Caught up in the daily whirl of thoughts and activities, few people access the tools they own to cultivate an awakened mind.

Although you may consider speeding up even more to get things done, stillness, mindfulness, and letting go may be the way for you to go. In canine-speak, you have to sit, be still, and stay. To this end, dozens of Buddhist centres in the Lower Mainland offer sitting meditation in hourlong sessions, on a cushion, for us humans. (See www.buddhismcanada.com/ for a comprehensive list.) In 2005, Harvard Medical School psychologist Sara Lazar found that meditation increases attention span, sharpens focus, and improves memory. Practitioners believe there are benefits in the area of stress relief, anger management, and general good vibes. A logical complement to meditation at a local centre is an organized retreat. These encompass many schools of Buddhist philosophy, from Zen to Theravada to Mahayana, but novice practitioners shouldn’t jump straight into the long form.

The theme of both short-evening sessions and the three-year retreats is the same: sit and stay. According to the Buddhist perspective, this physical stillness provides the basis for tapping into the innate goodness and ending the suffering created by attachments, habitual patterns, and judgment stemming from dualism. In Luminous Mind: The Way of the Buddha, a 1997 book based on a number of his written and oral teachings, Kagyü Tibetan Buddhist teacher Kalu Rinpoche states: “Mind is the basis of everything, of enlightenment as well as illusion.”

Buddhist John Fox has just returned from a winter Dathun (Tibetan for monthlong retreat) in Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island. Like many retreats in the area, the Dathun—organized through the Vancouver Shambhala Centre (www.shambhala.org/centers/van couver/), to which Fox belongs—offers a safe, secluded, quiet rural setting where practitioners commit to a led daily practice of sitting and walking meditation, with teachings interspersed. The retreats are fully catered and usually adhere to a rule of “functioning silence” (meaning that you talk only if necessary). They allow time and space to read and develop one’s own practice. The cost is an average of $250 per week. People can sign up for one-, two-, or three-week blocks.

“So many of the things you see out there seem to be spinning—I am not going to say spinning out of control, but you are not necessarily controlling your own spin,” Fox told the Straight. “What happens when you go away [on retreat] and get grounded is, you begin to [see] it is not so much a matter of control, but just a matter of getting in touch with seeing the effects of the spin.” When asked for an everyday example of “spin”, Fox painted a picture of a journalist trying to hand in a story by deadline and rushing off to pick up something at the supermarket, only to have senior fumble for change in front of her at the checkout counter. Rather than feeling compassion, our tendency is to build up a “story line” and antagonism, Fox said, and this creates our own suffering and suppresses our true nature.

Can we act differently? Do people not have the chance to be with their minds 24 hours a day? “That is a very true statement, but what ‘mind’ are they with?” Fox said. “You have to be skillful and patient and not too aggressive in terms of answering the question because they are as right as you are. They don’t have a reference point for stillness unless you create one for them.”

Fox is also undertaking an on-again, off-again three-year Shambhala retreat in Nova Scotia. So far he has completed one year. Norma Burke, practice director at Vancouver’s Nalandabodhi centre, told the Straight she did a similar kind of retreat at Cape Breton’s Gampo Abbey. According to Burke, a retreat is “a wonderful way to pacify the mind to a lot of distractions in the world”. “Quite often when we are out in the world, we want to meditate, but everything is always pulling us in every direction,” she said. “That is one of the purposes of retreat.”

At Nalandabodhi (www.vancouver.nalandabodhi.ca/), practitioners study under the auspices of the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, a lineage holder in the Nyingma and Kagyü traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.

“Buddhism is not a religion that proselytizes,” Burke said. “It does not try to force people. It basically says it is open for investigation if you want to check it out and then find out if it fits. This is one of the reasons I like it. It is very liberal. It is not aggressive, and offers an invitation to work with yourself.

“But on the other hand, from my experience, you have to be very involved with Buddhism,” she continued. “You can’t just study it. You have to put it into practice—both through your meditation and through your action in the world. There is a point at which it is not enough just to work on yourself. At some point you also say, ‘Okay, what can I do to try to benefit other people?’?” Not getting irate in the checkout line would be one small step.