Paula Chichester and Roger Munro started their second Great Retreat in January at Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel, California. They completed their first over two years ago at Milarepa Center in Vermont; it took nearly four years to complete. During a recent teaching, Lama Zopa Rinpoche said he “accepts” their retreat. “What I am most interested in is the bearing of hardships,” he said. Rinpoche felt it would benefit people to understand some of the hardships they underwent during their retreat in Vermont. Julia Hengst talked to Paula and Roger in November.

What is a Great Retreat?

Roger: When you’ve had an initiation into one of the Highest Yoga Tantra deities (Chakrasamvara, Yamantaka, Vajrayogini, Cittamani Tara, Kalachakra, among others), based on the kindness of your own guru and your intention, you develop the wish to do the Great Retreat of that deity. You go through the process of doing whatever preliminary practices your guru tells you to do before you start the retreat, such as 100,000 water bowl offerings, tsa-tsas, etc. Then you begin as you would any other retreat: Late one evening on an auspicious day, you do your first session; then you wake up the next morning and do the next session, then three more that day and it’s like that for about 1200 days. It’s a very clear, structured set of practices done over a period of three or four years. From my own experience, it brings unbelievable blessings and gives you some understanding of your own karmic power and potential.

Paula: As our kind teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche said, once you complete the Great Retreat, you simply spend the rest of that life waiting to die, with a happy mind.

Why is Rinpoche interested in people experiencing hardships while practicing Dharma?

Paula: The main reason we need to experience hardships is because that’s when we get to practice Dharma. When life is easy you don’t think about transforming a problem because you don’t have any. But when your life is full of problems (whether you’re in retreat or not), every minute is a chance to change your mind. The more problems you have, the faster your path to enlightenment. If you want to learn to ride a bicycle, you keep getting on, no matter how many times you fall off. You fall off, get back on. An easy life doesn’t give you much opportunity to transform your mind.

Roger: I agree with Paula. You don’t practice hardships because you want to punish yourself or you’re bad and someone wants to punish you – it’s just a very nuts and bolts issue of time and space in one’s life. When you’re working solely for the happiness of this life and all the comforts and securities of this life, the life is taken up with those activities and very little time is left to actually practice in any meaningful kind of way. You have to give up wanting health insurance, always having the right automobile, always having the right kind of food, having the kind of house you want – not that these things aren’t important, but at the end of the life your mind will be full of regret because you have to leave all those things behind. It’s just a very practical matter of how much time we have left in this life and what it is you want to take with you at the end of this life into a future life. You just can’t take the material things. If you spend this life on the material world and all its comforts and securities, at the end of it you mind is empty of virtue. You travel on from this life with no supply of virtue in the mind.

Paula: We have an incredible backlog of negative karma and the ways we experience the purification of that is by undergoing hardships. The negative karma doesn’t just go away; when you do Vajrasattva retreat the karma doesn’t disappear. You still have to experience the karma ripening, but maybe you experience it not in the hell realms but as some sort of sickness, or maybe your husband leaving you, or something like that. If we’re really intent on purifying negative karma and accumulating merit, then we’re constantly experiencing hardships due to constant purification. We have to want the hardships. If we’re doing the practice of the four opponent powers with faith and we’re sincerely purifying, the hardships are the outcome of pure practice. Then we have to learn to rejoice and feel happy when they come!

How can you tell the different between purification and “normal” suffering?

Paula: From the outside it’s impossible to tell. I think only an individual practitioner can tell by looking back over the years and seeing if they’ve changed after going through the hardships.

Roger: Sometimes it seems as if the sufferings increase and life gets worse when you wholeheartedly submit to the guidance of a qualified vajra master. But that’s what you want, that’s what you’re looking for. It’s like when you’re sweeping a house, you’re looking for the dirt and you want to get it out of the house. It’s very simple: When you practice Dharma you look for the negativities and you try to get them out through the doors of your body, speech and mind, the only places they can exit. That’s how you create the space in the mind for Dharma realizations to take root. Before it was overcrowded with the weeds of hatred, ignorance and greed. Nothing of virtue could grow there. You have to pull those weeds out and that’s always painful.

What part do courage and willingness to face hardships play?

Roger: Once we find the powerful motivation needed to do something, then doing it is easy. You can call it courage, but you can also call it a mind that’s going to push through the hardships, knowing there’s something much greater. Everyone goes through hardships to achieve what they want, not just spiritual people. Even rich people go through the hardships of dealing with family and the pressures society places on them; everyone has hardships, no matter what. Actually, the courage to practice Dharma doesn’t seem like much at all because the results are so great; the hardships that are experienced are so miniscule in relation to the blissful outcome of enlightenment.

