You Can’t Break the Sky: Notes From Retreat

An Ornament In Spaciousness

Recently, I attended a meditation retreat at The Alembic taught by Michael Taft. It was organized, facilitated, and illuminated with beams of joyful gratitude by Kati Devaney, who was supported by a team of holy volunteers. It was gigantic and lovely, and here are some notes:

I missed retreat. Deeply. I hadn't attended one in a long while and I regret that. Retreat feels as essential to me as taking walks, taking medicine in ceremony, and taking a moment to center and ground myself, because it does all the things those do and more.

The present moment is not a slice of time between the past and the future: it is an ever-expanding connective space in which concepts (which themselves are full of space and empty of thing-ness) like the past, the present, and the future are experienced. The longer one spends inside and as this spaciousness, the more stable and sticky it becomes. One identifies less as a feeble independent creature and more as something grand and unshakable.

As one woman said through tears after we broke our silence; “you can't break the sky”.

Sky-Mind, Body, and Heart were a big part of this retreat; the term ‘spaciousness’’ replaced the term ‘empty’, and I'm very grateful for this seemingly subtle semantic move, and for the nerdy verbal accuracy of Michael Taft. The words we use for these experiences really, really matter. For example:

The term ‘emptiness’ is full of baggage. The term ‘spaciousness’ is empty of it.

I feel that I grok what meditation teachers mean when they use the term ‘emptiness’, but even still, I found Taft’s use of the word spaciousness to be more helpful than other terms used to describe the same thing. An empty cup is full of space. So is my body; so are concepts, so are emotions, so is the universe.

I encountered a phenomenon that has happened every time I have been on retreat, wherein I get so aligned with awareness and focused on its liberating qualities that I start to get ‘spacey’, ‘spaced out’- I start missing lunch, the bell for the beginning of new sits, and whatever else is going on in and in front of me. It began to feel like something was missing, and I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was, as my finger just pointed back at the vast spaciousness where my head used to be. Taft brought me back to life by reminding me that bringing vast spaciousness to the contents of our life, our bodies, our hearts and seeing them, too, as spaciousness, is how one integrates this awareness to the next level of practice.

When spaciousness is the foreground and the background, objects in the midground can be perceived as ‘ornaments in spaciousness’, themselves full of space, light as a feather, with no essential thingness, or independence from their environment. When this perspective is settled into over the course of days, things get… sparkly. They flow. They dance.

Over time as I stabilized in this context, I found techniques that were previously too difficult became workable in ways they hadn't been before. In the past I've taken significant HP damage by wholehearted attempts at Tonglen; without spaciousness, breathing in all the suffering in the world tends to hurt a lot and leave what feels like burns in my chest cavity. With spaciousness, this wasn't the case. I could take in all the awful qualia in the world and breathe it out as compassion.

Over time this opened my heart, and for lack of a better term, it made it more spacious, and therefore more permeable, and that loop just kept going and going. I found that this empty awareness was also extremely helpful for a session of deity yoga, a practice I have been meaning to do more of lately. Spaciousness made way for an experience of my chosen deity: a lion-deer hybrid who filled me with confidence and energy when I was struggling with sleepiness and doubt. This feedback loop of agency, trust, and open-body-ness set my heart alight.

A Deer-Lion Deity. He and the technique I used to channel him on retreat will definitely be making an appearance in later posts.

Speaking of the heart: retreat before and after Metta (lovingkindness meditation) as my central practice is like night and day. Meditation before emotional work imbued with self-love is like flying a kite while someone chokes you; meditation after doing emotional work is like flying a kite while someone strokes you.

Basically anytime I fell off some kind of imaginal or emotional horse, felt myself flailing in some way, or felt overwhelmed or confused to the point where meditation wasn't happening, I put my hand on my chest and slipped into Metta. It became the glue that stuck everything else I was doing together. (It was also triggered every time I walked by Kati, who could power a windmill with her smile). This made my retreat the smoothest I've ever experienced.

With spacious awareness, Metta very easily became Non-Dual Metta; the distinction between self and other in the context of this vast spaciousness was itself experienced as empty, and the Metta very quickly felt as large as awareness itself; like awareness was a vast crystal clear ocean and Metta was the diffused light in the vast water, as well as golden rays that filtered through the waves above.

This is all getting very imaginal, so it's time I mentioned Rob Burbea: this was also my first retreat since falling in love with his teachings, and this informed my practice in delicious ways. One example is his teaching about the image of oneself as a meditator; how it can be more than an egoic fantasy, that it is a deep wellspring of motivation and alignment with one's strongest most vital desires, and that engaging with this image on the cushion can be a skillful and wholesome meditation move. I tried this on retreat and found the practice to be very sweet, and very effective.

Non-Dual Metta brings me back to my extremely religious days. The practice that worked best for me at the time was prayer; especially a newer form of ecstatic meditative prayer called Hisbodedus, which includes feeling the presence of God as deeply as one can. The presence, to me, felt like vast spaciousness, as God was said to be everywhere, and also, it was full of love, which was said to be an inherent quality of God’s personality. When done often and long enough, I’d often stumble into experiences that felt very close to what I now use frames like ‘Non-Dual Metta’ or ‘spacious love’ for, with one massive difference: with spaciousness as the frame rather than earning God’s grace, no effort whatsoever is involved. One simply is spaciousness.

