learn · 2026-09-21 · 5 min read
Why a retreat goes deeper than practice in the city
The hardest retreat I've sat began badly. In June 2024 I was supposed to be volunteering at a Pa-Auk monastery in Korea; that plan fell apart at the airport, and a few days later I arrived instead at the Pa-Auk centre at Angthong, about a hundred kilometres from Bangkok: exhausted, with a cold, and poisoned by a mushroom soup, into thirty-five degrees of heat, to sign up for fifteen days of silence. For the first days I did nothing but recover; I walked about like a dead man, and twice someone came to my room with a Covid test. The mosquitoes took the nights. On the sixth day I seriously thought about leaving.
I stayed thirteen days, and it went deeper than a month of good sittings at home would have. I've tried to understand why, because it wasn't the place. The place was, frankly, against me. It was three things any retreat does, and none of them is mysterious.
The empty evening
On that course we ate twice: at seven and at eleven. Nothing after. By the evening sitting the stomach is empty (no fermentation, nothing being processed), the metabolism slows, and the body relaxes in a way it rarely does at home. That's the physical half.
The other half is that nothing new comes in. No messages, no news, no film, no conversation. I wrote it down in my notebook afterwards in plain words: because no content is consumed, no new emotions arise, and because no new emotions arise, the mind becomes calmer still. On a normal day we feed the mind all evening and then sit down and wonder why it's loud.
I once put the food side of this more bluntly, about the retreats in general: the kitchen gives you as much as you like, and the moment you eat too much, the meditation is no meditation, and you see the cause and effect right in front of you. At home the same cause and effect exists. You just never get to see it cleanly, because the evening is exactly when both the food and the content arrive.
On a retreat every hour is spoken for. The bell decides when you wake, sit, eat, walk and sleep. Some days it feels like a prison: something changes every day, and still there's no way out, and you catch yourself asking where freedom of choice went.
But that's the mechanism, not a side effect. A mind that doesn't have to decide anything stops spending itself on deciding, and what it spends itself on instead is the same film, which I've watched on retreat after retreat. They're all alike in this. First it goes into the past: family, friends, old scenes, a kind of nostalgia. Then it builds plans. And then, one day, it arrives at the plain fact: and I too will be gone? Everyone, every relationship, every event is temporary. That's where compassion starts, for yourself and for everyone else, and after it the thoughts thin out; the ones that still come are given much less weight. The film needs unbroken days to run. At home it's interrupted every evening and has to start again every morning.
On a ten-day Goenka course, from the fourth day, three sittings a day are sittings of strong determination: an hour in which you don't open the hands, the legs or the eyes. It's the most dreaded instruction on the course and the one that does the most.
In Part 3 of my own home course, Vipassanā (Sīla + Samādhi + Paññā), I go further. Its thirty-five days move from the breath to the surface of the body and then inside it, and on the first day the scan goes inside, the sittings are two hours long, without moving and without uncrossing the legs, because only that way is the barrier between the outer and the inner crossed, and only then do you begin to feel the inside of the body. Pain comes first; it's met with patience and will, not with shifting. And the length is a measurement as much as a practice: when a person can sit two, three, four hours without a break, it means the body has become cleaner and the mind steady and unshakable, and the body fresh rather than tired. You can't arrive at that in fifteen-minute pieces. A retreat gives you the hours to reach it.
After that retreat I went to the Kullu valley in the Himalaya and set up a retreat of my own for two months. Up at three, two hours of sitting, the hot springs, fruit on the balcony at sunrise, the last food by early afternoon, two hours of sitting again at dusk. Some days I spent in complete darkness and silence. For a month the depth held, easily: I slept well, the ideas came, the discipline cost nothing.
Then I started training again (running, pull-ups, yoga) and found something I now see every time I come back from a retreat: more energy, less depth. After physical activity the body's structure changes, and when I sat down the path I had been following inside was, somehow, blunted. The work went through the body to the mind instead of directly to the mind. Neither is wrong; they're different speeds. A retreat is for relaxing all the way in; ordinary life is for movement, work and people; the mistake is to fall into either extreme: too much relaxation, or too much tension.
So my advice depends on who's asking. For someone who's practised for years: take five or ten days alone, with no physical training, and sit four to six hours a day. Only then does the path become visible, and seeing it is what gives you the will to go on. For a beginner, the opposite: meditation together with yoga, which in my experience clears the body faster and makes the first weeks (the numb legs, the restlessness) far easier.
What comes home
Not the silence and not the compression; those need a gate. But more than people expect:
- An early last meal: eat for the last time three or four hours before the evening sitting, and notice the difference in the sitting, not on the scale.
- An evening without content: one evening a week, nothing new in: no screen after dark. Sit, and see how much quieter the mind is when it hasn't been fed.
- A day that decides for you: fixed times, written the night before: the part of a retreat that costs nothing to bring home (why half past four).
- One long sitting: once a week, a single sitting you don't move in. Start at an hour. The two hours will come when the body and the mind are ready for them, not before.
None of it replaces a retreat. It's what lets you arrive at the next one with something to go deep from, and it's the foundation the home course is built on (retreat and home, honestly).
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