Paula: I’m not even sure I have any courage! What Roger says is right, and also, once you get the idea to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, there’s nothing else to do. It’s not really a question of courage, but more that there is nowhere else to go, nowhere to turn. The thought of doing anything else is unbearable. There were times in that retreat when I was sitting there cold and lonely, unable to do anything with my mind, unable to meditate, but the thought of doing anything else, of living a regular life again, was so disgusting that I didn’t have a doubt. Or I would think about the suffering of the lower realms, or of the human realm, or even the suffering of middle class humans! Then I just lived with the hardships because I couldn’t do anything else.

Tell us about the hardships you have experienced.

Paula: Everyone practices Dharma in a different way; you meet the qualified vajra guru and he gives you advice, and so, according to the advice, there will be corresponding hardships. For example, some people are center directors, so they have their own kind of sufferings. The advice Rinpoche gave me was to continue doing retreat, and that has its own particular hardships like looking into the mirror of negative emotions with no distractions, never getting to see friends and family, never listening to music or reading journals and books, as well as the uncertainty of knowing where we will live, how we’ll get money, how we’ll pay for food, how we’ll get from A to B. We finish one preliminary practice and don’t know how we’ll get the causes and conditions to do the second. We don’t know if we’ll get the teachings we need – we’re constantly living in uncertainty, from a worldly point of view.

I went through a big transition from having worldly security to having total faith in the guru and the blessings of Buddha, who promised to take care of sincere practitioners. For me that took a long time, maybe 10 years, to not be afraid anymore of not knowing what would happen. Also, to not be afraid of the physical discomfort of being poor, not having enough money for good clothes, or good food, or even enough money to go to the doctor if you’re sick.

Roger: My own experience in this Western culture, for a man to have a place in this world and any sense of self-respect, the main emphasis is on what kind of material possessions you have, what you’ve achieved, what other people think of what you’ve achieved, that kind of thing. And in order to practice a life of Dharma, because you’ve dedicated your life to becoming an inner being, you lose all of the outer securities of the world. Giving up the thought of being secure is one of the prerequisites to becoming an inner being. I think most men and women in our culture, if they sincerely want to practice Dharma, have to give up job, family, all the things this culture values. You have no health insurance, no real job description, there’s nothing of immediate benefit you’re doing for others.

I’m spending my whole life in retreat, and some people may from their own perspective even view this as an extremely selfish action. I’ve found that some people don’t take me seriously, or they speak to me in a condescending manner about what I am and what I do, mainly because they don’t understand what I do. I’m not doing anything for them directly, no social services are involved. The life of a meditator is based solely on belief in the law of cause and effect, blessings of the Triple Gem, fear of the lower realms, and belief that ultimately one will attain enlightenment, and of course nobody can see any of that. I think that’s one of the greatest social hardships.

Another difficulty people face in truly entering the path is that we have to start Dharma from wherever we are; if you’re an independently wealthy heir to some kind of fortune and you meet the Dharma, you start from there. You can afford to do this or that, take teachings, pay for your own education in that way. But if you’re a very poor person with no material resources, you have to accept that’s where you start your practice. You can’t think, “Oh, one day I’ll create the ideal circumstances to practice,” and start from there, because that’s the kind of life where no Dharma is practiced. You figure out what your resources are, where you want to go, what you want to do, and you start from that point. As long as you create the causes through doing the preliminary practices, when it comes time to actually start the retreat, you will have the ability to find what you need, or if you don’t find what you need, you’ll have the karmic wherewithal to go through the hardships of not having what you need; still you will get the practice done, still you will go from beginning to end.

Paula: Another difficulty is not only not seeing my family and friends but also that they have no idea what I’m doing and think I’ve gone crazy. A lot of people are afraid to enter into the life of a meditator and Buddhist lifestyle because they are afraid of what their families, their friends will think. This is particularly difficult when there is all this stuff about cults and strange groups around. I remember when I first got into Buddhism my friends called me Paulananda, thinking I had become another one of these religious freaks. This is all just concerning reputation, so it boils down to the eight worldly dharmas. They appear as hardships from a worldly point of view, and you’re experiencing them as hardships, but the point is to transform the mind so they no longer appear as difficulties.

As Rinpoche says, the one door opening the door of Dharma is the abandonment of the eight worldly dharmas. The purpose of abandoning the eight worldly dharmas is so you can develop a calm mind and do the work of entering, abiding and absorbing the winds in the central channel. If you always reactive negatively to hardships, there is no way you can develop stable meditation. The hardships are the path.

What were some of the difficulties you faced during your Great Retreat at Milarepa Center?

