Practice note · 20 September 2026
After the retreat: keeping the practice at home
After my first course in 2012 I stopped wandering in the past and the future — that is how I described it then, and it is still the most honest description. But it was not the ten days that kept it. It was the two sittings a day afterwards. Ten days of intensive practice followed by nothing is worth less than twenty minutes a day for a year.
The drop is normal
On retreat the bell decides. At home nothing decides, and work, family and the phone all come back on the same day. I have watched people leave a course radiant and be exactly where they started by the next spring, because they treated the retreat as the practice rather than as the beginning of one.
I lost it myself, after the first course
I am not describing other people. After my own first course I slid: alcohol came back, friends, the ordinary evening, and the sitting quietly disappeared. What brought it back was not inspiration. It was deciding that I would sit whatever state I was in, and then doing that.
The years that changed my practice most were two years without any centre at all — no retreat to lean on, no teacher in the room, just the two sittings and the decision behind them. Practice that only survives inside a retreat is not yet yours.
What breaks is not the technique. It is the decision
At home, the second day of any practice is a negotiation with yourself, and I lost that negotiation often enough to learn what wins it. Not willpower — willpower is what you reach for when the structure has already failed. What wins it is a time fixed in advance, a place that never changes, and a length short enough that you cannot argue with it.
Decide once, not twice a day. Choose the two times before you start, and let the agreement, not the mood, decide the morning.
Ten minutes you complete beats thirty you abandon
The traditional advice after a course is two hours a day. If you can, do it. If you cannot, do not let the ideal stop you from doing anything at all. Length grows on its own as concentration does; ambition that breaks does not recover.
Give up the idea of the good sitting
By day six or seven of a retreat, sittings become deep and you start to expect it. At home, fifteen minutes after a working day is often ordinary, and the mind that remembers the retreat calls the ordinary one a failure. It is not. Every sitting is its own, and chasing the one that appeared once is the most reliable way to stop it returning.
Keep the precepts as hygiene of attention
The five precepts are not morality homework. A mind with something to remember from the day will spend the evening sitting remembering it. The fifth usually decides whether the practice survives: a mind that is regularly clouded does not observe finely.
Write a few lines afterwards
One sensation you noticed clearly, one difficulty, one reminder for next time. It takes a minute, and over weeks patterns appear on paper that were invisible in the moment. It is the closest thing home practice has to a teacher in the room.
A few days lived like a monk
Once the habit holds, choose a few days and live them in your own room the way a retreat would: up before dawn, the two sittings, the last meal early, the phone off. Not as a retreat — to find out how much of the retreat was the building and how much was you.
And the next course
A daily practice is what makes the next retreat deeper, and the next retreat is what renews the daily practice. When a residential course becomes possible, take it: you will arrive with a foundation, and come home knowing what to do with what you found.
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