So, was at my first meditation retreat last week, and it was quite good! 1/n
This was a small cozy retreat of about 20 people in Hämeenlinna (Finland), led by Tucker Peck ( meditatewithtucker.com/about/ ). Five days of mostly sitting and walking meditation, though you were largely free to deviate from the schedule and e.g. take a nap if you so desired.
If you've got a chance to do a retreat with Tucker, I recommend it. He's warm, relaxed, non-dogmatic, pragmatic, and knowledgeable about meditation matters. Some choice quotes (paraphrased from memory and shortened to fit tweets):
"People have been asking me what kind of meditation technique they should practice. My answer is mostly, well, what do you want to accomplish?"
"There’s no way to tell enlightenment and delusion apart from the inside, so you should have friends who think that Buddhism is stupid. They are willing to listen to you talk about it, but if you say that you've become enlightened, they'll tell you how you're full of shit."
There were a few guided meditations, but otherwise it was pretty freeform: just meditate according to whatever system you want. Of the guided ones, I particularly liked the equanimity variant of metta, which I hadn't encountered before.
Wishing people happiness, while also accepting that not everyone will ever be happy and that's horribly unfair, but you can still try to make a difference even if you can't help everyone.
A phrase that stuck to my mind: "It's not my universe." I would prefer everyone to be happy, but I did not create the world nor choose what it is like. Simultaneously accepting that fixing the world is impossible, and then trying to fix it anyway.
I didn't have any particular plan of how to meditate when going in, so ended up doing lots of different things: see-feel-hear-noting, Internal Family Systems, metta, equanimity metta, mindful glimpses, concentrating on the breath, do-nothing meditation...
I had heard lots of stories about people having big breakthroughs on retreats, so goal-oriented parts of my mind were really focused on needing to get a big breakthrough! Which wasn't helpful for letting go. "I'm doing do-nothing meditation but I'm not doing nothing right."
Also had some conventional concerns about my life in my head that were hard to let go of for the first few days, so a large part of the time I wasn't feeling particularly "meditative", mostly like I was a in a normal state of mind. BUT... in retrospect, this may have been good.
Tucker talked about why retreats are useful. One of the reasons was, there's often a basic discomfort in you that keeps grabbing onto things in the external world. You're sitting and want to change position, wait for the meditation to end so that you can do X, etc.
Rationalists call this the Mind Projection Fallacy ( lesswrong.com/posts/ZTRiSNme… ); attributing things about your mind to the external world.
You know the thing when you go to the store hungry and then buy lots of things? You might think that the foods were now unusually intrinsically desirable. But rather _you_ were hungry, and that hunger within you grabbed onto the things that it found in the store.
Now with hunger you can eat, and then you get satiated. But there's also a more general craving that just keeps grabbing onto new things one after another, while pretending to be about the external world.
And one of the advantages of a retreat is that your brain is forced to notice. You get bored in meditation so you wait for it to end; you get an itch so you want to scratch it; you feel like you should go to the bathroom for the millionth time... and always remain unsatisfied.
In ordinary life, the things that the craving crabs onto can be sufficiently engrossing that you don't realize what's happening. But at a retreat, with nothing else to do than to sit with that discomfort, you realize that none of the attempts to make it go away stop it.
So going to the retreat in a pretty goal-directed state of mind, and largely failing to meditate much, was good. The desire to have a meditative breakthrough was another kind of discomfort with my basic state.
Being with that discomfort long enough and noticing that it was okay... seems to, for now at least, have caused an improvement in my general ability to be with discomfort, that I notice now that I'm back to real life.
As in: there are some sensations in my mind that I have previously found uncomfortable, and been trying to avoid. Now they just... are there, and do not compel action. Taking some effort to figure out my source of motivation, again.
This kind of a thing, where I no longer need to feel a particular sensation and then I need to figure out a new motivation, has happened to me before. E.g. when I fixed some of my self-concepts. ( kajsotala.fi/2017/07/how-i-… ) But this is somewhat different.
Previously, I had felt the need to flee some sensations, and then those sensations stopped showing up entirely. Whereas now, the sensations are still there, I'm just okay with them hanging around.
It's a weird feeling, since my mind keeps noticing them and predicting that I will make a mental move to try to avoid them, and then I simply... don't.
I've been using classical Buddhist language of craving and aversion so far, so let me translate that into a slightly different framework. I have been thinking in terms of goal-oriented parts of the mind recently ( ).
I think of these as just subprocesses which notice that you are in some state, and then try to get you into another. E.g. a process which notices that you are feeling sad, and then sets a goal of feeling happy instead. Notices that you are hungry, and starts looking for food.
(I'm going to call these goal-oriented processes, GOPs, to save on Tweet space)
Most of these GOPs are learned, when your brain notices that some state is better than another. You're a baby and feel bad and don't know why, your parents feed you, you feel better -> a GOP is created to detect the sensations of hunger, and then seek food.
