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I’m happy to know your retreat was a good one. I recommend making another soon. You said you cut the last one short owing to feeling tense and distracted. If the cycle of attachment is to be broken, however, it’s very important for you to stay the course through bouts with all kinds of tension. I realize that the tenseness one may experience during lengthy sessions of invocation is “phenomenologically” different from the physiological tension you’ve reported before in connection with concupiscence. But they’re nonetheless related.
When I recommended you avail yourself of the sacrament of confession, submitting then to whatever penance the priest might assign, you said you preferred not to—that is, preferred not to engage in a “combative strategy” on the plane, as it were, of the sin itself, and that you wished instead to take up a position above that plane, reposing in the mantram alone. I understand this perfectly. Nonetheless it’s important that this “supra-position” be brought to bear in some way on your habitual tendency; otherwise the formal retreats, collected or distracted as the case may be, will not “radiate” into the rest of your life.
One way to assist in this “radiation”, or in any case to render it more likely, is to make a special effort to stay within the “repose” of the “supra-position” come what may—even if you start feeling like “climbing the walls”. As with any session of meditation, you should feel free to stand up occasionally, take a few steps, or turn from side to side, so as to keep your body reasonably comfortable. On the other hand, you should resist the temptation to abbreviate the session simply for the sake of comfort.
“My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Nonetheless there is a yoke and a burden. Spirituality entails discipline, though in the final analysis the real difficulty lies in keeping things simple, which means having the presence of mind to turn away from provocations in the very first instant you become aware of them—when the turning is as yet no more burdensome than blinking one’s eye.