Western Zen Retreat at DDRC 2025 (A.F.)

I definitely was not prepared for how much this retreat affected me.  I can think of three different times that I just felt completely overwhelmed, to say nothing about the number of times I just found myself crying.  All of that being said, while I think those moments were important and real, they are not what I brought back with me from this retreat.

Within minutes of leaving the Reception Hall, my mind was already transitioning back to normal life.  Just turning on my phone, seeing texts and emails, then driving home, stressing about work.  It wasn’t really depressing as it was surprising to see how quickly it all started happening.  Exactly as you said, by Friday, the retreat felt like it had happened years ago.  Even those overwhelming experiences had faded into the background of my memory.  I remembered the experiences, the insights I learned and could describe them, but the feelings themselves seemed remote.

As the week wore on, I thought mostly about how, during the retreat, my mind was so busy filling in the blanks left vacant by conversation and a sense of busyness.  Left alone with my mind, with fewer outside distractions, I had started to become aware of how often my mind flails about telling me stories.  Stories about my past.  Stories about the present and even the future.  It was as if my mind were convincing me that I was involved in this kind of social event at the retreat and that I actually had a real sense of what was transpiring.

I also started becoming more aware of just how much time I spend every day engaging with this kind of mental activity.  It’s as if I am constantly rehearsing some kind of act geared towards managing other peoples’ impressions of me and anticipating or monitoring their reactions.  When it “fails,” I feed it into some narrative about what an awful, strange or awkward person I am.  When it succeeds I more often than not tell myself that it’s only a matter of time before the real truth about me is found out.  Heads you win, tails I lose.

I also saw that I have these sort of roles written out for people in my life.  I convince myself I’ve figured them out or unconsciously pigeonhole them based on fears and insecurities I have.  Everyone gets cast as a particular character or combination of characters from my past or one I have dreamt up out of my cravings or insecurities.

As the days have gone on, I am noticing more and more just how constant this is and how unconsciously I do it both on and off the cushion.

Who am I?  Where is my heart?  I try to continue using these questions to break that spell and to see what it is my mind is doing.  Sometimes I am successful, sometimes I forget, and sometimes I’m just plain confused about how to answer those questions other than to say “Right here, right now.”

All I feel like I know is that I feel a giant sense of relief when I feel like I can drop the constant task of trying to keep all of this up.  When I can just be completely honest about how difficult, challenging and confusing it can all be or when I can just experience the joy of something in the present moment, because the truth is all of those things my mind is doing, those webs of explanations and theories I spin to try and “make sense” out of the world and the people I encounter in it just get in the way of me, not being “me”– some dreamed up notion of how I am in the world– but of me just “being” in the present moment or of my heart just being where it is.  

But I have also begun to see that the goal or practice is not to eliminate these activities of my mind, but to get to know what it is that my mind does and to become aware of what my mind is up to.  I don’t know that those habits of my mind described above are ever going to go away, but if I get to know them, then I can stop being pilloried about by them all the time.  I can be more embodied in the moment and more present to those I am with as they and I are, as opposed to how I imagine, hope or fear them to be.

So I guess what I have taken away from some of those more intense moments from the retreat is not so much the emotions or the intensity, but the feeling of surprise– the memory of having had my expectations turned upside down regardless of how large or small the moment.  Mostly because they remind me that every moment has that capacity.

I feel like I could write about this forever.

Anyway, thank you again for bringing these teachings into our lives.