A few days ago I came out of a 6-week solitary cabin retreat at @MonasticAcademy. Here are some haphazard reflections from my experience.

Some background: I've been connected with MA for ~4 years, have considered Soryu "my teacher" for ~2, and have been living here for 4 months.

"Meditate with your body, not with your mind" is one of the most useful and actionable pieces of advice I have received - once I actually chose to put it into action.

I've known it for years. But I finally decided to DO it. And suddenly everything became easier.

Using the mind to meditate is difficult and frustrating. Using the body to meditate is straightforward, even though it often feels like it's "not working".

Over time, the experience of the body just... becomes louder, and the mind naturally becomes quieter.

Which isn't to say that it became _quiet_. At a certain point you DO need to "meditate with your mind" - but by then you are so much more aware of bodily sensations that it becomes infinitely easier to turn towards them and away from thought-sensations.

The thing that sucks about meditating to attain "deeper states" is that you do 90% of the work and see very little result. Interestingly, this is what kept me going.

It's not working. I suck at this. But okay, I'm in the 90%. I can't expect to see results yet. Just keep going.

I had the privilege of working with an experienced teacher with whom I got to have interviews every day. I imagine "just keep going even if it feels like it's not working" would be much more dangerous if training alone. I could trust him to steer the ship, so I didn't have to.

And then at some point, magically, things start to shift.

It's not *actually* 90%/10%, and it's not linear, and it doesn't happen at once - but I can't emphasize enough how wild the shift is from "nothing is happening" to "holy shit, all those weird words people use are true"

A small example:

A few months ago, my teacher said "when you're aligning your posture, are you using your muscles or your breath?"

I said my muscles.

"You should use your breath."

What in the fuck does that even mean?

And then weeks later, as I'm maturing my breath practice, I suddenly feel this *completely tangible* ball of *something* shoot from my stomach up my torso and whip my body into alignment.

...Oh. He wasn't just being weird and cryptic. He was talking about a real experience.

I don't know what the materialist explanation is for that experience (I imagine there is one), but it became completely clear that it makes perfect sense, experientially, to describe it as the breath doing the aligning - I sure as fuck had no conscious hand in it in that moment.

This proved true over and over. I would have an experience, try to find the right words for the experience, and then realize that they're the same words I've been hearing for years -- I just had a completely different expectation of what they meant.

Soryu tells us, over and over, that you can't just hear about an experience, imagine what it might be like, and then try to construct it based on that imagining. It won't work. You have to discover it for yourself. You can glance at the map, but the map isn't the important thing.

Over time, I grew to be able to feel "energy" in my body - whatever the fuck that means. I don't think it's something particularly mystical - it seems to mainly be a result of increased awareness and decreased activation; an attunement to subtle moment-to-moment changes.

(It's probably more than that, but that seems like a reasonable interpretation for the moment)

It's incredibly fun to have this skill, and incredibly frustrating to build it.

I spent days just... trying to feel my legs. I don't know how to explain it better than that. I know that I have legs. I know I can use them. They have physical sensations. And yet they felt like a black box in my awareness.

I would sit and try to put all my awareness in my legs. I would walk and try to put all my awareness in my legs. Over time, I grew to be able to feel like my legs are actually a connected part of my body. I could feel sensations changing in them as I breathed.

As people grow to have more experience in "deeper" meditative states (I'm putting scare quotes because this is all still quite shallow compared to what's possible) there's a common report of feeling an "external energy" moving the body as you move through the world.

Starting to feel this was REALLY fun.

As far as I can tell, this is a result of bringing conscious awareness to unconscious movement, _without_ making the movement become conscious.

Like when you walk to a door and naturally move your hand to the doorknob - if you bring awareness to this as it happens, it feels like some sort of external force is moving your hand.

When I was walking, it felt like there was something pushing me forward from my tailbone.

There's a lightness and ease to it. It's a feeling like, I don't have to do anything, this energy is moving the body where it needs to be. I'm just along for the ride.

Okay, but back to sitting practice.

In my time on the cushion, my hope was to get to 1st Jhana. This is a (relatively, again) deep absorptive state characterized by feelings of wonder, pleasure, focus, and joy.

There are reasons for this goal which I won't get into right now

The pleasure part is one of the two most mind-blowing experiences I've had in the past 6 weeks.

I have literally never, in my life, experienced that much pleasure in my body - not from sex, not from intoxication, not from any sort of food or physical sensation.

I went from "I can't feel my legs" to "my legs can't hold this much sensation". My body would tighten up and brace against it because it was too intense. My teacher kept telling me to not fight it, but I didn't know how.

With time, I learned how to control the sensation with my breathing, and learned how to keep it at the level just before my body would start bracing against it. I played with the intensity of it, moving it to various parts of my body, trying to gently massage it into every inch.