Roger: First we had to find a place to do the retreat, which was difficult. We visited many Dharma centers and got different levels of reception. We arrived in America with very little money, and through Rinpoche’s subtle guidance we ended up in Vermont. Some people had opposition to what we were doing, people who thought we were just going to be selfish hermits. While we built the retreat huts we lived for about nine months in a heavily wooded temperate rain forest behind Milarepa Center under a sheet of plastic with lots of rain and mosquitoes. Where we lived looked like a refugee camp, an extremely poor situation. It was difficult to get food since we were working all the time.

We had to clear a couple of acres of forest just to get some fresh air and sunlight. We built a couple of 50-square-foot huts there, which was difficult for my body — my body was constantly sick, suffering from allergies. The more my practice of Highest Yoga Tantra developed, the more subtle and sensitive my body has become; because of that, doing construction was a source of constant pain.

I built the huts using a gas-powered chain saw and the exhaust made me sick all the time. Again, we were in a state of insecurity about money, and the only sustenance in those times is going for refuge. We spent about nine months building the huts with our very limited resources, and it was extremely difficult just to live there. Also, we were told the houses could only be 50 square feet, which comes down to 7 foot by 7 foot square; they were about the size of a medium-size tent. At first we thought this would stop us, but when we realized this was our only choice, we decided we had to make it work. By the end of the retreat, four years later, we were accustomed to our tiny spaces.

As soon as we started the retreat severe snow storms came and we found ourselves in these tiny 7 by 7 rooms, freezing. We were under so much pressure to start that we didn’t have a chance to test the fireplaces or how the heating in the hut worked. For the first two years of the retreat I found out my fireplace was putting so much smoke in the room I became sick and couldn’t meditate. I had the choice between being warm and unable to use my mind, or being very cold and having an alert mind; I chose to be cold. I’d wake up, and my room would be completely frozen; the water in the offering bowls on the altar would be frozen solid, my body would be cold from head to toe. I would have to jump up and down and run around in my little room, do some prostrations, just to get warm. Paula’s experience was similar.

We had very little money for clothing to begin that retreat, and all of our clothes were from church thrift stores. We discovered that everything we had was dry-cleaned, and those chemicals caused us to be sick for the first year. We burned all the clothes the first summer, so the second winter, not only were our houses not warm but we had little warm clothing. It just went on and on. In northern Vermont in the middle of winter it can get anywhere down to minus 30 or minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and it can stay that way sometimes for several weeks at a time. During the third year of our retreat it was the third coldest winter in recorded history in Vermont. It stayed at minus 20 or minus 30 at night for a month; it would reach zero or 5 degrees during the day.

The facilities were extremely primitive; we had no bathing facilities, no bathroom or toilet, no running water and no electricity. Winter nights were long, and even the candles we used made us sick in such an enclosed space, so we couldn’t use them. We had a 6-foot octagonal-shape kitchen, and anything we did in there was uncomfortable and squeezed.

So how did you bathe?

Roger: For the first two years of the retreat I didn’t bathe at all. I didn’t wash my hair, I hardly bathed my body, except for my private parts. But the rest of the time it was so painful and so cold, and in the summertime there were so many insects. Just to get water in the winter meant walking a couple hundred yards through deep snow to a small creek, and chopping through a foot of built-up ice. It was dangerous as one slip on the ice could mean serious injury or even death – very stressful. I still have a painful hip from one time I slipped and fell on the ice. Fortunately when Paula and I did slip we were never knocked unconscious for that would have meant death. We only saw each other at lunch, and you could die in minutes if you’d fallen in extreme cold. Also, we had to wash our clothes in this situation. Our hands would get so cold they would hurt for days, sapping our energy for practice, so washing wasn’t a huge priority, as you can imagine.

Paula: Just being outside in the cold for periods of chopping wood and carrying water would leave us feeling fatigued. If we stayed outside for too long we would be affected for almost three days. Roger chose to go without fire, but I continued to use the fireplace even though the fumes made me sick. It was so cold I had to keep the fire going 24 hours a day; it only took two minutes to go outside and throw another piece of wood on the fireplace, but if I forgot my gloves, my hands would ache for days afterwards. My head hurt, the cold would just go right through; I would wear two hats, sweaters, three pairs of pants, blankets all around.

The toxic conditions caused by the smoke, dry cleaning fumes, etc. in my room created a condition where my skin burned and itched when it touched water. Two years later when we rectified the toxic problems I bathed in a bucket in my room.

The first two winters the siding on the outside of my house shrank, which left quarter-inch cracks through which cold drafts could come and disrupt my meditation. I could never be comfortable in my hut, even if it was warm. I kept the temperature at 50 degrees so I could sit under my blankets. Furthermore, after I fixed the cracks by caulking them, the caulk gave off poisonous fumes, which I could smell inside for two months; again this made me sick!

