apologies for my long absence from these pages; for the last 4 months, i've been in guhyaloka on retreat, and just got back.

it’s more than 20 years since I did a retreat as long as this four month ordination course. I came straight to the retreat from an intense set of meetings, with the public preceptors for 10 days, then the private preceptors, with bhante, for a weekend. The private preceptors meeting finished on Sunday evening, and by Tuesday morning I was on a plane heading for Alicante.

The retreat has a very simple programme, but it has a surprisingly strong impact, that comes from the underlying spiritual logic of the retreat programme.

On the first week, 18 guys, most of whom hardly know each other, turn up in this little cluster of huts in the mountains 3000ft above the holiday resorts of the Costa Blanca. For the first week, pretty much, we told life-stories. It was surprisingly effective. All these people, about whom I already had opinions, on the basis of nothing much more than the way they walked or talked or ate or looked, gradually turned into to real human beings. I felt much more understanding of, and sympathetic to, everyone on the retreat at the end of the life stories.

The second week of the retreat is given over to the precepts. Following on from the life stories we look back over our whole lives from the point of view of each of the ten precepts. That was quite intense; I had quite mixed feelings about it; some real reluctance, and some moments of excruciating embarrassment. But overall, like it says in the books, it really did feel like a liberating thing. By this time we were a couple of weeks into the retreat, and it was possible to be a bit more subtle and self aware around ethical behaviour. Habitual things, like ways I communicate, things I usually wouldn’t notice or take very seriously, I was becoming aware of, and seeing how the behaviours set up subtle and not so subtle disturbances, that spilled over into my meditation.

We were a couple weeks into the retreat by now, and on an ordinary retreat it would be time to go home. But here we were just warming up. The next phase of the retreat was study, looking at the dharma section of the three jewels. One of the things that bhante has been saying a lot recently is that he’d like people to go more deeply into some of the basics. This study really felt like that. We were dong karma, conditionality, samkrta and asamskrita dhammas and the laksanas. It doesn’t get much more basic than the laksanas, – anicca, anatta, dukkha: impermanence, insubstantiality, unsatisfactoriness – but again because of the context, it felt like these pretty familiar ideas were able to go in more deeply, and started to make more experiential sense. it was the old ryokan joke: listen, i'll tell you a secret; everything's impermanent. or as someone in my study group said, as we studied impermanance: 'why wasn't i told about this'. when you bring the kind of still, meditative attention that the retreat makes possible to these key 'marks' you can’t see anything you can cling to, or define in concepts… you’re right into the heart of the dharma.

There were some real gems in the seminar on the chapters we were studying, like:
‘if you change your attitude towards the conditioned, well it’s as though the conditioned becomes the unconditioned. In a sense you could say if you changed your attitude towards the conditioned you don’t need the unconditioned. It’s your attitude itself which is unconditioned… the unconditioned acceptance of the conditioned was itself the unconditioned.

So, we’re sitting out in the spring sunshine, in a grove beneath some pine trees, looking down the valley with walls of vertical limestone, studying this stuff. It was exhilarating.

As someone remarked, basically we’d done a sangha retreat, followed immediately by a confession retreat, followed immediately by a study retreat, and now it’s being followed straight away by a meditation retreat. and we were still not at the halfway mark yet.