Written following the 7-week silent retreat. Translations of the Pāli are my own.
10-23 February, in the quiet of a frozen forest
Resonance
The application for the self-directed silent retreat had included a question about what exactly I would be practicing. My answer was simple: Jhāna, insight, and kriyā yoga. I wanted to explore how these cornerstones of my practice could work together. The interplay of jhāna and insight was clear; the relationship between jhāna and kriyā was not.
For months, my daily practice had leaned strongly toward kriyā, as that was rich and deepening. And on this retreat, when I sat with the intention of doing jhāna practice, the kriyā pathways were so strong that they would activate on their own. Pulsating lights, shaking, waves of prāṇa — it seemed there was nothing to do but follow them. I felt caught in an ‘either-or‘ framework of practicing either kriyā or jhāna, feeling helpless when I tried to practice jhāna and kriyā took over.
Then, one afternoon, insight arose — not cognitive, but embodied: it wasn’t either-or at all. It was fine to be open to how they might interconnect. With that insight came permission to experiment. Before the retreat, I’d written to my Hindu teacher asking him to reply if there was any problem with exploring kriyā-jhāna connections, stating I’d take silence as consent. He was silent. And now, after his silence and in the quiet of the retreat, something crystallized. Inner authority strengthened, and it felt natural to step beyond the strict boundaries of kriyā and jhāna.
And in the stepping beyond, it was resonances that revealed themselves. Not direct overlaps or mappings, not ‘x is the equivalent of y‘. Rather, it was subtle affinities that had the sense of ‘there is something of x that feels like something of y‘. This effortlessly led to investigations like ‘if, after practicing x, might it be possible to slide over into y?‘
This approach allowed both systems to retain their integrity while revealing their resonances. It wasn’t blending the two but seeing each from a new angle. This created conditions for revealing what had been hidden when they had been held apart in either-or thinking.
This was also an expression, a strengthening, of inner authority. Moving into territory where I’d received no instruction and knew no-one else who had walked before felt freeing, authentic, and on-path. Following inner guidance, the practice became in large part exploring this new terrain, finding resonances, and developing insight into which were helpful and which less so. Direct experience led the way.
Only the essence will remain
As these inner experiments unfolded, some outer friction surfaced. There were a number of surprising exchanges that periodically disturbed the equilibrium of the mind, as the teachers and I had quite different perspectives on working with the Pāli language and early Buddhist teachings. These encounters were lessons in how quickly the mind can move into right-wrong thinking, and how it responds to outer and inner authority.
In the library one day, when reading the Longer Discourse on Emptiness, the final sentences caught my eye. I’ve never heard anyone teach the ending of this sutta in depth, but it is profound. The Buddha speaks to Ānanda:
I shall not treat you as the potter treats raw damp clay (ignoring it). I shall speak, correcting you again and again, pressing you again and again.
What is essence, that will remain.
These sentences moved the heart to stillness. And I recalled that the word used for essence, sāro in Pāli, was the same word used in verse 12 of the Dhammapada:
Having known essence as essence, and non-essence as non-essence,
they attain to essence, with (its) sustenance for perfect intention. — Dhammapada, verse 5
This struck so powerfully that it became a theme for the retreat. I chanted the verse hundreds of times as it embedded into, infused, and saturated the heart. On and off cushion, this mantra invited reflection: What is really ‘essence’? What is unnecessary? What can fall away?
Clearly, ‘essence’ had nothing to do with either-or thinking, nor with concepts of right and wrong. What was needed was to look deeply, discerning what actions, thoughts, attitudes, or any small movement of mind could be dropped while still staying connected with the core, the essence of the path of practice.
Judgments? Dropped.
Ruminating? Dropped.
Superiority and inferiority? Dropped.
Negativity? Dropped.
Granted, this is all easier said than done. Aversion is one direction my mind can certainly travel with some measure of ease if left unchecked, and in the retreat it did so from time to time. I’d catch it, work with it, then catch it again. But as the long retreat progressed, touching the blissful states of jhāna and kriyā yoga, it felt increasingly clear and workable to just drop aversion. Challenging, to be sure, but workable. In my journal is a note written after a day of strong practice:
Aversion? What aversion?
Bliss obliterates negativity.
February 2025 — Barre, MA