I’m gearing up for my annual week-long silent retreat, and it has me thinking: how did the practice come to mean so much?
I don’t talk about these retreats a lot, but when I do, most folks have two questions:
Is it hard to be quiet for a whole week?
Uh. Why do you do that? What’s the point?
I’m mulling this over as I write, so I’ll start with the second question. I’ll get to the first one another time.
So: WHY.
The first time, I felt a pull. A leading, in Quakerspeak.
I’d been feeling it for years but finally I made a reservation at a retreat center. At the last minute I thought, Why not try being silent?
I was nervous. I am anxious by nature. But after a bumpy first day or two I settled in. And I learned a lot.
By the end of the week, the world was feeling … shifted.
I wasn’t surprised to be in touch with the “Beyond Within,” as Quakers say. That wasn’t a first.
What was new was that the Beyond Within also felt externalized - maybe let’s call it the Beyond Outside. Or just The Beyond.
Hey, that’s funny. The Beyond. That’s what my favorite Georgia O’Keeffe painting is called.
Just looking around my stark little room at the retreat center, I started feeling pretty damn sure there was a lot going on, like really there — existing, knowable, just beyond my peripheral vision. I’m talking holy divine mystical stuff that was REAL. Realer then real.
I was quite certain. But I also wasn’t sure at all.
Because, I mean, how can you be sure of any of this kind of thing?
It starts to get way meta and epistemological.
How do you know that you know what you know?
My uncertainty was compounded by a strong habit of self-doubt. I’d had decades of practice ignoring or denying important experiences. These included spiritual visions in childhood, clinical anxiety, my appetite, and experiences of sexual harassment and rape.
In each of these instances, people I trusted, who were doing the best they could with the information they had, told me that these experiences were not real or legitimate.
I had been conditioned not to trust myself.
So on this retreat, I was sure of what I knew and I also doubted everything about it.
Self-doubt might not sound like that big a deal. But it started tearing me in half.
With nothing to distract me from my experience, it became increasingly painful. Physically and emotionally unsettling. Like ants in your pants, but instead of your pants, they are crawling around your soul.
Desperate, I did the only thing I could think of. I closed my eyes and asked the Universe for a sign - any old sign would do.
Well, actually, not any old sign. If it could please, please be a sign that would leave no doubt. I was already doubting, I didn’t need more of that. Please, just a clear, unmistakable sign that what I was sensing was real.
I opened my eyes and looked around. Nothing. No signs. Butkus.
Well, shit. Thanks a lot.
Disappointed, frustrated, antsy, I laced up my sneakers and went for a walk.
Nothing happened.
Until suddenly something happened.
I’ll explain.
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