2024-25 Punta Ballena retreat

Beth and I did a thirty day meditation retreat at our house in Punta Ballena over the Christmas and new year period from 2024-2025. This article is a write-up of the main learnings I had during my practices.

Our meditation alter for the retreat

Opening the heart chakra

The heart chakra (Anahata) is a crucial focal point for both daily life and meditative practices, precisely because it serves as the bridge that connects the grounding of the lower chakras with the transcendence of the upper chakras. Its dual role integrates physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, making it central to holistic well-being and spiritual growth.

The main learning for this retreat was that opening the heart chakra is essential to the effortless stabilisation of the eyes resting in the third-eye position (anja chakra) for long periods of time.

In the 2020 retreat I had realised that the resting of the eyes in the third-eye position was key to the continuous non-identification with thoughts. Actually just the long term stillness of the eyes is sufficient for this, but locked into the third-eye position also has the benefit of being particularly beneficial to higher connection and insight.

Keeping the eyes locked in position is extremely tiring and there is only so much will power available to do this, so it cannot be sustained for long meditations. In a retreat setting, this depleting of the will consumes ones energy and the quality of the meditation inevitably degrades as the days go by.

Many teachings say that we need to connect to the abundant inexhaustible vital energy of the universe to overcome this obstacle, and the most accessible way to do this is by opening and connecting with the heart chakra.

For example practitioners such as Swami Sivananda and Paramahansa Yogananda have noted that without an open heart, attempts to engage the third eye rely more on personal willpower and effort, leading to exhaustion rather than effortless flow.

In Dzogchen and Mahamudra teachings, the heart centre is associated with the natural, spacious quality of awareness. An open heart allows for the effortless integration of body, mind, and subtle energies, supporting higher meditative states.

Typically this is done by balancing our focus-oriented meditation practices with compassion-oriented practices such as Tonglen, but I've never really clicked with this kind of exercise as it always feels contrived for me - I'm not really great at visualisation exercises in general.

But in this retreat a solution came to light that really works in opening the heart chakra well for me. It comes from both unregulated breathing, particularly exhaling without control which lightens the heart. But in addition to this, I found that the chin mudra (thumb and index finger connected with palms up) makes the heartbeat very discernable, and using this mudra allows the mindfulness of the unregulated breathing to naturally expand to include the heartbeat and eventually even more of the bodies subtle rhythms.

Krishnananda mentions that heart-centred meditation benefits greatly from natural processes like unregulated breath, as it mirrors the deeper rhythms of life. Compassion, he suggests, should be expressed actively in daily living rather than being forced during meditative absorption.

The subtle rhythms of the body

Stillness acts like a filter, removing the distraction of external and internal noise (e.g., thoughts, emotions, environmental stimuli). This allows finer, quieter sensations - such as the body’s rhythms or the subtlest movement of breath - to emerge into awareness. The salience landscape is essentially the "map" of what the mind deems important or worthy of focus. In ordinary states, this map is cluttered with competing stimuli. Through stillness, the salience landscape becomes simplified and reordered, prioritising finer, subtler aspects of experience over more gross or transient phenomena. As louder inputs fade away, the system dynamically recalibrates, assigning more weight to subtle rhythms, sensations, and patterns. This reordering is not forced but arises naturally as the mind settles into stillness.

The subtle rhythms of the body are founded in the breath and the heart creating pulsing waves of pressure in the blood, and there are many other more subtle layers of rhythm too. As one observes these and settles into stillness they become clearer, it's much like listening to the wind, water and insects in the forest.

With the heart chakra opened while resting in this stillness, one can really start to appreciate that we are ourselves an integral part of nature, and that we can bathe in the inexhaustible flow of vital energy within our own bodies just as we can when sitting quietly in the forest.

Natural breathing

This idea of "breath like a sleeping baby" in meditation is far from simple. You think you're breathing naturally, but after some time you realise that its subtly contrived leading to tension and even blocking chakras. An intense retreat setting is important for revealing subtle problems in breathing, because after hundreds of hours in meditation, even the most subtle problems will lead to very clear consequences.

The Buddhas advise of focusing on the breath entering and leaving the nostrils is not only a device for helping to prevent the mind from wandering, but also about ensuring that the initiation of the breath itself is coming from the right place to ensure lack of contrivance or control. His teaching of mindfulness of breathing (Anapanasati) focuses on observing the breath at the nostrils or upper lip. This focus ensures that the practitioner doesn’t interfere with the breath by over-controlling or over-emphasising physical sensations elsewhere in the body (e.g., chest or abdomen).

The nostril focus subtly shifts attention away from effortful breathing and toward passive observation, promoting natural, unforced rhythms. By anchoring attention at the nostrils, the initiation of breath becomes more subtle and less likely to involve contrivance, as the nostrils are a neutral point of observation, far from the muscular centres of control.

