My first half-day meditation retreat

This past weekend, I attended my first half-day silent meditation retreat. I am not really interested in weeklong retreats, which I think in too many cases are western-centric money grabs (that’s a broad stroke, I know) but also, I have a family and dumping them to go away isn’t in the cards for now.

But a half-day retreat was more than doable, and took place at a local Buddhist temple.

And I learned a lot, and quickly.

First, it reaffirmed the one thing most of us know which is, meditation is hard. By hour 2 or 3, a 30 minute sitting after a break might be 30 minutes of daydreaming and then hearing the bowl ring reminds me I didn’t even remember to follow my breath!

Second, and I read this in Joseph Goldstein’s book, Mindfulness, I started to dislike one or two people in the room and I had never even said a word to them! But one moves “annoyingly” or one was dressed a certain way that my brain decided would irk me. Goldstein noted this happens in every retreat he’s on and he now laughs about it, and realized his mind is trying to create a story that isn’t there.

Lucky for me, I had already read about this and was prepared to counter those thoughts with positive ones.

I did learn that I needed to use all the tools in my toolbox to meditate this much. Focusing on breathing only works for so long, at least for a relative newbie like me, and I needed to switch to sound, visualization, meta, and other senses that were more than just, “breathing in, I know that I am breathing in,” etc.

In the day, we did multiple seated meditations, a walking meditation, and working meditation in which we spent 20 minutes helping to clean up around the temple, mindfully, and then back to the cushion for a few more before calling it a day.

I found I got a lot of out of. Being in silence for a long period was calming, I made sure to leave my phone and smart-watch in the cubby with my shoes and didn’t want to know the time so I could just be present in the moment and not thinking about what activity was coming up next.

The meditation was hard, but I walked away knowing in those hours there I had great moments of mindfulness and some moments not as great, but those are still part of the process so I don’t think I failed anywhere, I just learned more in a crash course setting.

While I don’t know I will rush back for another half-day retreat too quickly, I am more than open to doing this again.