Everything Is Included: Nine Lessons from a One Month Meditation Retreat
Tenzing Rigdol — Biography of a Thought
When do I get the focus superpowers?
I’m always looking for a competitive edge. It’s how I’m wired. What conditions can I put in place to show up as the best version of myself?
I've put in my time on the meditation cushion for years—ten minutes daily, a full fifteen when I’m feeling extra spicy. This is what peak performance looks like. (There’s always an 80/20, right?)
But my minimum viable superpower continued to elude me. After years of half-measures, it was time to commit—I signed up for a one-month retreat. What would happen if I ramped up from ten minutes to ten hours on the cushion every day for an entire month?
Despite my hesitation, I dove in. If I was going through all the trouble of getting to the bottom of the ocean, I might as well take some time to look around.
I didn’t find the Holy Grail of Focus. Instead, I discovered a new relationship with experience that challenges the entire notion of controlling our attention.
Here are nine lessons that emerged from this month of practice, each a small shift away from control and closer to inclusion.
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air with nothing to hang onto and no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”
Thoughts are not the problem.
I used to believe that meditation was about achieving a clear mind. When my mind wandered, I felt like a failure—each thought was evidence that I didn’t have what it took.
The practice of noting changed everything. When meditating, as soon as I notice a thought, I make a mental note of “thinking” and return to following the out-breath.
This simple instruction has two dramatic implications. First, all thoughts are equal. The brilliant insight about the nature of consciousness? Thinking. The clever comeback I wished I'd said? Thinking. Judgment about the person fidgeting nearby? Thinking. There are no good or bad thoughts, just thoughts.
Second, meditation has nothing to do with replacing bad thoughts with good thoughts or trying to achieve a thought-free state. It’s about developing a healthier relationship with thinking.
The problem is my attachment to thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. My suffering comes from chasing after some thoughts and running from others, treating them all as solid and real.
Trying to stop a thought is an aggressive act, treating my own mind as an enemy. Worse, it’s hopeless. With every thought I push away, another will soon arise to take its place. Instead, by developing a lighter touch with my thoughts, I can work with my mind instead of fighting it.
With greater awareness, everything is heightened.
The mindfulness movement promotes meditation as a means to serenity. Sit for nine minutes daily, and you’ll be calm and peaceful.
The serenity myth is grounded in our desire for control. If I follow through with this practice for long enough, then everything will be okay. This “happily ever after” is spiritual materialism, using practice to maintain a comfortable emotional state rather than facing reality as it is. Meditation does increase access to these states but the goal isn’t to stay there, even if we could.
We can’t choose what to be more aware of. There is no mixing console to raise the levels of “desirable emotions” and lower the levels of the others. Everything is heightened.
Reality has not changed, we’re just no longer dulling or muting our experience. This is both liberating and uncomfortable. Simple experiences become more vivid and beautiful, but our neuroses and anxiety become more obvious and prominent.
I often treat difficult emotions as another thing to “fix” but all emotions contain intelligence. Rejecting an experience also rejects that intelligence. Everything that can be experienced is worth experiencing fully.
There is no break.
The retreat introduced the concept of flopping, a state of complete disengagement. Imagine the way we flop on the couch after a sustained period of focus.
I eagerly anticipated the gong signaling the end of a long meditation session. That sound meant that I had some time off. I could sneak off and zone out, maybe even flop into my bed. But this “necessary and well-deserved downtime” was tainted with the building anticipation of my flopping coming to an end. Back to the grindstone.
I fell into the trap of compartmentalizing life, creating false separations between focus and non-focus, and meditation from non-meditation. I created a false narrative that engagement is “work” and requires effort. Naturally, effort should be avoided if at all possible. Treating activities as tasks is a foolproof way to generate resistance.
We crave stability in a world of movement. But the world stubbornly continues to change. We change.