And regarding the insects in the summer – mosquitoes are everywhere, along with huge black flies that leave itchy welts on the body. Mosquitoes would completely cover the screen door in summer. It’s hot and humid in the summer, and then it’s cold in the winter. There are a couple of months in the fall when it’s nice outside.

Describe your cooking and food situation in more detail.

Paula: We had one building that was originally intended to be retreat hut, but it was too small. The center gave it to us to be our cookhouse; Roger did a lot of remodeling; we had a wood stove for heat and a gas stove. The wood stove was so bad we didn’t use it – we got another one in the third winter. In ten- or fifteen-degree weather our food would be cold before we could even eat. We realized after the first winter that the gas in the kitchen was making us sick; we would cook in this tiny kitchen and by the time the food was done we had splitting headaches. That first year was the hardest because we didn’t know what we were getting into. As soon as spring came Roger put the stove outside, where he built a makeshift tepee over it, and from there we continued to cook, even in zero-degree weather. We would chop our vegetables inside, then go outside to cook. We ended up eating only once a day.

Although I also had difficulties with gas and creosote fumes, my most dangerous obstacle was the cold. By the second winter my health had deteriorated due to these conditions, so I thought a macrobiotic diet (which consists mainly of grains and vegetables) would help me regain my strength.

But having no overcoat (which we had burned) combined with the diet, caused me to lose all my digestive heat, so I ended up sick with diarrhea in the winter, which wouldn’t go away for two months or so. I got really thin and very gray. I distinctly remember walking in the snow one day and getting a strong sense that my life force energy was leaving me, just draining out of me; I got scared by this, because I had the thought I would die. I didn’t communicate anything to Roger, but at the same time he saw my condition rapidly deteriorating. He ordered a chicken for me, and immediately after that I warmed up. After that we began to eat meat.

Incidentally, if you get sick during retreat, you still continue with your four sessions a day, even if you have a fever; you have to deal with it by yourself – mom isn’t here, no one is there to help!

Before the retreat started, we agreed to a food delivery once every two weeks. The caretakers came on tsog days, so we had to have a list ready for what we would need in the following two weeks on the day they delivered. So if we had a need the day after tsog, we would wait a month, at least, to get it; we would sometimes not receive what we ordered for two months! This was difficult in cases when we were sick or really needed something for health.

Here in America, we’re used to getting something very soon after the desire comes. In that way the first year was hard for us – just waiting for things. Sometimes what we ordered wasn’t what we wanted and then we’d get upset about that. Interestingly, by the end of the retreat, that wasn’t a problem for us anymore – whatever came was perfect!

Roger: Another way of seeing this circumstance from a worldly viewpoint is that we put ourselves at the mercy of the kindness of others. We relied upon others for food, shelter, clothing, offerings of money – all this kind of stuff. With our cultural background of rugged individualism that’s crammed down our throats, that becomes a very big impediment to spiritual practice. People aren’t always kind; even though they have good intentions, they go through their own trips, and you become the object of all their stuff. And then of course you’re working out your own karma, so even if that person has the intention to treat you kindly, sometimes your karma forces them to treat you badly and not help when they said they would.

One example of my own personal karma is when, after the second winter Lama Zopa came to visit (it was the only official visit during the retreat, and it brought great blessings). One morning after Rinpoche came I had a dream, and when I woke up I realized we had to get the fireplace situation fixed, and we needed decent clothes and meditation cushions. We decided to write to Miss Lim in Malaysia, one of Paula’s friends, a kind benefactor, and ask her to send us some money to be able to do these things; she sent us a few thousand dollars, which we used for wood stoves that didn’t put chemicals and smoke into the rooms, and clothes. But even though I designed the stoves in May 1993 and anyone could have built and installed them before the summer was over, it wasn’t until Christmas Day 1993 that the stoves were delivered. Fortunately we got the stoves installed, because, as I mentioned, that third winter was the coldest on record, and I think we would have either stopped the retreat or, perhaps, one of us might have gotten very sick or died without them.

Now obviously these were my and Paula’s personal karmic obscurations that prevented others from going out and doing what needed to be done to get those stoves to us. So for those six months that we waited for the stoves, we could do nothing but practice patience; we were relying on the kindness of others. Somehow our karma prevented others from being very kind and helping us in that way. It was about zero degrees the day I installed them.

Did you perceive the situation with this understanding at that time?