This was towards the end of my retreat - the final week of the 6 weeks.

But I want to rewind for a moment to the second week.

On day 9, after a particularly intense and beautiful exhortation from Soryu, there was a significant shift in my practice for about an hour.

I somehow conjured up the willpower, zeal, determination, to immediately tamp down thoughts as they came up.

I would hear a chirping sound, feel the beginning of a thought: "bird", and immediately the thought would be gone and I would be in a state of exhilarated confusion.

I would look at the wall. I knew it was a wall. But also I didn't. The moment the knowing arose, it was pushed away.

I heard a ringing sound. My chest filled with intense tingly energy which spread out and moved through my fingertips.

"bell", I thought, then didn't.

I went into my interview immediately after this experience. I'm not totally sure what happened in the interview. Soryu said some things. I stared like a deer in headlights. He asked a question. I think I shook my head. I left at some point.

I spoke to him about it the next day. Said that I felt like I was dipping my toe into something. He said that I was. Asked if I had any questions. I said no.

I couldn't find the experience again, no matter how hard I tried.

One day, weeks later, I walked into the interview room frustrated and said "I don't know how to cultivate the vigilance to get myself to the state that I was in that time weeks ago when I was able to tamp down thoughts as they came up. I'm lazy on a moment-to-moment level."

He said: what you did through force, you have to do through relinquishment. Fighting against thoughts is still a reaction to the thoughts. You have to learn to let them go.

When someone is coming at you, you can push back against them. But even better is to just not be there.

But I didn’t know how to practice relinquishment, so I did what I knew to do - played with the energy in my body, attuned to moment-to-moment changes, purified hindrances as I noticed them.

"hindrances" is a Buddhist term which I don't have the patience to get into right now

I learned this strange trick of “outrunning” hindrances when I couldn’t make them disappear. Brace yourself, this is going to be a weird explanation. It’s the best words I can find for it, but I’m pretty sure it makes no sense if you haven’t experienced something like it.

It was the last day of retreat, and I was enjoying being attuned to my breath and the effect it was having on my body. I was having fun moving energy around and feeling it ebb and flow. But despite the fun, there was some sort of aversion, a feeling of "I'm tired of doing this"

I tried to investigate, to figure out what part of the experience was unpleasant, but I came up empty. I chalked it up to laziness.

Then I remembered something Soryu had said about every arising moment being unconstructed, and every previous moment ending.

So then I tried to... in every new moment, find the place in it that the aversion hadn't yet gotten to. I would step into that, and then the aversion would follow, but by the time it caught up I was already stepping into the next moment.

I know, I know. It's the best I can do.

It was a futile chase where I never quite outran the aversion, and it never quite caught up. It was exhausting, but intensely satisfying.

Later that day, with just a few hours left before my final interview, I gave up on the possibility of getting to that space of no-thoughts again, or of entering Jhana. If I hadn't managed to do it in 6 weeks, what's the likelihood that I'd do it in the next few hours?

But I continued to meditate, because what the hell else am I gonna do with that time? I'm not gonna sit there and daydream - that would be immensely disrespectful to my teacher and to the opportunity I have been given in doing this solo retreat while the community cares for me.

So I played with the pleasure-energy in my body. Let it fill every part that it could. Breathed with it. Noticed the aversion come back.

And then it hit me - the only part of this experience that isn't in congruence is the fact that I'm still thinking about unrelated things.

And then - I don't know how it happened, but I just... dropped it. I dropped the thinking. And within a minute, I was back in that state again where everything was wondrous and confusing and exhilarating.

There was an immense feeling of relaxation, like finally releasing a muscle you didn't know had been tense for years. The aversion was nowhere to be found.

"Oh wow," I thought
"This is what he meant by Pure Wonder," I thought
"I could do this forever," I thought

Then let it go

Between the pleasure-energy in my body, the sound of the birds, and the amazingness of the trees in front of me, there was very little room for anything else. Everything was wondrous and exhilarating.

The trees - it's not that I *didn't* know that they were trees, but also, they weren't trees. They were a beautiful vibrant green mesh with light spilling through it, one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It shimmered and flickered and vibrated with me.

The pleasure-energy in my body began to build more, and I noticed my muscles start to tense against it. I tried to soothe it down with my breathing, but I wasn't skilled enough, and after about ten minutes I came out of that state.

For the next hour, I stayed a step or two away, occasionally stepping into it again, but never quite to the same extent.

I can see how very early-stage this experience is. It's like a newborn baby, or a fetus, of a full jhanic experience, and I'm holding it with humility.

But it was absolutely wondrous, and I feel glad and proud to have put in the work to get there.

"Wonder is real," I said to Soryu that evening.

"You look happy," he said.