Or, you cry as a child and are discouraged from doing so: a GOP is created to detect when you are crying and try to make you happy instead.
These processes can and do get stacked on top of another. One GOP makes you say "yes" to all requests because declining has had bad consequences; then you burn out and another GOP makes you avoid situations where people might ask things of you. lesswrong.com/posts/oJwJzeZ6…
So now, you have these specific sensations in your consciousness. For whatever reason, your brain has learned that these sensations are bad. Meaning, there is a GOP which has the goal of "make those sensations go away".
So you sit in meditation and are aware of them -> the GOP sets the goal of getting to the end of the sit. Then they are still there -> the GOP distracts you with the thought of going to the bathroom, or getting food, or getting compulsively stuck on some thought...
Or, your brain has formed the idea that getting a huge meditative breakthrough would make that discomfort go away, so a GOP is really focused on needing to get such a breakthrough ASAP now that you're finally on a retreat.
But you're on a retreat and can't find anything that would actually be distracting enough to make the sensations go away, so the GOP keeps creating desires to achieve a particular goal, but none of them actually achieves the underlying thing that it is optimizing for.
And since the brain is a learning engine, it notices two things:
1. This isn't working, this GOP is just creating more discomfort.
2. We've been with these sensations for five days now and are still pretty much okay, so maybe they aren't that bad in the first place.
1. This isn't working, this GOP is just creating more discomfort.
2. We've been with these sensations for five days now and are still pretty much okay, so maybe they aren't that bad in the first place.
So then it might end up just eliminating that particular GOP, and then you are okay with those sensations. And that seems to have happened.
I was also trying to do concentration meditation on the retreat, but trying it too hard. I think this has been my problem with concentration meditation for the last few years. I'd had good results with it, so GOPs showed up that really wanted me to succeed at it.
Unfortunately, concentration meditation requires paying attention to what's actually happening in your mind, and if you are too focused on the goal state, you might miss what else is happening.
Tucker noted that this is a typical problem with The Mind Illuminated, the system for concentration meditation that I was using. It's pretty goal-oriented, so attracts strongly goal-oriented people, who then fail to make progress to the final stages. ( reddit.com/r/TheMindIllum… ) 
After the retreat, concentration meditation has felt easier too. In fact, getting off the retreat seems to have relaxed some GOPs more: oh, no need to make the best use of the time on the retreat and have a big breakthrough anymore... so now meditation is easier. Brains, man.
I'm making this sound like I got no real meditation done on the retreat. Actually, there were some pretty significant-feeling things.
One was Internal Family Systems meditation, where I worked on a mundane issue. I kept repeatedly asking myself, "what do I expect to happen if I do X, how do I expect to feel if I do Y"... and at some point noticed that there was something off about the answers.
I kept getting an answer like "maybe if I do [particular unpleasant thing], I will be totally fine with it". I had made that prediction many times before, ended up doing [the unpleasant thing], and almost always feeling not-fine-with-it-at-all.
Yet my brain kept saying "high confidence prediction: I will feel totally fine". At this point I figured out that something was giving me biased answers, so I dug up the GOP that was doing it, had a talk with it, and then the predictions changed.
It felt like this was some kind of a "please authority so that you will be safe" kind of GOP, specifically with associations of my mom/teachers being "safe havens" from bullies and dangerous kids.
And if someone felt like an authority in some sense (even if they had no real power over me), the GOP would cook the books to make sure that predictions of "will I feel comfortable doing what this person asks" would return a "yeah, totally, no problem".
Afterwards there was a bunch of emotional work triggered by that change, and it seemed to definitely be helpful.
Another was that, a particular kind of distracting thought that has often come to me in meditation, are specific kinds of very engrossing and rather unpleasant fantasy scenarios of a sexual nature.
Previously I had been trying to ignore them, since they were just too distracting. Failing that, stop meditating once it had become obvious that I was just stuck in those scenarios without getting any meditation done.
But ignoring them didn't work, and as for stopping meditation, well, there again wasn't really anything else to do rather than meditate. So this time I just sat with them, and let my mind engage in them.
And then I noticed that my mind began developing them, one element at a time. After that element had been developed, it moved on to work on a different aspect of the fantasy, and lost interest in the previous one. So I just let it do that.
So then my mind worked through this extended chain of elaborate and very disturbing scenarios, each time seeming to lose interest in the previous step of the chain, until it finally reached the last step and then just... gave up on the topic and didn't generate more fantasies.
And afterwards I haven't been bothered by them again. So uhh dunno what was up with that, but I guess it got resolved.
Anyway, good retreat, would recommend! Would have been nice if it was slightly longer, but I can live with my GOPs setting the goal of going on longer retreats. I expect to indulge their craving for that particular goal soon enough.
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