Our attempts to escape awareness drive our constant seeking of entertainment. But there is no vacation from reality. Closing your eyes doesn’t make it go away. It is impossible to step outside of our experience. There is no resting place we can reach where we can comfortably press pause and relax.
Practice is continuous engagement with whatever arises. There is no separation. Everything is included in the process, even our attempts to take a break.
There is nothing to hold back.
I was introduced to a challenging meditation practice called tonglen. In tonglen, we take in the suffering of others with each in-breath and send out relief with each out-breath.
Tonglen is so hard because it reverses our habitual tendency to hold onto territory. We find ourselves subtly maintaining some safe space or keeping some happiness in reserve, just in case.
Tonglen invites us to take in everything, without hesitation. Instead of holding something in reserve, we give everything away. We discover that there is no inherently existing giver, gift, or recipient. There's nothing solid to hold onto or give away in the first place.
I’m incredibly creative about holding back. You name the technique—playing small, avoiding visibility, comfort-seeking, people-pleasing, being illegible—I’ve mastered it.
Tonglen challenged me to give up my strategies of self-protection that justify self-sabotage. Reserves are my anti-compass. When I notice myself holding back, I know I’m heading down the wrong trail. Instead of turning inward when I encounter fear or discomfort, I open my eyes a little wider, stand up a little straighter, and look out at the world. Hello world.
Everything that is happening is completely normal.
On the tenth day of retreat, I was completely demoralized. My rollercoaster of racing thoughts, physical discomfort, and existential loneliness had reached a low point.
I looked forward to a scheduled catchup with my meditation teacher over the lunch break, where I could take off my brave mask, complain, and blow off steam. My teacher needed to cancel, and in my frustration, I wrote him a lengthy play-by-play detailing my extensive suffering.
The more I fixated on validating my experience, the more my interpretations became my experience. My desire for uniqueness perpetuated a narrative of victimhood.
We didn’t even need to speak. All I needed to do was read what I had sent from his perspective. Gazing at this mirror of human experience, I could only laugh. I felt ridiculous.
From the outside view, it was all so… normal. All of my challenges, emotions, and experiences are completely normal. What feels deeply personal is actually universal.
Disappointment is a teacher.
I had a lot of time to face my disappointments on retreat. This is the blessing and curse of the format—there are no distractions. I endlessly replayed the tapes of past mistakes, punishing myself for not doing better and fantasizing about where I would be if things had played out differently.
I act as if events and people are solid mechanistic entities that behave logically (i.e. the way I want them to!). But reality stubbornly refuses to conform to my expectations.
I know I’m getting somewhere when I finally become fed up with the familiar. It means I’m exhausting all of the ego’s little games. I’ve come to terms with the facts—whatever I’m doing, it’s not working. It’s hopeless. The key is to treat hopelessness like a door opening, an empowering disillusionment.
I stop hoping that relief is around the corner. I give up the fantasy that the next peak experience, valuable connection, can’t-miss program, or lucky break will change everything. The desire for external salvation surrenders our agency and perpetuates a belief that something is missing.
When I embrace disappointment it becomes a valuable messenger, illuminating where I’m holding onto fixed ideas about how the world “should” be. Instead of always wanting things to be different, there is a fundamental okayness with things exactly as they are.
The nature of experience is projection.
There is an independent world out there, but we cannot experience it directly. All perception is a bet: sensory signals are filtered and interpreted according to our personal narratives. Our beliefs, personalities, and judgments are just stories based on selective memory and cultural conditioning. Even our basic assumptions about reality—time, space, consciousness—are opinions that we treat as solid facts.
For years, I’ve obsessively surfaced my numerous cognitive biases and blind spots. Like my brain, continually refining its models in an attempt to minimize prediction error, I faithfully followed the North Star of becoming “less wrong.” What have I learned in this pursuit of perfect rationality? Everything contains rationalization.
The pursuit of better perceptual bets trapped me in the dualistic realm of subject and object. The framework of “me” experiencing “tree” is a conceptual overlay. The tree I’m seeing is inseparable from my act of perceiving it.