Roger: No, not from the start. It was very difficult to deal with these things, like not getting what we needed as quickly as we would have liked, especially the stoves, heavy weather gear, medicines Paula ordered, among other things. We had to work very hard to apply all of our intellectual Dharma understanding as an antidote to the disappointment or anger that would come. We were also forced to realize our own lack of care for dependents in past lives. It took me about six months to figure out that everything that was going on, any negativity that was directed towards me, any lack of help, any kinds of inharmonious things that were going on were because this is how I treated people in this life and in past lives and now I was purifying this in some way. The reality was that it was our karma; fortunately we realized that. If we hadn’t realized it we wouldn’t have been able to finish the retreat because we would have gotten so angry that we would have ended up getting in fights with people. The more problems came and the less help we got, the more determined we became in our practice.

This is another hardship that makes people reluctant to enter the path, the aspect of relying on the kindness of others. Sometimes people are kind, sometimes they’re not, even if they want to be. Most people want control over everything themselves, they want to be independent, and just for this reason most people can’t move away from this life. To be a meditator you can’t be like that; it’s almost like you become public property. You have to give up any self-centered ego, because if you keep that it will cause only pain.

You have to give up thinking that problems are caused by someone else. The only way you can do that is to realize it’s just the creation of your own karma, and other people are kindly helping you purify that. But if you believe other people should be your servants or should be this or that, then you’re in trouble; samsara is always trouble, and samsaric relationships only cause trouble.

Paula: I was very enthusiastic and excited going into retreat, having completed my preliminaries, thinking, “I’m going to get single-pointed concentration, I’m going to do tummo,” and suddenly I went straight into the wall of my karmic obscurations! It was like the Road Runner cartoon, with the character who would run Smack into the wall! I deal with that the first year or so, because I just kept getting smashed. After some time the main mantra for the retreat was the verse from the Guru Puja:

Should even the environment and the beings therein

be filled with the fruits of their karmic debts and

unwished-for sufferings pour down like rain, please

bless me to see miserable conditions as the path by seeing

them as causes to exhaust the results of our negative karma.

That’s what the retreat became for me. As soon as I changed the concept from, “Oh I’ll do tummo and be the deity,” to mind transformation and the idea of purifying my negative karma, then I became very happy. I realized this retreat was a mind transformation retreat. Lama Zopa says you do Great Retreats to generate the lam-rim realizations, and I’m thinking, “lam-rim realizations? I’m going to do tummo!” But then I realized lam-rim is the most precious. You can’t practice tantra successfully without strong lam-rim realizations.

Even though Roger and I weren’t talking at that point, we both realized this around the same time. Then I just applied whatever worked and felt happy that I could even sit on the cushion for eight or nine hours a day. I just took it from there.

Could you talk more of the inner hardships you faced?

Paula: I think anyone who has done long retreat would agree that one of the main difficulties faced is the absence of ego-gratification. Most of the time, no matter what I’m doing when I’m not in retreat, I’m doing something that gives some sort of ego feedback, even if it’s just getting something to eat, reading a book, seeing a movie, talking with someone, going here or there – suddenly there’s nothing, nothing at all. I’m in this little tiny place and I can’t go anywhere. There’s absolutely nothing to do but read Dharma books and meditate. There are no psychological pats on the back, nothing for the ego to grasp on to. Because of this, I went through depression and a feeling of emptiness. It’s not blissful empty; it’s more like nothing. I just sat with that, and still felt loneliness and depressed feelings during the last winter. I did have blissful meditations, good meditation experiences, and that kept me going, but it’s so slow.

I remember I cut my finger in retreat and as I watched how long it took to heal, I realized this is exactly what it’s like as we’re transforming our body-minds into buddhas, clearing up our subtle nervous system and all the other inner work we do; Lama Yeshe used to use the word organic to describe this process, and until then I didn’t really understand what he meant. To become a buddha, it’s not like you just change a computer screen ; we’re actually working with human cells, and the mind is a biochemical thing. The mind heals in the same way a scar heals over, and the channels and winds – it all opens up very slowly and organically.

Here in America we have what I call two-dimensional learning, where to learn something you read about it, memorize it, and you spit it back out. Dharma learning isn’t like that; you might be able to memorize lam-rim like that, but to have realizations, which are understandings on a cellular level, it’s a cellular process, therefore it takes a long time.

I understand that a Great Retreat is really just a drop in the bucket. You really need a long time. With this understanding comes a different, gentle sort of patience, almost as if you’re babying yourself. You become gentle and kind to yourself. To a degree I lost the American supermarket, instant gratification mentality when I realized we’re here for the long run.

In the midst of the boredom and loneliness was there any point when you would rather have been doing something else?

