Anticipating the end of retreat comes with the desire for (or fear of) becoming. The challenge is to engage with it with embodied wisdom with the tools we’ve been using.
Puja provides a steady frame for meditation and helps to ward off dullness and stale familiarity in daily practice. Its fresh vitality undermines ingrained behaviours and attitudes.
Through retreat we learn the trigger points where the I Am occurs. We see the potential for a remedy, a liberated citta, by removing the self from the picture and trusting embodied awareness.
Sometimes the heart feels trapped distracted, or passionately involved with experience. This too changes. Training the citta to know itself releases this.
Meeting what is disappointing and frustrating in an unfamiliar way and through contemplating the immediate experience of body and mind, release ownership. This reveals warm heartedness and compassion.
Citta is central to our experience of life and can be experienced separately from the energies and moods it is so involved with. It's a kind of '"awareing" that can be contemplated as sense data lands.
