from Kyabje Gelek Rimpoche's extended commentary on the Lama Chöpa:
When I say ‘session’, I am referring to the time when you meditate, when you really do a guru-yoga retreat. You don’t have to have a long-term retreat. Those who have the opportunity and the facilities, great. But you can do your Lama Chöpa retreat as twenty to forty minutes every day. Retreat means withdrawing from the lousy, noisy, usual daily chores, and retreating into the quiet, relaxed, happy, joyful atmosphere of your sweet home.
The time between sessions, called ‘interim’, is also extremely important. If you think that on retreat you can just sit there in your sessions and then, in between the sessions, you can go and watch television, you will find that it does not work. Really true. You can watch some television, it is okay, but if you watch some kind of funny movie, you will go back to your cushion and start thinking about it. You will wonder what John Wayne is doing! And then at night you will dream about John Wayne, too. That is not because you have watched too much John Wayne or are mentally connected with him. The protectors who look after you remind you, and give you signals reflecting your state of mind by means of wrathful or peaceful, angry or joyful dreams. All this is a mental reflection of yourself in the form of dreams. That’s why I dream a lot of John Wayne sort of things.
The traditional teachings recommend that in between sessions you should read about the practice you are doing or read biographies of those who became enlightened through this practice and how they did it. In a way, the biographies of the early masters are the real sort of mentor for us. If you look from that angle, the translation ‘mentor’ for lama might not be bad.