Learning from the 3 day retreat

  The three day meditation retreat has just passed, and I felt overall renewed by the experience. I would have to say that it is something that doesn't quite sink in until I am back in Toronto and seeing how distracting city life can be compared to the retreat environment. There was part of me that did feel quite changed by this experience, though I can't quite put my finger on it. Altogether, I would say that I suffered my share of back, knee and thigh pains, and there were times when it was hard for me to stay on the method of my practice. And there were also times when these feelings discouraged me, and made me wonder how far I can really go with practice. Yet still, in spite of all these misgivings, I found the retreat to be an essential experience for me, because it grounds me in an awareness of where I am really at with practice. I am hesitant to say that my practice is not as good as I wish it to be. But then, the point of this experience is not necessarily to measure oneself, but to let go of all measurements.
     Fashi was quite clear about not getting stuck in identifying with our thoughts. He used the example of how meditation practitioners tend to want to eliminate scattered thoughts and replace them with clear mind. But in reality, both 'scattered thoughts' and 'clear mind' are in themselves results of the mind. It's not that the mind is closer to 'clear' than it is to 'scattered', but that in fact, both states of mind are equally true mind. So there is no need to be uncomfortable with these states of being, but to see that they are both emanations of the same mind. Another interesting point is that no matter what we experience in meditation, that experience is already a kind of object of the mind. It has no ability to be aware, so in that sense it is not the real mind. To know this is to say that nothing we ever can settle for in meditation is ever the real mind. Meditation is always about seeing past the barriers of thought into something that can never be captured by thoughts themselves.
    Is it possible for a person to be 'terrible' at meditation? I often had this thought when I was in retreat this weekend, simply because it was quite hard for me to settle at the beginning. But even this 'being terrible' is a thought, and if I were to grasp at it, it would only lead me to argue with the other thought that says "you're not so bad". In fact, I kept fluctuating between feeling resigned and then feeling determined to get back into an uncomfortable sitting position to 'hash it out'. But the actual true mind has nothing to do with these discomforts and misgivings. It is more about seeing that every thought is in the same ocean and has the same substance as water. One needn't pick and choose, and the joy of meditation is relaxing in the knowledge that all thoughts have the same essential origin, even though they may display very different things.