The most experienced meditation practitioners in the world regularly do retreats, so it's not about just connecting beginners with practice. It's about immersio

The most experienced meditation practitioners in the world regularly do retreats, so it's not about just connecting beginners with practice. It's about immersion. Are you going to learn French better by reading some books, or by going to France and living there for a while, using the language for practical purposes all day every day? > What might people share of meditation, given that it's such a personal experience? This is a question of phenomenology. If you can accurately describe your perceptual experience to someone who's very experienced, they can offer guidance. There are many common experiences to people practicing similar techniques (of which there are many). Those experiences tend to follow a pretty well defined pattern within each tradition. Generally speaking, if your practice involves building a very strong, relaxed, equanimous type of concentration, and using that concentration to deconstruct your survival mechanism of the experience of self and world, doing that for 8-12 hours a day every day while maintaining silence and doing basically nothing else besides walking and sleeping is going to be more conducive to that than practicing less intensively at home, with all of the distractions that regular life has built in. That's not to say it's impossible to do that on your own, but a retreat is built for it.