It’s tempting to pursue a special state of pure perception, but that horizon is forever receding. I will always interpret and construct my experience. Accepting this as fact brings freedom from struggle. My bias is not an obstacle to overcome but a stepping stone to realization.
It’s all so much bigger than me.
The hardest part of any life transition is transitioning identities. I once took pride in being known as a poker player. Attempting to shed this identity meant grasping at the replacements of teacher, speaker, author, and coach. I feel like a hermit crab trading shells with the expectation that the next shell will finally be my permanent home.
This question of “Who am I now?” conveniently places the ego in control and at the center. It’s all another strategy to stake out territory—I am me and this is mine. Even now I feel myself using writing as another ornament of expertise and achievement—look at me, I’m a meditator!
The desire for territory is the basis for the three poisons of passion, aggression, and ignorance. We grasp at what we want (passion), push away what we don’t (aggression), and ignore everything else. This is the root cause of our suffering.
Ego solidifies these reference points in an ongoing attempt to maintain its existence. Luckily, these reference points are all a construction.
I occasionally catch glimpses of the vastness of open space while meditating. I instinctively flinch and retreat within but not before touching a world unfathomably beyond any notion of the sublime. “Me” and “Mine” become trivially insignificant by comparison. The ego shrinks to a pinpoint. There are no limitations and infinite space for expansion.
Interruptions are a gift.
If there is one thing all productivity enthusiasts can agree upon, it's that deep work is good, and interruptions are bad. If only we could go through life without taking off our noise-canceling headphones, imagine what we’d get done!
The duality of “focused time” and “distracted time” creates a disempowering narrative: “I’d be making more progress, if not for this distraction.” When interruptions become an enemy, we build walls around ourselves to keep the world out. We spend most of our lives asleep, lost in thought, immersed in a constant stream of mental commentary, and responding to situations with preprogrammed reactions.
What if interruptions are an invitation to wake up?
When interrupted, I experience a rapid flash of emotion: irritation “not now,” frustration “not again,” and blame “you should know better.” I’m caught in the act of indulging my storyline. My patterns are on full display: reestablish control, reabsorb into my “important” activities, retreat into comfort.
With an interruption, there is a natural gap in the stream of habitual thoughts and reactions. Instead of seeing this gap as an unwelcome disruption, I’m consciously grateful for a brief glimpse of wakefulness, an opportunity to step outside of my cocoon of preoccupation. With my plans disrupted, I’m forced to deal with what is actually happening at this moment.
Every interruption is a teaching moment, revealing something about my mind, my attachments, or my resistance to reality. From this perspective, interruptions are valuable allies, reminding me not to get too comfortable in my habitual ways of being.
Everything is included.
There are no perfect entry points to meditation. My misguided quest for ultimate focus created an opening for deeper wisdom.
A profound softening occurs when we stop fighting with our experience, instead letting it show us the way. Every disappointment contains a lesson, every hesitation gives a direction, and every interruption points toward clarity.
Life isn’t about reaching some mythical destination where everything unfolds according to plan. It’s about cultivating the patience and persistence to be with whatever arises.
Everything belongs. Everything teaches. It’s all path.
Retreat Details
The Three Yanas Retreat was led by senior teachers in the tradition of Chogyam Trungpa with initiations by Judy Lief and Pema Chödrön. Alternating weeks of practice and study, the program progressed through the three yanas (vehicles) of Tibetan Buddhism: Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Practice weeks were conducted in silence while study weeks featured readings, talks, and discussion groups. Highly recommended.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Ken Friedman for his patient teaching and ongoing encouragement to “stick with it.” This article is a direct byproduct of our conversations.
Disclaimer
These lessons are provisional. Philosophical interpretations are limited by my current level of understanding. All errors are my own.
I’m Chris Sparks, an executive performance coach advising executives and investors on how to achieve elite performance.
Thanks for reading! If this resonated with you, please share with a friend on the path.
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