This retreat felt like a microcosm of my last decade of practice: At first, I was only ever able to to do Non-Dual, Advaita-Vedanta, Open-Awareness, Alan Watts- type meditation. Dry Vipassana felt and often still feels too one-pointed, too constricted, too much like the desperate fundamentalism I was raised with. (It also tends to break peoples minds much more often than Non-Dual stuff). Even practices like Metta or Tonglen felt contrived and forced. It wasn’t until the last few years, with the help of teachers like Burbea and Taft, that I was able to do such practices with regularity, and even then, I do them within open awareness. Not by ‘focusing’ or bearing down on a specific meditation object at the exclusion of all else but rather by noticing and cultivating specific states within soft effortless spaciousness. The entire path can be walked this way.

Being on this secular, unorthodox, co-ed retreat, while also feeling this sense of ancient religious fervor, yearning, and ecstasy from my orthodox past was very exciting. It felt like the boundaries between my past, present, and future had dissolved, and my image of myself as a meditator, from a child singing to god under a vast sky, to a rabbinical student escaping from the study hall to murmur and dance in the trees, to some kind of adult weirdo finding the others in the nerd capital of the world, all came together perfectly. Non-Dual gates like sacred and profane, serious and silly, sad and happy, tradition and modernity, were all flung wide open. Taft’s teaching style melds with this frame very well; at one point he instructed us to break our meditative silence to act and speak like Teletubbies and repeat the phrase ‘I'm an enlightened Buddha!’ in a high-pitched falsetto mantra. Later he repeated the same phrase, but with utmost earnesty; this was felt sincerely by us all, but without the hot air spiritual statements like that can often come with.

My theme for this retreat was ‘Release Into Expansion’

Contrary to how some might see ‘fantasy on the cushion’, touching into images of myself as a deer-lion-deity, an enlightened Teletubby Buddha, or a vast sunset did not distract me. They were more like adding a bucket of melted wax to a campfire. Smooth liquid fuel poured into my bodyheartmind and instantly was alight. Whatever part of me keeps track of time clutched its heart and keeled over with its tongue hanging out the side of its mouth.

It wasn’t all sunshine and orange-robed unicorns though. Myself and many others on retreat touched into, as Taft put it, how far into the deep you can see when the waters at the top are finally still. The Loch Ness monster I found was a sense of brokenness, one I'd been carrying for a long time. It was triggered by ‘trying’ (already a doomed endeavor) to access Jhannas (forms of deep meditative absorption that can start with ecstatic states of bliss and peace) something I found to surprisingly more difficult on retreat than at home. After speaking with Taft I now feel this was because I had adopted the unhelpful frame that to get ‘access concentration’ I had to do something with my mind that was more ‘focused’ than what I was doing by resting as expanded sky spaciousness; but at the time, it just felt like I was broken.

This is an extremely common phenomenon for western meditators; my understanding is that most meditation teachers in the west are dealing with this problem at least as often as any other, almost certainly more. We take instructions too seriously, we try too hard, and we harangue, berate, insult, and despair in ourselves when that doesn't work the way we were told it would by people who didn't know how to love us well enough but tried harder than the ones who failed them.

What happened when I experienced this brokenness in the context of vast spaciousness stabilized over the course of a few days though, was transformative. As Shinzen Young says “a complete experience of boredom is not boring.”- a complete experience of brokenness didn't shatter me, and instead it felt deeply wholesome. Earlier I mentioned trying Tonglen; at this point I tried a new technique Taft had injected into the retreat at what felt like the peak of its intensity; an extremely powerful, potentially disturbing alternative version of Tonglen in which one not only gives away any positive feelings they are experiencing whatsoever on the out-breath, and takes in every ounce of their personal worst suffering imaginable, from everyone they love, and from the whole world, on the in-breath.

With spaciousness, this felt possible; the degree of suffering I felt with this technique while remaining equanimous was more than I’d ever felt sober. It built and built until it felt that I might break, but I didn't, I just expanded into new dimensions of feel-space. It took more than an hour to regulate my nervous system, but I fully regulated in that hour from an experience that in any other context could have taken me days or weeks to integrate. This was deeply encouraging and filled me with faith in the practice.

The stabilization of spacious awareness on retreat is special, and as the retreat began to wrap up I found myself appreciating it more and more, especially in moments it usually tends to falter. Moments like getting out of a chair, the time it takes to open a bathroom door, the moment one is shook from a reverie by someone calling your name, being startled by a loud sound, waiting for cars to stop for you at a crosswalk, or the transition between listening and speaking. As more and more time passes, I find this is an area where retreat is obviously different than daily practice- the degree of open awareness I’ve been able to maintain during these moments has stayed much more consistent.

While spending time with friends, I find myself focused on their face, while also relaxing my gaze and taking in the periphery of my vision along with them. This grounds me and enables a deeper more receptive listening. When waking up, I find myself in the same expansive state I used to relax enough to fall asleep. Little moments like these, building on each other, consecrating this frame shift: that spaciousness is the context in which life is experienced, and not the other way around. The nothingness behind my head welcomes whatever bedazzled ornaments in spaciousness that may arise.

You can’t break the sky.