My name is Sean Hagan and I will be leading the retreat entitled Cultivating the Fruits of Your Contemplative Practice, which begins on May 21st at Bonnevaux.
During the retreat, we’ll explore how the benefits of meditation, equanimity, discernment, and other centeredness can help us in our personal and our professional lives through the management of stress, the cultivation of relationships, and the attainment of a deeper sense of purpose.
So my goal is for the retreat to be a very interactive one. I think it’s important that we create a space of trust that will enable us to share our own personal experiences. I’ll share how my practice helped me, both personally and professionally, during my own professional career. As a disclaimer, though, I certainly cannot claim to have succeeded in consistently applying the benefits of meditation in my own life.
Indeed, I am sometimes disappointed by my setbacks, but I do console myself by recalling that it is a lifelong journey, and in fact, that fact helps me think of life, at least my life, as a process of potential growth rather than of a process of simply getting older.
The central theme of the retreat is distilled by the elegantly concise metaphor of the eighth century Buddhist monk Shantideva. Let me paraphrase a little here. Imagine you look out your window one morning and you find that the earth is covered with thorns, but you need to go outside. So what do you do? You can try to cover the earth with leather, but that is not feasible or, as Shantideva suggests, you can simply wear a pair of sandals.
How do I interpret this metaphor?
So fast forward 13 centuries and another Buddhist monk, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whom you all know, extends this insight in a very important respect. Giving greater priority to our eternal life not only helps us address the day to day challenges that life throws at us, but it can also help us deal with the internal demons that we ourselves generate, the afflicted emotions as he describes them, such as anxiety, fear, anger that can make us feel miserable no matter how beautiful the beaches that we’re lying on.
It can also undermine our ability to make good decisions, to exercise discernment in both our personal and professional lives. So how do we cultivate this inner life? As we will discuss in the retreat ,it is an experiential rather than an intellectual process.
A simple idea, but very difficult to achieve, as you will find out. We close our eyes and we find ourselves assaulted by our thoughts but the idea is to let them come and go without engaging them or rather, without letting them engage us. And as we do so, we experience something both obvious and profound: We are not our thoughts. We are not our emotions. We are something bigger and, well, better. As is explained in the Upanishads, the great Indian text, we experience the self and it is this experience of separation between our self on the one hand, and our thoughts and emotions on the other that can be, using Shantideva’s metaphor, “the sandal that protects us from the thorns”. What do I mean by this?
Well, as we will explore in the seminar, the experience of detachment provides us with the equanimity to manage our reactions to the inevitable ups and downs of life. As we are confronted with events and emotional reactions to them, outside of meditation, we learn to do what we do in meditation. We observe without engaging.
In doing so, our anxieties, our fear, our anger loses its grip on us. These emotions lose their power. And it’s really important to emphasize that this equanimity not only helps us manage stress. During the seminar, we will also explore that it enhances our ability to make wise decisions to exercise discernment in both our personal and professional lives.
Curious to know more?
Sean will be leading a retreat at Bonnevaux this spring titled Cultivating the Fruits of our Contemplative Practice (21 – 24 May) to explore together how a contemplative practice can enable us to experience greater stability, strengthen our relationships and help us become more effective leaders.
