Tag Archives: enlightenment

Why Three Years?

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March 2008

Just before retreat started, a friend asked me why I wanted to do a three-year retreat. I didn’t give her a very good answer, because I hadn’t really thought about how to explain it. Most people don’t ask the question, though it must be in everyone’s mind: how can you give up friends, family, restaurants, hiking, driving, concerts and movies, email, the internet, teaching Latin, cell phones, the New Hampshire seacoast, etc. to sit in a room by yourself for THREE YEARS! A week, or maybe even a month…maybe…but THREE YEARS!

For me, there are five basic reasons.

First, in the spiritual tradition I’ve been part of for the past 27 years, the Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, three-year retreat is hands-down the best way to acquire all the basic tools you need to attain complete enlightenment, a.k.a. awakening, a.k.a. seeing everything the way it really is, with no confusion or errors. That sort of realization also enables you to help other people without accidentally making things worse, which is one of the pitfalls of trying to help others when you are confused yourself. It is what the Buddha discovered 2,600 years ago when he set his mind to end suffering for all beings, no matter what it took.

Second, even if I don’t attain enlightenment this time around—and I admit that may be asking a lot—the Buddhist path has many, many tools to help us develop emotional equanimity and tame our minds so we are not at the mercy of every little thing that happens to us. I’d like to not even bat an eyelash the next time someone starts yelling at me or I realize I forgot to buy the chocolate chips. There are a lot of studies now that suggest meditation makes people not only more focused, but also happier. If you want to explore this option outside retreat, a good place to start is any of Pema Chödron’s books, or my current favorite, The Joy of Living by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

Third, and you can stop reading now if you don’t want to think about this, one of the things Buddhism does best is to help us prepare for that inevitable moment of death we are all going to face whether we think about it or not. We learn in Buddhism that the moment of death and what happens after it are crucially important opportunities, and a lot of our practice is specifically designed to enable us to take advantage of them and help others do the same. That may sound far-fetched in a culture where old age is invisible and corpses wear lipstick; but…what if it’s true? (Look up “Pascal’s wager” for seventeenth-century Christian advice on a similar topic.)

Which brings me to reason number four: Why am I so sure three-year retreat can deliver on these goals? Because I have the example of my teacher, Lama Norlha Rinpoche, and other realized teachers I have met, who have traveled exactly this same path before me. You have only to be in a room with one of them for five minutes, maybe less, to know they are operating on some level of clarity, competence, and compassion that we can’t even imagine. I can’t hope to achieve that in three years or even this lifetime, but I do hope to get the process underway.

September 2007, 4:00 a.m.

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At the end of this month, I will move to Palpung Thubten Choling Monastery in New York to enter the traditional Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist three-year, three-month seminary retreat, which will begin around the end of the year. I’ve been planning for this moment for more than twenty years, and it’s exactly what I want to do.

But right now (the very hour when I will start the first meditation session of each day in retreat), I am lying awake immersed in the grief of leaving family and friends. I won’t see my daughter or my best friend for more than three years; I am unlikely to see my father or my dog again in this life.

As I have slowly prepared for retreat over the past two years, I have often felt that the process is like preparing to die. If we know we are going to die, then we feel deep grief at the realization that we must leave behind our family, friends, pets and most treasured possessions. Unless we are completely grounded in our practice, we become more and more agitated at these impending losses as the moment of death inexorably approaches.

In preparing to enter a life of seclusion for three years, I too am leaving everything (almost) behind, but in this case, it is my choice; I have some control over the timing; and with any luck, I will re-emerge in early 2011 and be reunited with most, if not all, of my loved ones.

As a remedy for my sadness, I try to follow the instructions for basic calm abiding meditation: I can focus my attention on my breathing or just on empty space, without trying to manipulate the feeling, and allow it to subside in its own time. Or I can use the feeling itself as the focus for meditation, letting my attention rest in its weight and texture, and witnessing, if I am very attentive, the process of its disappearance. Strong emotions can be overwhelming in the moment, but one thing you learn from regular meditation is that all thoughts and feelings are fleeting—even the ones that seem to linger for months. (It’s like snow; you can break your back shoveling it in January, or you can just wait for April. OK, maybe you have to shovel the driveway to get to work…but it’s still a fact that if you don’t bother, it’s going to melt anyway.)

I also bring to mind the instructions of the great nineteenth-century Kagyu teacher, Jamgon Kongtrul, in The Lamp of the Definitive Meaning, in the chapter on the inevitability of suffering in life as we know it: “Sever the root of entanglement! Demolish the foundation of desire! Reflect extensively on the advantages of liberation…and apply yourself diligently to the methods for attaining enlightenment. You must do this!”

Ultimately, there is nothing to be gained by clinging to what we are attached to in this life. If not now, we are bound to lose it later, and the Buddha taught that our suffering at that time will be exactly proportional to our attachment. On top of that, we will continue to go around and around and around lifetime after lifetime, experiencing this same grief again and again, until we do something to halt the entire process. Lama Norlha Rinpoche recently used the following analogy in a teaching: After we do our laundry, we are so happy to have clean clothes, but then they get dirty and we have to wash them again…and again…and again. Similarly, we cycle endlessly through lifetimes of suffering, being born and suffering and dying again and again; but once we recognize the nature of our mind and attain freedom, as he put it, “the laundry is finished forever.”

And it’s not just my laundry. The Buddha taught that when you attain freedom for yourself, you can see clearly how to help others get out of the cycle as well. So, even though I will miss my family and friends for the next three years, this is something I need to do for them, too.