Paula: I never had the desire to do anything else. By the end of the retreat I had emptied out much of who I was and what I had grasped onto. If I hadn’t gone through all that turmoil in the beginning when that garbage came up, it never would have left. What happens during retreat is that each time a memory comes up, or an experience comes, I can apply the antidote; the best antidote is emptiness. One of the best things about doing a long retreat like that is you can actually develop an experience of emptiness, which is the most precious antidote to emotions; by the end of the retreat, if feelings came up, I actually had some power over them due to this right view. The emotional hardships were extremely important because they gave me the chance to really look at the “I.” I finally got the chance to look at the ego-grasping.

Roger: I also experienced the things Paula did to different degrees. On another level, I experienced heart attacks, severe heart palpitations, and on several occasions I was sure I would die in that moment. I would have to say, “Well I’m up here, and I won’t get any medical treatment.” I would be fully ready to die. I would go to bed and not expect to wake up the next morning; sometimes this wasn’t so bad, since my belief that I would go to a pure land was so strong that the idea of waking up in this tiny room wasn’t so appealing!

One time I went through what appeared to be serious spirit harm; I would have dreams of being in my room and this spirit would be eating my head. I could hear it and see it. It was a very frightening experience to watch; then I would find myself back inside my body while the same experience was going on. My first response was to recite some wrathful protector mantra. I went back to sleep and woke up a while later; I continued to have this dream, and when I woke up I could actually feel the spirit harming me – it was like I was being electrocuted from the top of my head.

Then I thought if I recited The Heart Sutra I would be protected from this harm. It stopped, so I went back to sleep. I woke up again, and it was worse than before; it was like my nervous system was shattered. I thought to myself, “I’ve tried wrath, and that didn’t work; I tried wisdom, which also didn’t work. This thing obviously wants something.” Finally I decided to do the Chöd practice, and that worked. Immediately as I gave up strong grasping of this physical body and offered it to this malevolent spirit, the harm stopped, and I went back to sleep. The next morning when I woke up my nervous system felt very weak and shaken; nonetheless my mind was very happy.

From the worldly viewpoint, this seems like a terrifying experience and I feared greatly for my life, and my body hurt. But because of the practice I was able to transform it into the joy of having come through it with some positive outcome. I was able to give up this body, offer it to the spirit and say, “Here, do whatever you want with it – eat it, drink it, anything.” Somehow by doing that I befriended that spirit and received no more harm for the rest of the retreat.

Also, going back to what Paula was saying about the internal hardships of loneliness and depression: There’s only one thing to do, which is to transform them into the power of practice, actually feeling one with the guru, feeling the guru’s presence at all times.

Paula: Another thing is extreme fatigue. We never had a day off. We woke up very early in the morning, and we put in eight or night hours on the meditation cushion. Furthermore, we had to chop wood and carry water, cook food – there was no rest. To keep our bodies going we had to do chi-gong or take a walk; there was always something that needed to be done out of necessity. There was no time to stop – work in the morning, afternoon and night, seven days a week.

In the fall there was work to prepare for winter, so we would spend some of the afternoon stacking wood, among other things. By the time we finished it would be dark and I hadn’t done my afternoon session. I would end up doing the last session after midnight. Then we would wake up after only a few hours of sleep and it would begin again. The fatigue was difficult, and sometimes on top of that I would get lung.

I never wanted to stop, but I wondered how I could continue like this. Then I would pray to the guru, and it’s really due to the blessings of the guru that I went on. I never wanted to stop; that it was very hard was a recurring thought.

Roger: One difficulty that may not be apparent until you do it is that sitting all day becomes difficult. I have some kind of chronic hip problem, which got worse during the retreat. I fell on ice once during the retreat, and ever since then I experienced pain whenever I sat. The only time I didn’t feel pain was during deep absorption when the winds would leave that part of my body, and I wouldn’t feel it anymore. The rest of the time was a very harsh experience of forcing myself to sit in one place. Fortunately there is some feedback of bliss in meditation, if you persevere long enough or if you have the right karma; still, that doesn’t mean you won’t end up limping out of the session like a 70-year-old man!

Also, much of the time I would go without breakfast during that retreat. Not because I was lazy, not because there was no food; simply because there was no time to eat and get my next session done. I would experience the suffering of hunger. The choice was be hungry or get a session done and I chose to get a session done. A lot of the time I would go without an evening meal as well for the same reason. This is part of the joy of being a meditator, the single-pointed devotion to practice, and it brings a deep feeling of inner satisfaction. Still, on the surface one goes through all the sufferings of heat and cold, hunger and thirst. My room was so small I could only build a bed that was only 2 feet wide, so I couldn’t even lie down comfortably on the bed.

