Getting Back to Basics

Stripping away the distractions of our everyday existences, a retreat provides us with an environment conducive to a deeper more concerted period for reflection and practice.  Of course, mindfulness is something that can be practised in everyday life, but it helps to establish solid foundations before trying to take on the real world. 


A retreat is a wonderful opportunity to solidify one’s practice, regardless of duration.  For those new to meditation, half a day or a day’s guided practice is a good place to start.  A weekend, or 3 day residential breaks offer a timescale during which a more sustained period of practice can take place.  A week is something to build up to, and prepare for, as I have discovered.

Broken down into its essential components, mindfulness is about becoming fully aware, in the presence moment of all our experience, without discernment.  It involves experiencing contact, feeling and perception and being able to slow down this usually automatic process, to arrest each stage, and do so knowingly, thereby potentially and profoundly altering our experience.  Without mindfulness, we are apt to jump from experience to reaction, without knowing what has prompted us to think, feel or act in the ways we do.  We form habits based on our previous experiences, which may cause us to respond inappropriately to our present circumstances, based on a set of assumptions that stem from the stories we tell ourselves. 




At the heart of meditation is an inquiry into what is true for us in each moment.  In the Insight traditions that underpin Mindfulness Meditation, we are invited to refamiliarise ourselves with the phase we all too often pass through unknowingly – where we define our experience as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. 

This deceptively simple task is both the means and the end.  The challenge is to stop right there.  To resist adding anything to the mixture.  When we proliferate, we get into the muddy waters of conceptual chaos.  So, the invitation in short might be summarised as follows:

In the seeing, only see. 

In the hearing, only hear. 

In the perceiving, only perceive.

Gathering awareness, we make contact with sensory events – things we see, hear, or perhaps smell.  We make contact with thoughts, and with feelings.  We notice them, and acknowledge their tonal quality – whether we like, dislike, or feel indifferent.  We needn’t get swept away on the waves of thought, imagination, fantasy, historical recollection, hopes, dreams, or obsessions.  Whilst we can’t stop the tides, we can learn to surf.  Meditation is a bit like surfing – remaining on the surface, rather than falling in and getting dragged along.