Not surprisingly, your mind will behave differently while doing a Home Retreat especially when doing your formal meditation. In order not to start your retreat blocking yourself from skillful use of your time, try and try again, not to judge or compare your formal meditations to the best you’ve ever done or to compare your experience in the Home Retreat to what you’ve experienced in a formal retreat. Try to make no comparisons at all. Home Retreat is a different practice than a formal residential retreat. The conditions are different and though many of the tools are similar or the same, these skills are being exercised and developed in different ways and under different conditions.

    On formal retreat we are provided an environment where the retreat center or the monastery supports a very intense level of sense restraint, and it’s where we are further encouraged as individuals to take sense restraint to ever more subtle levels. On Home Retreat we are also practicing sense restraint, but on a much more active and wide ranging level. After all, the practice of Home Retreat is in the world and as a consequence the continuity of concentration will be different than what is generally available on formal retreat. Investigation and effort are being examined at a different level with different intensities. There is much more reflection, more samapajañña, than on a formal retreat, and as a consequence during formal meditation our minds will often be more active with various kinds of thinking. For most who do Home Retreat, fairly intense mental chatter will be present which, again, will lead to the arising of the hindrances and yogi mind in very big ways. These are some