How did you deal with the hardships – how did you actively work with them so you could stay in retreat?

Paula: There are several ways – the first step is to learn the techniques; I would sift through my mental lam-rim catalog and look for which remedy or antidote is proper to apply at that time. One can use any point from the lam-rim, ranging from praying to the guru, to meditation on death and impermanence, to reflection on how this is my karma ripening or meditation on the suffering of the twelve links; emptiness meditation is powerful, or whatever worked at the time.

Another motivating factor was to think about how much I want to become enlightened for the benefit of all sentient beings – we certainly wouldn’t do just this for ourselves! I would also consider my alternatives – the thought of doing anything else made me stay. Also the realization came that doubt is just another negative mind that needs to be abandoned as much as hatred or jealousy. Also I would think of my teachers, how wonderful and inspiring they are, how there is no one I have ever met like them anywhere else, in any culture.

Especially inspiring for me was to think of Geshe Jampa Wangdu’s cave in Dharamsala, where he would simply sit in mud if it rained – he had much worse conditions. I would think that by doing this I become like them, and based on that I would stay with it.

Having benefactors was really important to enduring the hardships. In retreat one doesn’t get any feedback on meditation, it doesn’t seem to improve for a long time, and there are so many hard conditions, but when I would think of the people who were really counting on me, and how I was ultimately doing this for their sake, I gained strong motivation. I was training to take on the sufferings of all sentient beings, so how could I do that without having lots of suffering with which to practice?

What are the benefits of experiencing all these difficulties?

Roger: The most important benefit I derive from persevering in the face of hardships is that I’m able to achieve what I want in this lifetime, I’m able to create the causes for higher rebirth, liberation and enlightenment on behalf of all kind mother sentient beings. That’s the freedom, the power I get.

Based on that we’re about to start another Great Retreat, to last another four years. This time the conditions, although a little primitive by most peoples’ standards, are better. Inner hardships will increase, which is good, it’s what I want. It’s very appealing for me to do another retreat; as traumatic and painful as the last one was, I can feel the results in my mind very directly, and that leaves me with the imprint of wanting to do more and more and more, until eventually, in this life or some future life, I become like my guru Lama Zopa Rinpoche, or my guru His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Without question I see that persevering in the face of hardships is the key to all these achievements, all the good in the world. All our past gurus have done it, they’ve all persevered in one hardship or another to gain the realizations. The only way we’re going to have accomplished yogis and yoginis manifesting in this society is if people give up the idea that Dharma practice is easy, that spiritual practice is something that is comfortable or something that is always pleasing to the mind – that’s just not going to work. Even worldly endeavor is not like that – how can spiritual endeavor be like that?

Not only do I get to achieve what I want in this life – but as anyone knows who has ever read the life stories of beings like Milarepa, Gampopa, Lama Atisha, Lama Tsong Khapa, all these great, inspiring beings who have practiced the entire lam-rim of sutra and tantra and experienced the fruits of practice by, at the very least continuing in the face of such obstacles – I’m putting imprints of the entire lam-rim, sutra and tantra, on my consciousness. If I get extremely lucky and am able to please the mind of my guru through my practice, I have the chance of attaining realizations in this lifetime. And what could be more wonderful than that – to follow in the footsteps of these holy beings?

Paula: I have the same feeling as Roger and I would like to add that the day-to-day joy of transformation that occurred during the retreat is still with us; I am excited to be doing another retreat. Not only are we able to achieve the highest goals, but also in the day-to-day existence, when hardships come up, the grasping at them is less. The connection with the Dharma, with the guru, and with faith is so much deeper. It seems like when you’re taught the Dharma, it is segmented – there are all the parts of the lam-rim and various aspects of tantra, all these pieces appear; during great retreat, however, all of it integrates into a beautiful experience beyond words, which is why the lamas can’t tell you about it – they can only point you toward that experience and give you the map (which is the lam-rim of sutra and tantra) and encourage you to go meditate. The fruit of that experience is so indescribable; the little I’ve tasted of it caused me to want to do more because the benefit is so great. The hardships are incidental. Lama Yeshe would use the word totality to describe such holistic, deeply joyful experiences of which the hardships are part.

Furthermore, by taking on the hardships, one learns the extremely precious practice of tong-len, the way of taking on everyone’s hardships; the more practice one gets at transforming one’s sufferings into joy, the more one can do this for all sentient beings. You develop the wish to truly take on the misery of all beings and make them all happy. The only way to do this is by feeling happy with one’s own sufferings.