I learned the importance of this through direct experience on this retreat. At one point in the retreat I had started feeling a lot of abdominal discomfort during the meditation sessions which was getting worse day by day. I was thinking I might need to take a break for a few days to let it subside, but my intuition was telling me that it was something I was doing wrong in my meditation, and that I needed to observe the problem more closely and see what eased or aggravated it.

I noticed after a day or so of observation that while observing my breath, the pain would be aggravated if my focus was in the abdomen or chest, but it would begin to ease after some minutes when focused in the nostril area. This led to the realisation above about the importance of this area of focus for truly natural breathing, and the importance of natural breathing itself when meditating for many hours each day.

The helmet and the amulet

Shamatha is a structured approach to calming the mind, it's divided into ten levels which describe the kind of mental phenomena and obstacles the practitioner is likely to face along the path to ultimate calm abiding. Different schools and literature describe these levels differently, I use The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace as my definitive guide to Shamatha. Alan Wallace was the translator for the Dalai Lama for many years and is familiar with a wide range of Buddhist teachings and literature in both Tibetan and Sanskrit.

In the higher levels these phenomena are very clear and act as feedback to help the practitioner know with certainty whether they're going in the right direction and what level they're at.

The idea is to stabilise each level so that one can quickly and reliably lock in that level in every meditation session, and maintain it unbroken for the rest of the session - even it be hours long (although long mediations require the support of yoga as well, because they're very hard on the body).

The phenomena that are typical of level six come from successfully opening the heart chakra (anahata) and locking the eyes into the third-eye position (anja chakra). A sensation like an amulet or a jewel over the heart chakra becomes very pronounced and remains for the entire session. A tingling sensation in the forehead begins and expands around the head like a headband, then spreads to cover the head and ears like a helmet. These sensations are not at all subtle and lasts for the entire session - the amulet feeling has some definite weight to it and may spread out to cover the chest and shoulders, the helmet literally feels like you are wearing a real helmet.

Level six also comes with a definite reduction in difficulty, the energy is not driven so much by the will power, but by the natural inexhaustible reservoir of vital energy (prana or chi) that animates all living things.

Level seven also has a very definite and clear indicator - it is completely effortless. Where level six feels much easier, level seven is literally completely effortless. For this reason, it's a major milestone, because the practice becomes very blissful and self-motivating after level seven is achieved. Level seven is a completely different state of consciousness, as different from the normal waking state of consciousness as is being asleep or tripping on LSD.

During this retreat I have stabilised level six which for the last five years or so has been consistently present in most meditations, but broken into five or ten minute segments with lower level phenomena in between. I had experienced the helmet many times, but never the amulet until this retreat.

During the last ten years I have randomly experienced level seven half a dozen times or so, and only for mere seconds. On this retreat I have experienced it a few times, but now when it arises it locks in and remains for the rest of the session effortlessly. Unfortunately it's still completely random and I'm not sure what subtle thing I have right which allows it to arise - perhaps I need to find another sacred object like a key or a sceptre?!

Final thoughts

With all these subtle details needing to be aligned, the meditation can easily become bogged down with constant micro-adjustment such as keeping the mudra perfectly balanced and the chakras in a prefect vertical line etc. But it's important to remember that the foundation of the practice is to rest in the stillness of being not to be doing.

I find it best to spend the first five or so minutes settling in to position and making regular adjustments to these things, and then settle in to stillness ignoring any desire to make further adjustments. After definite phase-changes such as the helmet or amulet set in, some further micro-adjustments can be a good idea, but they should be done very slowly, deliberately and infrequently to consciously ensure that the stillness is not spoiled.

Here's my checklist of things that connect all the above concepts into the mediation sessions.

1. Mentally review your motivations and methods for doing the practice
2. Sit with spine straight and the chakras vertical with the base chakra firmly rooted such that the exhales can be felt in the base chakra being supported by the ground. Use the chin mudra (thumbs connected to index fingers palms up) with the chest slightly open.
3. Begin mindfulness of breathing with focus on the nostril area and exhales natural and into the groundedness of the base chakra.
4. Allow mindfulness of breathing to reveal the heartbeat, starting between breaths, allow micro-adjustments of posture for things to be balanced.
5. When the heartbeat is very pronounced, stop micro-adjustments and breath more lightly resting into stillness and begin locking the eyes into the third-eye position (anja chakra). Keep the eyes very slightly open allowing a little light in at the bottom of the eyelids, this allows a perceptual balance to be maintained between the inner and outer worlds and allows the inner content to remain rooted to the body-schema (your internal view of your body and surroundings).
6. The heart chakra and anja chakra will compliment each other working together and allowing the locking-in process to take place more easily and for long periods of time. Maintain a state of poise as if your state of presence is a timid animal that will run away if it notices any movement.
7. When settled in to stillness with the eyes are locked in for some time, a sensation of a jewel or amulet over the heart chakra and a headband or helmet will arise, this is feedback indicating a deepening state of meditative quiescence.