Time Away

A meditation retreat is considered a time away: a time to just be with one's method and not to be tied down by past memories. Perhaps most importantly, it is a time to see things in fresh ways: to keep coming back to a simple method of watching the breath or other meditative practice.
  Some people might go on retreats with expectations: they want quick results, or they've heard a lot of things about meditation, including the benefits and so on. I am often like this, because I tend to think that having the isolated time to be with one's method is already an opportunity. However, the point gets continually missed when practitioners come loaded with expectations, and their bodies also become subtly tense in expectation of what they are hoping to find in the process. Sometimes, one's meditative practice is little more than tricking oneself into "setting up" an experience, as when a person hangs on to their method very tightly when practicing. However, all these experiences belittle our sense of being as practitioners, because they set up this kind of perfection that the mind is not going to stick to.
   The meditative attitude can be summed up as a combination of maintaining awareness and discovering the present. Maintaining awareness is knowing that from moment to moment, one need only tend to one situation, namely the meditation method. Discovering the present is fostering a non-discursive, present awareness of all the phenomena that arise as a result of the practice. It could be drowsiness, or distractions, but the point is that one has a way of knowing these states, through the method itself. Nothing is discounted from this experience, and nor is anything sought after. This is such an important part of the practice, a kind of acceptance of the Buddha nature that already exists in a person, but is simply changing states, much as water has states of freezing or gas. These states are neither good nor bad, and there is no sense in preferring one state to another since they are all originating from the mind.
   This "time away" is actually not a time away at all, but a time that is deeply with one's mind and its phenomena.