If you do retreat, your full concentration goes to your own practice and meditation without any breaks, and you are away from the environment. In one way, it is like having a part-time job or full-time job. Another thing is that you can be fully dedicated. Therefore, daily practice is when you are doing a little bit everyday. It is slow, with a lot of interruptions and different environments around you. In the beginning, you cannot transform all of this into your practice — it is quite difficult. You will fail and practice, and then fail again. But, there is nothing wrong with this way — it is OK. At the beginning, to do very long retreats is not something that we normally recommend. First, you do daily practice. This is very important.
Meditation is like doing physical exercise. Even if you can exercise full-time, you cannot exercise the whole day. Therefore, at first, daily formal meditation is very important. Maybe you can do a mini-retreat. It becomes a very manageable way to do retreat. This is for formal meditation.
Once your formal meditation becomes quite good, you can sometimes do retreat. At first, you can do retreat for two or three days, then you can extend it to one week, and slowly you can begin to do longer ones — this way would be beneficial, it would be good.
If you really spend time with the process, developing a habit, and you understand what retreat is, and you have this feeling of wanting to practice, then retreat is really of benefit. But, nowadays many people do retreat, but they do it suddenly, or they do not know exactly what they have to practice, so even though they do retreat, their minds wander all over the world. So, the time is gone, your body is in the retreat house but your mind wanders around the world. That kind of retreat is not of so much benefit. People did retreat for many, many years, but they did not change or transform. It is like you stay in the gym the whole day but you are not doing any exercise. You are just sleeping at the gym the whole day. Even if you spend six months there, it will not be of so much benefit. If it is that kind of retreat, then just doing one hour of full dedication to one’s meditation, is of more benefit than doing a few months of retreat. Therefore, the quality of retreat is really important. If you have a good quality retreat, then it is really of more benefit than just doing daily practice.
Normally, our daily practice is like a fire that starts a little bit, but then some interruption comes — it can be the wind, or having a block of wood that is too big so the fire cannot burn it, and sometimes the fire goes out, and then it starts again, a little bit. Doing it this way takes time. Daily practice is like that. But, this is important in the beginning. You learn from it. You fail, but you learn from it. Next time, you know how to start a fire better. So, you start it again, and again it goes out, but you learn more and more each time. Normally, this is what we call, “Failure is the mother of success.” But, if you do retreat, then the fire starts, and it burns while having the right protection, and it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. Once the fire becomes bigger, having wind is OK, adding big blocks of wood is OK, or even if stones or different things fall in, it is OK. After that, what becomes important is informal meditation.
Some people, after they have finished their retreat, they come down and they mix meditation with their daily life, they mix meditation with problems, they mix meditation with different circumstances, and they go to meditate with difficult persons — the object is there. When they meditate with rough and challenging circumstances, with their problems, then everything becomes part of their practice.
Normally, we need two things: formal meditation, and informal meditation. These two need a bond between each other. If you just do daily meditation — both formal and informal — you still have this quality. It does not mean that if you do not do retreat for a long time, you will not get any experience — it is not like that. You will, but the experience is similar to the part-time job experience. If you continue to do good quality and unbroken continuous retreat, then it is really beneficial to you.
I really like to do retreat. All my teachers have done a lot of retreats. It has been of real benefit to me. In the future, once you do retreat, after some time you will bring your retreat experience into daily life. Then, in the end, everything becomes part of retreat, because there will be no obstacles. Even bad situations, even bad environments, everything will transform. Therefore, doing retreat is like making a fire — it is just the same.