6 reasons I’m going on a silent Buddhist retreat over Christmas and New Year

The last few years I’ve gone on a Buddhist retreat over the winter holiday season. It’s a perfect time of year to reflect, relax and recuperate. but it’s more than that for me. Here are 6 reasons why.

To challenge my views

2016 has shown how strong views can be, how easily they can be reinforced by our surrounding echo chambers online and offline and what happens when these strong views play out in national and international politics. Views create divisions which need to be healed. There’s a lot of talk in the UK about healing the gap between Leavers and Remainers. We can blame social media algorithms for creating this gap as much as we like but it will do nothing to change our views. These views are tracks we tread into our minds through what we choose to allow in and what we allow ourselves to ruminate on. The path to healing these gaps has to involve working against the forces that create strong views in our own minds.

Going on retreat helps me get a handle on these forces. On retreat views become phenomena to witness and let pass by rather than habits of mind to get tangled in. I’ll get lots of opportunities to practise techniques to work against these forces with people of all ages, different races, political persuasions and income levels.

To challenge my greed

I’m greedy. When I take a long hard look at myself I realise I’m embarrassingly greedy. Even when I’m behaving in seemingly altruistic ways there’s always something in it for me. I recently gave away a free tool for playing around with audio loops. There were genuine generous motivations in there but I also got totally engrossed sending it out to press, watching the stats and seeing how MY thing was doing. This self-centredness is ingrained in human nature. It can be overcome but it needs constant conscious effort to overcome it. If I’m really going to improve the world I won’t get very far until I’ve deeply understood the strength and nature of my own greed. That means me understanding MY greed — not me getting indignant about someone else’s.

On this retreat we will be practising the Brahma Viharas — a series of meditations specifically formulated to strengthen loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. Through practising these I hope to make the tiniest bit of progress in dialling down my own greed.

To experience fellowship

In this online world I end up spending so much of my life interacting with avatars who may or may not have real people behind them. Even if there are real people there the ‘avatarisation’ turns them into units of value — statistics who will like me, repost me, buy my products and do whatever I crave to have my identity validated. This also plays out in my offline life. As I get busier and busier with my own projects which are *so important* and will *save the world* (read: save MY world) I see people as means rather than ends in themselves. This is not how I want to remember myself on my deathbed.

On retreat there is time, space and a great context to get below the self-obsessive forces of modern life, take other people in and experience a sense of community which is so rare elsewhere.

To exercise kindness

I find kindness such an easy value to aspire to but so hard to practise. When I’m busy — when I have the feeling that I don’t have the time/energy/money to get from A to B — the first thing that goes out the window is kindness: the call to my ageing grandmother, giving a friend in need a shoulder or even taking the time to make a donation to a good cause. Ironically when I’m less pressed I notice that it’s doing these very things that is the cornerstone to being in the right state of mind to do what I do well and help others do the same. I’ve learned that kindness needs training and exercise in the right context. On retreat there is so much time to exercise my work-shy kindness muscles and come back just a little bit more resilient to kindness getting lost in my busy life.

To worship something bigger than me

“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.” — David Foster Wallace

Before I became a Buddhist I was strongly opposed to the idea of worshipping anything at all. I thought it was at best uncool and at worse recklessly dangerous. But a teacher of mine pointed out how I already worshipped so many things — my youth, my career, my creativity to name just 3. None of these will outlast my life. At best they’ll come and go and at least one of them is fast going out the window! Constantly devoting myself to these fickle things has often been a source of hell in my life. Crisis and fortune blow on winds completely out of my control and even when they blow in my favour the fear of change stops me savouring the sweetness fully.

The only way I’ve found to work against getting blown around by these winds is to surrender to something bigger than me — something infinite and cosmic. For me this is the ideal of the Buddha — the complete transcendence of attachment to worldly things and the suffering that comes with it. The more wholeheartedly I can surrender to it the deeper the healing.

On retreat the myth of the Buddha takes on an indescribable symbolic reality which just doesn’t happen in normal life. The devotional rituals which I take part in have been the biggest source of healing and growth for me. This has taken me utterly by surprise! Paradoxically I’ve learned that it’s surrender itself — the giving up of worldy things — that allows me to engage more effectively with all the mundane things that motivate me in my daily life.

To come back

A basic motivation to go on retreat is to escape the world — the bustle, busyness, stress and anxiety. But my higher motivation is to spend time working on myself so I can come back more effective at making a positive impact on the world. The Buddhist ideal is enlightenment for the sake of all beings. Since I have the most control over this particular skin-bag of flesh and bones that sits here writing this article it makes sense to spend most of my time and energy improving it — but ultimately what I aspire to aspire to aspire to become is someone whose entire physical, emotional and spiritual being is oriented to ending suffering for all that lives. So really it’s all about coming back rather than escaping.

This all sounds so lofty and sanctimonious! I’m so far away from these ideals that it seems kind of crazy to aspire to them. But I’m convinced that if I aspire to anything less it’ll all end up just being about me. And I know that if I keep practising in my imperfect way, keep starting afresh when I remember I’ve forgotten, I will bit by bit become a stronger force for good in the world. It’s ridiculously unlikely I’ll ever become enlightened — never say never — but at least I’ll be able to die happy knowing I left the world in a better place than I found it.

I’ll be away and completely off grid from 20th December 2016 until 3rd January 2017. Please feel free to respond and recommend (there I go again) and I’ll get back on my return. Wishing you peaceful and loving holidays.