After a half-year of daily meditation I decided I want to try to expand and deepen my practice. Kottke’s post about deliberate practice and the excellent book Altered Traits prompted me to research taking longer retreats to push my own practice further to see where it leads.
There are quite a few mindfullness and meditation centers in the Twin Cities, each of which offer their own types of retreats. To start off with I chose a mindfullness-focused option: The University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing (whose full name is even longer, but who I will call CSH).
CSH offers frequent Mindfullness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) courses, weekly Stressbuster breaks and monthly retreats. And, bonus for me, they are very close to my house.
Since this was my first time I cautiously picked a half-day retreat. Though I’ve been meditating daily for half a year I thought there was still a chance that I’d hate the retreat and want to bail. A half-day seemed safe and it made things easier to organize with my family.
Before I headed out I realized that I was quite nervous. And that’s OK! Being ‘mindful’ is vulnerable. If you’re being fully present you’re fully there which means that you’re not hiding. That’s scary enough to do by yourself but doing it with a group of strangers? Nervousness makes sense.
I needn’t have worried, though. Not only was the retreat done in silence – which I’d expected – we also were told not to make eye contact. So I was in a room with strangers but I didn’t have to interact with them in any way. Perfect! That is exactly what I want in every social situation.
The retreat itself was a quick tour of the different techniques used in MBSR:
- Breathing
- Insight meditation
- Body scan
- Yoga
- Walking Meditation
- Mindful eating
- Qi Gong (not normally a MBSR thing, but it is at CSH)
- Loving kindness meditation
- Guided meditation/visualizations (mountain meditation)
The parts of the day I liked the most were the parts of my experience that I already liked – Insight and walking meditation. No surprises there. But I was glad to get a chance to try some of the other techniques. I’m starting to do more visualization in my practice as well, so I was happy to try some other visualization techniques.
Though I had some experience most of the class was brand new to these techniques. The half-day retreat is a great way to introduce yourself to the variety of mindfullness practices. And at 4 hours long it’s a lot less daunting that committing yourself to the 8 week MBSR class. I’m sure that many people sign up for the full course after doing one of these retreats.
That was not my outcome, though. I love the retreat idea but I want something more focused on meditation, which is the practice I most enjoy. So, next month I’ll be attending a full-day retreat focused on Insight meditation at the Common Ground Meditation Center. It’s like 9 hours of nothing but meditation. Daunting, but also exciting!
