The very silence and seclusion that frees you from workaday concerns can also give you time to get immersed in other concerns—notably personal or family issues that in everyday life might visit you, and even revisit you, but not settle in for a long stay. What’s more, being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty. Which is just as well, when you think about it. Isn’t much of the point of Buddhism to confront suffering rather than evade it, and by confronting it, by looking at it unflinchingly,
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