Ah, I see, if it was just 7 days of actual retreat then this is much more reasonable, I’m glad you clarified. Regarding the post-retreat crash into daily life, the thing that worked on me to help me deal with those crashes was to hear someone say “look, a retreat environment is a very special circumstance, you’ll get to places in your practice that you couldn’t get to with a daily 1 or 2 hours of practice, revelations that you are sure to be permanent will end, and once the retreat ends your practice will fall back down, but it will fall to a better level than pre-retreat. Over the years and the retreats, you’ll eventually get to a place where daily life itself becomes the practice, and then you’ll live your life from a place of grace.”
I can definitely see the immense benefits of a live-in spiritual community, but I think it might also create an artificial divide between “normal life” and the spiritual life. It might make people believe that they require a community to achieve insight, instead of the community merely being very supportive. You can perfectly well do walking meditation while shopping at walmart, and you can do metta while looking at your crazy boss. I remember crying of joy when I realized that queues, traffic jams, being put on hold on the phone, etc. no longer had the power to bother me, all these were simply opportunities for practice. Shinzen Young in particular is really great with this framing of “Life as Practice”, and I think it’s doing marvels to minimize the post-retreat crash, because, in effect, the retreat never ends, it just gets a bit more challenging. There’s also the fact that people have much more free time than they believe, I’ve personally managed a 4h/day practice in normal daily life, it just required some sacrifices. So unless I’m misunderstanding your community, it might be that people are getting the impression that it’s impossible to get awakened without renouncing their whole lives, yet impossible is very different from merely quite hard.
Ah, I see, if it was just 7 days of actual retreat then this is much more reasonable, I’m glad you clarified. Regarding the post-retreat crash into daily life, the thing that worked on me to help me deal with those crashes was to hear someone say “look, a retreat environment is a very special circumstance, you’ll get to places in your practice that you couldn’t get to with a daily 1 or 2 hours of practice, revelations that you are sure to be permanent will end, and once the retreat ends your practice will fall back down, but it will fall to a better level than pre-retreat. Over the years and the retreats, you’ll eventually get to a place where daily life itself becomes the practice, and then you’ll live your life from a place of grace.”
I can definitely see the immense benefits of a live-in spiritual community, but I think it might also create an artificial divide between “normal life” and the spiritual life. It might make people believe that they require a community to achieve insight, instead of the community merely being very supportive. You can perfectly well do walking meditation while shopping at walmart, and you can do metta while looking at your crazy boss. I remember crying of joy when I realized that queues, traffic jams, being put on hold on the phone, etc. no longer had the power to bother me, all these were simply opportunities for practice. Shinzen Young in particular is really great with this framing of “Life as Practice”, and I think it’s doing marvels to minimize the post-retreat crash, because, in effect, the retreat never ends, it just gets a bit more challenging. There’s also the fact that people have much more free time than they believe, I’ve personally managed a 4h/day practice in normal daily life, it just required some sacrifices. So unless I’m misunderstanding your community, it might be that people are getting the impression that it’s impossible to get awakened without renouncing their whole lives, yet impossible is very different from merely quite hard.