Roger: The Great Retreat is an extremely blessed and powerful form of practice that comes to us through the Gelugpa lineage; there’s nothing like it as far as giving you the single-pointed opportunity to figure out what Dharma practice is. My own understanding is if we get enough people doing these practices, enough people who are prepared to persevere in the face of hardships in order to please the mind of the guru, we’ll definitely get some stars; some people will rise up out of that group and we’ll have Western tulkus, our own yogis and yoginis and mahasiddhas manifesting great things. That can only come from a culture in which one is able to do this practice called persevering in the hardships.

 

“What I am most interested in is the bearing of hardships”

–Lama Zopa Rinpoche

“Many times, I think, you don’t see much result in most people who have done three-year retreat. But Roger and Paula’s retreat – I think I would accept. I can see the improvement and stability, and that’s the result of having practiced Dharma during the retreat.

“They bore so many hardships. What I am most interested in is bearing hardships. Some people can talk about this experience or that, about some dreams or something, but bearing hardships – that becomes real Dharma practice.

“Generally, those who have realizations, the Kadampa geshes or those in monasteries, spent their early life without much concrete food – just some black tea and some tsampa. Many of them have stories of having no food for many months, but there was no fear, no worry: The mind was completely absorbed in Dharma, practicing, studying, debating. The realizations, even of the learned masters, are a result of bearing hardships and studying Dharma.

“Everyone can recite a mantra or visualize deities – that is not difficult; practicing Dharma is difficult. Why there is no development in the mind is not because one hasn’t received a mantra or hasn’t received a deity to meditate on, it’s because of not having practiced Dharma.

“After they finished their retreat at Milarepa, Ribur Rinpoche offered Roger and Paula the suggestion to do another retreat. If they become enlightened before retreat finishes, that is good. So I hope they have a good journey! If you can offer them some help, that’s good.”

 

“Joy and happiness arise in my mind.”

–Geshe Rabten

“I lived in an old small stone hut that had room for only one person. It was situated in a forest on a hillside above Dharamsala. Many of the slates on the roof and stones in the wall had fallen down. When the wind blew, a draught would come through the cracks in the wall. And when it rained heavily all the rainwater would come in through the roof. Because of this, when I lay down at night I would have to put a number of containers and basins on my bed. At times I even had to put up an umbrella and sleep under that. When the different kinds of monkeys would get onto the roof their legs would come through into the room.

“Occasionally relatives and people I knew would come from here and there to see me. Some of them had rather small minds and would exclaim, ‘O teacher, you are living in such a dreadful house!’ Often they would even start crying. I would reply, ‘But when I look at this house with my eyes, a feeling of joy and happiness arises in my mind.’”

–From Song of the Profound View, by Geshe Rabten, Wisdom Publications

 

“Don’t think easiest, best or cheapest!”

–His Holiness the Dalai Lama

At a teaching in Los Angeles in July this year, someone asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama: “What is the quickest, easiest way to realize selflessness?”

His Holiness replied with great intensity, “Although I cannot claim to have any high levels of realization, even the little realization that I have in relation to the understanding of selflessness is a product of an effort over 30 years.”

And then he bowed his head and wept. “When Milarepa was giving his last instructions to one of his foremost disciples, Gampopa, he showed him the calluses on his behind, the result of his continuous sitting in meditation.

“‘Look at this!’ Milarepa said to Gampopa. ‘This is what I’ve endured. This is the mark of my practice and this is how you must remember that realization of Dharma requires effort and single-pointed commitment.’

“So don’t think easiest, best or cheapest! Think more, count more in eons – that is important!” His Holiness urged.

“Although I am quite sure that I cannot achieve the level of realization – even by a hundredth part or a thousandth part – of what Milarepa achieved, one thing is for sure. I will definitely emulate Milarepa’s example and try to follow in his footsteps!”

 

“Even though my bones have pierced my flesh on this cold stone floor, I have persevered.”

–Milarepa

 

To give thanks due

To all sentient beings who are my parents,

I do religious practice in this place.

This place is like a lair of savage beasts;

At the sight of it, others would be roused to indignation.

 

My food is like the food of dogs and swine;

At the sight of it, others would be moved to nausea.

 

My body is like a skeleton;

At the sign of it a savage enemy would weep.

 

My behavior appears to be that of a madman,

And my sister blushes with shame.

But my awareness is truly Buddha;

At the sight of it the Victorious One rejoices.

 

Even though my bones have pierced my flesh on this cold stone

floor, I have persevered.

My body, inside and outside, has become like a nettle,

It will never lose its greenness.

 

In the solitary cave, in the wilderness,

The recluse knows much loneliness.

But my faithful heart never separates

From the Lama-Buddha of the Three Ages.

 

–From The Life of Milarepa, by Lobsang P. Lhalungpa, Penguin Arkana

 

Tags: retreat