People sometimes ask what I do on retreat, and what difference it makes to spend that much time meditating alone and in silence. Often the question feels conversational rather than an invitation to elaborate, but when someone is genuinely curious, much of what I would say is in this talk by Ken McLeod. It's the first talk from a retreat on an advanced practice—not where you might look to find the answers to such basic questions—but Ken is teaching a traditional practice from Vajrayana Buddhism to students of Zen, so he starts by introducing meditation from the Vajrayana perspective.
Ken begins with a basic meditation instruction: return to what is already there and rest. Let the body settle into attention. Let the breath breathe itself. When thoughts and feelings carry you away, as soon as you notice, return and rest in attention again. Practice is not maintaining a special state. It is this repeated returning. Ken also explains why meditation can be demanding. What is true, he says, is simple; what prevents us from knowing what is true is extraordinarily complex. We spend much of our lives moving away from experience—trying to improve it, suppress it, explain it, act it out, distract ourselves from it, or turn it into something else. Meditation begins to reveal those movements because, for a while, we stop giving ourselves so many places to go or to hide.
One of his central points is that we are robbed of attention when we are unable to experience what is arising. When a pleasant or unpleasant feeling, sensation, memory or impulse arises and we are able to remain with it, attention stays available. But if the experience feels threatening or intolerable, we recoil from it. If it feels pleasurable or desirable, we may reach for it, try to hold onto it, or merge with it. Both movements are forms of reactivity. Instead of simply experiencing what is there, attention gets pulled into anger, desire, avoidance, distraction, story, justification, suppression, grasping, or some other attempt to manage the experience. In that sense, attention has been “robbed.” Whether we experience anger, desire, jealousy, shame, sadness, or restlessness—the problem is not that these feelings appear, but rather what happens when we cannot experience them directly. We react instead. And the reaction generates another layer of experience, and then another.
Ken’s instruction is to neither analyse our feelings nor to get rid of them. He makes a sharp distinction between experiencing a feeling, suppressing it and acting it out. To experience it is to feel what is happening in the body, the emotional quality of it, and the stories and associations that accompany it, while remaining present in a wider field of awareness. As he puts it rather wonderfully, "The function of a feeling is to be felt."
Over time, this changes the relationship to what arises. Anger does not have to dictate what happens next. Sadness does not have to be escaped. Impatience does not need to be disguised as patience. Even confusion can simply be confusion. Something that seemed to require an immediate response can be experienced instead, and in that experience a little more freedom becomes possible.
This is one answer I might give to the question of what meditation does. It doesn't necessarily make life easier, but we can be in experience without being so completely governed by impulses to avoid, grasp, resist or alter it. As reactivity loosens and the repetitive thoughts and stories that sustain it begin to subside, there is more freedom in how we respond, and a sense of peace when we are no longer fighting or opposing what is.
There is another reason this talk stays with me. Ken places a particular practice from the Tibetan tradition—chö—in a much broader landscape. Some approaches work gradually: you cultivate capacities and qualities that eventually enable you to meet experience more fully. Others transform the way experience is perceived. Still others, including chö, mahamudra and dzogchen, take a more direct approach, beginning with what is already present rather than first working to develop capacities or transform experience. These gradual and direct approaches look very different, but they can be complementary: step-by-step practice can help develop our capacity to recognise and remain in what is always already here.
Perhaps that is why this teaching feels both advanced and introductory. Chö has a fascinating history. Its traditional form involves elaborate visualisations and deliberately entering situations that provoke disgust and powerful fears about death, but the principle Ken begins with requires none of this. Sit down. Let the body settle. Let the breath come and go. Notice what takes your attention. Notice the moment you come back. And instead of trying to make experience different, see what happens when you are willing to be here for it.
For someone who has never meditated, that may be as good an introduction as any I know. For those who have practised for years or decades, it's not a bad place to return to.
