting. Thus our capacity to be human increases.
