Many people wonder, “What exactly do you do on a meditation retreat?” It’s pretty simple. Let me give you a basic description: You decide to take a few days off to meditate with some other people. On day one, you sit and pay attention to your body and breath for 30 or 45 minutes. Then you walk back and forth, back and forth. When it’s time to eat, you eat in silence. Then, you sit and pay attention to your body and your breath and walk around some more, eat in silence, and so forth and so on. You do that day in, day out. It’s a great time. You really should try it.
OK, I’ll admit: When I put it that way, it’s pretty hard to sell this stuff. It doesn’t exactly sound like a day at the spa, yet so many people who try it keep coming back. Why is that?
If you talk to people at a retreat, they often say things like, “I just sit here struggling to be present. I feel one breath, then my mind is all over the place for I don’t know how long, and then I come back, occasionally. I have maybe a couple of moments of awareness in a 45-minute sitting. When we start walking, I ponder my life while still trying hard to be mindful. When we come back and sit, I continue racing around in my head. At lunch, I think about how little time I spent really meditating that whole morning.
The way we pattern our attention—the paths our attention takes us down, the choices it makes—hugely affects our experience. In a way, it creates our experience.
“But after lunch I go for a little walk, and all of a sudden the world looks really vivid. I notice the stones on the ground, and they really stand out. They’re distinctive. I see beads of moisture on their surface. What a beautiful place!”
It’s not uncommon for someone doing a meditation intensive to feel like they’re not meditating— however they define that—and yet there are these intriguing effects. What’s up with that?
These effects seem to have to do with a shift in the habitual way we use our attention. Our everyday attention has automatic modes to it. It follows patterns. And the way we pattern our attention—the paths our attention takes us down, the choices it makes—hugely affects our experience. In a way, it creates our experience.
How we pattern our attention
We’re generally not aware of the patterns our attention follows, because what we’re mostly aware of is the stuff that’s happening, or not happening, or the people who are coming or not coming, or the way work is unfolding or not unfolding. We rarely notice how our own attention is behaving. Fortunately, meditation enables us to take a closer and closer look at the mechanisms of our everyday thought process.
If you take a moment to notice, there’s a good chance you’ll see that the patterns your attention follows are typically not random. They obey certain tendencies; they habitually operate in very similar ways. They make up your daily grind. One of the tendencies is for our attention to hop around a lot, trying to catch something happening or make something happen. Even a few minutes of meditation will make that apparent. The breath happens, and you’re totally with it for half a breath and then…you move away to something else. It’s very likely nothing super interesting is happening—particularly in the space you’re meditating in (unless instead of a retreat you’re meditating at a rock concert). It’s simply that the attention is habituated to moving around, to seeking after stuff. That is its mode. It’s flighty—plain and simple.
One of the tendencies is for our attention to hop around a lot, trying to catch something happening or make something happen.
One thing that starts to happen, though, as we sit here and practice, moment by moment, is we learn how to attend differently. Connecting with what’s happening now (for a moment or, if we can manage it, a bit longer), again and again, you begin to see that, oh, the attention drifts off or flits away. But it’s the coming back that makes the difference. You might connect with just one breath, or notice just one sound, or a twitch or tingle in your body. But that’s all it takes.
These moments have impact. And indeed over time, in subtle ways, we start to be able to attend differently. The attention learns how to land here, connect with what’s actually happening here, simply by our repeatedly choosing to come back to wherever here may be. We find ourselves connecting not with our thoughts about breathing, or the concept of breathing, but with what breathing is in this moment, as a tangible, complete experience. That’s why even when someone is practicing in a way that makes them feel like they’re checked out most of the time, something deeper happens. Meditation happens.
Usually we need something buzzy or bright, flashy, to connect with, but as attention settles down, we can find richness in ordinary experience…
Why does it happen that way? Again, it is because we are doing something so different from our usual mode. And when we do it repeatedly, our habits of attention begin to shift, and tangible effects creep up on us. The world can be more vivid, even when you’re wallowing in your story of being a shitty meditator. In the midst of your I-am-a-shitty-meditator story, your experience is punctured by moments of vividness.
The simple practice of sit