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Stepping into the Abyss:
Experiences on Retreat
 From top, Patrick Lambelet, Emily Hsu, Ven. Lobsang Chogni and Glen Svensson Four of these new teachers offer dispatches from the edge as they reflect upon their experience of retreat … of stepping into the abyss of their minds …. Patrick Lambelet: When you’re by yourself, you’re looking at your own mind and everything that comes up in your mind – a lot of stuff that has come up in my mind has not been very pleasant [laughter]. It’s not that you just sit there and meditate and have nice, great blissful visions or something. Retreat is really just dealing with what comes up, dealing with who you are, and not having anywhere to run away from it. You don’t have TV or friends or anything else to run away to; you just have yourself sitting there, looking at your mind. The more you do that and become familiar with it, the more you see that it’s not such a big deal. You start to see things more like, 'OK, I’m not perfect, I’m human. I don’t have some amazing ability as a meditator.' You start to see what your limits are but you also begin to accept them, rather than feeling like you should be a better person, a better meditator, or have some great understanding, or not get angry, and so on. I’m not somebody else, I’m not some great yogi, I’m not Milarepa. In fact, I read Milarepa's life story and, it was really frustrating at first [laughter] because I began comparing myself to Milarepa, which can be dangerous because it’s such a high standard. Eventually, you start to get more relaxed and accepting about yourself... Glen Svensson: The main thing to come out of this was an understanding of the situation we’re in, this precious human rebirth, understanding that we’ve got this wonderful opportunity and we’re not going to be here very long. Maybe tomorrow we will be dead, which is a real possibility. We have this very precious opportunity and we should do something about it. We should make our life as meaningful as we can while we have the opportunity; we shouldn’t waste it… Emily Hsu: O Sel Ling was a wonderful place to do retreat, and I am very grateful to the incredible group of staff and volunteers who took good care of us, prepared our meals, did our shopping, fixed our houses, etc. – and they seemed so happy to do it…. Without first having done at least some years of studying, I believe that I would not have been able to do this retreat. Studying helped me to understand what I needed to do in retreat as well as how to do it. In addition, hopefully I now have more realistic expectations and don’t expect instant results (well, not as much). But, studying can also increase the busyness of my mind, being too much in my head, and doing retreat helps to settle my mind down and be more in the heart… Ven. Lobsang Chogni: Study, in my opinion, is indispensable for retreat. For example, when you are in retreat and you recognize a mental affliction for the first time within your own experience, if you have studied the fifty-one mental factors you can figure out which affliction it is. And then you can apply the correct antidote. I remember thanking our gurus during my retreat for giving us such thorough and precise teachings for when such an experience arose. The structure of my retreat followed Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Geshe Jampa Gyatso’s advice. Basically, the idea was to do four practice sessions a day using Jorcho. My personal practice was to do ten minutes of reflective meditation (Shar Gom) within each session. Also, the practice included prostrations, water bowl offerings, and mandala offerings. In this way, over the course of the retreat, one could slowly work through the Lam-Rim using Pabongka Rinpoche’s Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand as the source text. … This article is an excerpt of the full article printed in Mandala
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