If you're going to a meditation center for a meditation retreat, try on these ideas:

1) Take care of the details before you leave for a spiritual retreat center. Make sure your bills are paid.  Have someone check your voicemail and give them the emergency phone number for the retreat center that you'll be at.  If you have pets, make sure someone's there to take care of them and knows the vet's phone number. Change your voicemail to let people know that you are unavailable until you return for your meditation retreat.

2) Remind yourself that will forget some of the details… and you will freak out. I can guarantee that on your third day at any retreat — whether it's a Christian retreat center or a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center — you'll suddenly have the fear that you left the stove on, or the sprinkler running, or you have a door open that will allow all of your pets to leave. You'll be convinced someone could break into your home and turned it into a meth lab.

3) As best as you can, remember that no forgotten detail will ruin your life These are just the thoughts arise when you engage in a spiritual retreat.  Trust me, everybody's had those thoughts and the real joke is: even if they were all true, you're probably better able to handle the situation after 10 days on a meditation retreat.

4) Ask questions.  If this is your first time at the meditation center, there will be a lot of activities or ways of doing things that will be unfamiliar to you. And I don't mean crazy religious rituals, I mean things like "When's the best time to go to the bathroom?" or "Can I have seconds at lunch?" or "What should I do if I want to run screaming from the meditation hall?"  Find the one or two people who are managing the course and ask them questions rather than jumping to conclusions or living in the confusion of not knowing.

5) Entertain the possibility that "problems" are merely thoughts and the entire reason they're showing up at all is to distract you from your spiritual practice. In other words, let's say you're doing 10 hours of Tibetan meditation practice and suddenly you get the idea that a tiny tension in your neck is an indication that you have some sort of brain tumor.  Just entertain the possibility that your fear is only a distraction, nothing more, and see what happens.  It's not uncommon to have some loud, distracting thought that seems 100% real and must be attended to immediately… and when we think, "It's just a thought," we might not even remember it an hour later at  lunchtime.

6) Know when to say "No!" I know this'll sound like I'm contradicting a previous tip for being at a retreat center, but this is really a variation of "ask questions."  If something's going on, whether it's internal, like a physical sensation or emotions, or external, like being asked to engage in some unusual behaviors, be willing to say "No." Spiritual practice is about deeply knowing and trusting yourself.  And there's no better time to start that if the teacher pulls out some Kool-Aid and invites everyone to have a drink.

7) Don't look in the rearview mirror.  We like the idea of advancing along the spiritual path. But since there's no way of knowing how long the path is or how fast you are traveling, there's no real way to measure progress.  Seriously, even if you have the most amazing blissed-out, transcendent, God-realized, everything-is-one experience that any human being has ever reported in his or her life, that doesn't mean you've "gotten somewhere."  It's simply an experience.  And if the person next to you is the one who had that unbelievable, I've-only-read-about-it-in-books experience…  So what?  There's no real way to compare yourself to anybody else.  So don't bother.

Realize that you will look in the rearview mirror and compare yourself to everybody else!  It's just human nature. It's just the way our minds work. So you may as well enjoy it with a chuckle rather than thinking you shouldn't be doing it (and getting even more judgmental when you when you find that you are).  It never ceases to amuse me how at the end of a meditation course, where you were supposed to be only paying attention to yourself, everyone seems to know everything that happened to everybody else on the course.

9) Don't try to get it all.  At almost any meditation retreat or yoga retreat there will be some philosophical teaching.  You'll probably have the urge to try to "get it" as if there were a test at the end.  There is no test and you won't get it all, guaranteed.  Neither will anybody else, even though some people will try to convince you that they have.  Remember there is no test, so you don't need to cram for it.

10) Relax.  In Thailand, they have a saying, "my pen rai," which they translate as "there's no problem." But they say it in a way that suggests there's no problem, because you'll take care of it in the next lifetime. Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, anyone who's been to Thailand knows that this national slogan seems related to how calm and friendly the Thai people are.  There's no prize at the end of a meditation course for who's the best meditator, let alone for Miss Meditation-Congeniality.  If you don't do your meditation retreat perfectly — and you won't because nobody ever has — then remember, my pen rai.

Let me know how your retreat goes… and let me know if you've got other ideas for getting the most out of your meditation course.

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