A trip to SF
Reflections on a meditation retreat
I recently attended a two-day meditation retreat with Evolving Ground at SF Commons. I’d worked with Charlie and Jared (the teachers) before in a Vajrayana-based online workshop, but I wasn’t sure what to expect in a formal, in-person retreat setting. I was also afraid that my lower back issues would flare up and prevent me from going deep during sits, and I hardly slept the night of my arrival.
Thankfully, the trip was an incredibly rich experience. It was both joyful and challenging—and so much more. There were moments when I was literally sweating on a cushion with others, and I wanted nothing more than to go deeper into practice. I wanted to continue exploring and playing alongside my fellow seekers, many of whom I felt an unfamiliar sense of kindredness with.
At the heart of the retreat was “opening awareness” meditation. It’s a kind of meditation that stands contra to the more renunciative, focus-based practices that have become popular in the West. Rather than honing your ability to focus your attention on say, the breath, opening awareness is about allowing for everything to arise—thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, bodily sensations, etc—while remaining uninvolved with said things.
(The language here is frustratingly subtle but important. Bear with me because what follows is going to be vague and verbose. As with many things meditation, it’s easier to understand in practice than in esoterica.)
“Remaining uninvolved” does not mean to actively change the context of experience, to return to your anchor (e.g. the breath) when something like a thought or sensation arises in your field of awareness. Rather, it’s about allowing the openness and spaciousness that already characterizes awareness to emerge while whatever arises is arising, while whatever happens is happening. It’s a recognition, a letting things be rather than a letting go, a noticing of both the clouds and the vastness of the sky all at once.
Let me get concrete. Sometimes, when I walk around my neighborhood, I get lost in thought. A thought will occur to me as if from nowhere, and then, before long, it becomes an all-consuming story, one that isn’t even lively or clear—yet it warps and distorts the entirety of what I’m experiencing. Experience itself is thus rendered as something hazy and narrow in its texture. I feel like a zombie sleepwalking through the world in this state, totally unaware—or only aware—of the grainy, low-resolution movie at play. The world, as far as experience is concerned, is this story.
Snapping out of it is like leaving my heated apartment on a wintery night in Vermont. I instantly become aware of the fact that I was lost in thought as the world returns to clarity and openness. Experience now feels less crowded because my thoughts can be situated within awareness as one of many “things” that I can choose to engage with or not. Everything else in the immediate moment (including the act of thinking, which is different from having thoughts) suddenly feels more meaty, connective, visceral.
Spacious presence and spacious involvement are the outcomes of opening awareness. I practice so that it’s easier to allow for a vaster sense of awareness to accompany my days. This, in turn, generates the capacity to respond freely to one’s situation rather than from patterned thought, feeling, and behavior. The result is a richer, more vivid experiencing of life. With practice one naturally develops power, clarity, playfulness, and autonomy as well as compassion, social effectiveness, inner security, and creative spontaneity.
The path is highly experimental and individualized. What you become aware of and how you practice with what arises depends on your intentions, your goals, your personal psychology, and so on, which can make it hard to know how one is progressing. But that’s the beauty of it too: it’s an exploratory practice that equips and enables you to be more you, to embody and embrace the possibility that there are other modes of being in the world, modes that you can play with and step into fully when circumstance calls.
People respond uniquely to being seen, especially when it involves the eyes. Eyes touch us, move us, charge us with vitality, temptation, desire. They fill us with their intensity, which makes us want to discharge intensely. What might it feel like to make space for all of this aliveness, this energy? To turn toward the gaze of another without releasing what arises?
This is something we played with in retreat. My patterned response to being looked at was to smile. It felt automatic and varied depending on who it was, whether they were male or female, young or old, shorter or taller than me. It’s unsurprising that I smiled more indiscriminately and easily with women. This smile always felt friendly, light, inviting, open. With men my smile was more guarded, testy, as if I were sussing them out and sizing them up on various dimensions of masculinity. Are you my brother or a threat? Where do I stand in relation to you?
I sat across from R for the last exercise. We meditated and then were instructed to silently gaze at each other. In the first thirty seconds I felt apprehensive and judgmental, perhaps as a remnant of our brief conversation during lunch, and certainly due to previous conditioning. This shortly gave way to something more subtle, a delicate curiosity and appreciation of his being. We had practiced feeling the distinction between appreciating and liking someone the day before. They aren’t the same, though I noticed the more I appreciated him, the more fond of him I grew. His left eye twitched in a specific way. His irises were brown and darker than my own. His outward coolness was accompanied by warm and comforting vibrations.
We were told to close our eyes after seven minutes or so. Immediately the connection we had built was severed. A quiet sadness bubbled inside my chest and then bloomed throughout my body like a virus. Tears swelled at the corner of my eyes, leaving me in the hallows of something familiar, an ancient loneliness I am well-acquainted with. Slowly awareness expanded around these feelings and sensations like a blanket. I felt secure in its presence. What followed was compassion and warmth. And when I was allowed to open my eyes, I was full of gratitude.
Everyone has an aura, an atmosphere that, once you’re inside of it, shifts your state of being, sometimes subtly, sometimes abruptly. Mine was unassuming, neutral, open, like vanilla, according to R. I was slightly offended by this (ha) of course. But he reported to the group that this allowed him to feel truly comfortable in my presence, a feeling he had more trouble finding with others. This feeling had also transformed into something warm and light by the end of our sit, like a bright cup of tea that perfectly complements the shadows of our souls.
Only later did I learn that vanilla is quite complex. And in many ways, it makes the world go ’round.
By the end of the retreat, despite being sleep-deprived, I bumbled through the streets of San Francisco with a renewed sense of lightness. Certain thoughts and emotions I had suffered from months ago felt like they could now be physically located and situated within a spacious container—that of awareness—which left room for things like joy and wonder to arise on their own. This seems the natural outcome of finding stability and security in what was already there. The more I recognize this, the easier it is to be courageous as I consider big life changes like a move by summer, potential romances and relationships, projects I want to commit to, difficult conversations I need to have.
In the afternoon, I met up with an online friend I hadn’t met yet and had a nice time with her and her husband. I played their guitar, ate Chinese food, walked around, and chatted with strangers and yet-to-be friends. The more I explored the more I thought of my ex. So much of SF and the Bay was in her; so much of her was in the city. How strange and wonderful and sad it is, I thought, that this is where I’m at. I cried and shouted and laughed to myself as rollerskaters cruised by in the night. I messaged a friend and drank milk tea in Chinatown.
If you knew that awareness was always there for you, what would change? How would you live differently? It stands here, not like the distant, godly torso of Apollo, but by your side as a constant companion who will be with you in the trenches of life, one who, like a good friend, recognizes and accepts your differences while encouraging you that so much more is possible than you realize.