Well into the second half of the retreat, a strong rhythm was in place — meditation, chanting, walking, contemplation. The silence was nourishing, and the mind was touching subtler and subtler insights and experiences.
These experiences are unique, having arisen in a particular time and place. Details about them don’t feel useful to share. Why? Because when you, dear reader, are on a long retreat, you will have your own experiences. And it’s best that they remain uncolored by another’s.
What does seem useful to share are two threads woven through these weeks: resistance and joy.
Stop resisting
Some surprising imagery began appearing in meditation and kept returning. Strong visual images are rare for me, so when they arise with such clarity, I pay attention. This one, at first perplexing, soon revealed its meaning. It was about resistance — a subtle resistance that had escaped my notice.
This wasn’t thought or rational discernment. It was fully experiential. The image showed me the truth of the resistance, which suddenly felt obvious and not subtle at all. Born from wanting reality to be a little different, it was resistance to fully and openly experiencing things as they are.
Then the simple inner guidance arose: Stop resisting. So I did.
Somehow this was easy to do. Resistance was decreasing, decreasing, decreasing, not quite down to zero, but dramatically reduced. With that reduction, energy flowed more freely, thoughts fell away more easily, the heart opened, and acceptance felt natural.
Only love remains
As resistance lessened, energy increased and flowed more freely. Love and joy were abundant — sometimes felt as emotion, sometimes as energy suffusing the body, sometimes as both.
One of the practices I chose to work with was arising and passing. Of the insights that emerged, one stands out to share: any thing that arises is bound to disintegrate – this is the natural order of things, and it cannot be otherwise. And when the disintegration is clean, without clinging or residue, what remains is love. Only love.
From the depth of that recognition came a simple truth: it matters, and it matters a great deal, to dwell in love, to experience joy. No matter how small or insignificant the circumstances may seem. Because it is love that remains.
As with so much on this retreat, this understanding was not primarily cognitive. It was an embodied truth, a personal, intimate experience. A Pāli word that captures it well is sacchikiryā: literally ‘doing with one’s own eyes’, usually translated as personal understanding, or intimate experience.
Weaving the threads
Afterwards, I was aware that this phrase had for me a more powerful effect than the phrase ‘let go‘, which I had often used to encourage release. So I began to experiment during meditation. When the familiar phrase ‘let go‘ arose, I substituted ‘stop resisting’ instead. The impact was immediate, unambiguous, and unmistakably positive. For the remainder of the retreat, ‘stop resisting’ became my phrase of choice to encourage letting go. It still is.
There was also a clear knowing that, like letting go, joy quite naturally arises when conditions are right. In those weeks, conditions were certainly supportive. Again and again, my journal entries speak of love, contentment, and joy.
What I didn’t yet know was that, in the final week of the retreat, another piece of the puzzle about joy would fall into place.
February/March 2025 — Barre, MA