From: Chö: Cutting Through Demonic Obsessions, part 1
This excerpt is from the first session in Ken's chö retreat. The full talk covers much more ground including the origins of chö, working with difficult feelings, and the relationship between gradual and direct approaches to practice. I highly recommend listening to the whole session.
Ken: Now when very strong things come up, they rob us of our attention, just [falling sound] and we fall into reaction. And it’s that process that chö focuses on. How are we robbed of our attention? We are robbed of our attention because we are afraid of experiencing what is arising.
And this applies to our ordinary lives. Why do you get angry? Well, we only get angry when we feel weaker than what we are facing. If you feel stronger you don’t get angry. If you feel weaker, in the moment of anger you feel weak and fear arises that something terrible is going to happen. So there’s an eruption of energy into anger in which you try to destroy what you’re facing before it can overwhelm you.
So that’s how we’re robbed of our attention. We’re robbed of our attention because we are afraid of experiencing that uncomfortable feeling inside. And if there’s anything you take from this retreat, I’d like it to be that one understanding, that the problems that we experience in our life, which lead us into this practice in the first place, arise because we are afraid of experiencing just what is right in that moment.
So we withdraw from it, we try to change it in some way, we try to manipulate, shut it down, whatever. And that’s why we react with anger, or with desire, greed, jealousy, whatever. Once those things start they just snowball, moving things more and more out of balance.
So in your meditation practice, as I said earlier this evening, the essence of meditation is resting in what is already there. Now when we first start to practice, when we rest, what do we find is there? A mass of thoughts and confusion. Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter.
And I’ve had many people say after their first practice of meditation, “Oh, I don’t think I’m cut out for this. My mind didn’t quiet down for a moment.” Well, when I first practiced meditation, I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, I couldn’t sit for more than one minute quite literally. I had to resort to extreme measures to sit for two. That’s always the experience—don’t be afraid of that. If your mind is in complete chaos, jumble jumble all over the place, that’s what you’re experiencing right there.
So experience the chaos. Experience confusion. Or as one teacher said, “Remember, confusion is just confusion.” That’s it. You can use the breath to help you with that, that is rest with the breath and jumble, jumble, jumble. Then you come back. But just experience the confusion, don’t try and do anything with it.
That’s the first step in cutting. You cut your ideas about how it should be and how you want to be and you experience just how you are and just what is. And when you do that, then you start experiencing how the body is. All of these different sensations and discomforts and tugs and tensions in the body. That's what's there. And you'll struggle to find a more comfortable position. But there isn't one. And then you'll struggle with all kinds of ways and tricks to play on yourself to make it a pleasant experience. But it isn't.
Just forget about all of that. Again, you cut your ideas about how you think it should be and how you want it to be. And you just experience what is. And as your body becomes accustomed to the practice of sitting, you realize, "Oh, I can't just sit here."
And then you begin to find that feelings come up, unasked for, demanding your attention. And you may say, “Go away feeling, you’re disturbing my meditation.” But they don’t. They demand, they keep coming back, they want. And some people they think, “Oh this is a distraction,” so they sit, they sit very, very hard and they create a kind of quietness but it’s really blocking the feelings. And they can be very good in their practice, but as soon as they start practicing all those feelings come flooding back. And so there’s no real peace there.
What is the function of a feeling? Well, the function of a feeling is to be felt. It sounds almost trivial to say that, but when you refuse to feel a feeling, you’re denying that feeling the opportunity to fulfill its existence. And they don’t take that very lightly. They just keep coming back, because they’ll keep coming back and they’ll go into the body and do everything until you actually feel it.
So I suggest you don’t engage that whole struggle. Feeling comes up, use your breath as a base of attention if you wish, just experience it. Now experiencing it doesn’t mean getting lost in it, acting it out because acting it out is a way of not experiencing it and it certainly doesn’t mean suppressing it. You just experience it, there it is, whether it’s anger, or love, a feeling of accomplishment, jealousy, shame, inferiority, superiority. There it is. You just experience it.