Silent Retreat #4

Ummm WTF Just Happened?

It’s August 2020. COVID. No vaccine yet. Time for my annual silent retreat.

But the retreat center is closed.

Pivot.

All of humanity is pivoting. No biggie. I’ll do a silent retreat at home.

Husband and Teen will go to the NC mountains to ride bikes.

I’ll spend my days reading, meditating, yoga-ing, going for walks.

Same rhythm as going away on retreat - except interpolated with the doings of daily living: taking care of the chickens, walking my sweet dog, warming up meals, washing dishes.

I’ve been spending the three years since my first silent retreat delving deeper into spiritual … everything. More study, more meditation, even learning some dope woo-woo tricks.

I’m now certified in Reiki, I’ve looked into dowsing, I’ve started seeing energy.

Yes, I know how this sounds.

I can hear myself.

I would be rolling my eyes, too.

But what can I tell you? I’ve always promised to be honest.

I woke up one morning and could see energy in the air, vibrating in things, swirling around people. I’ll say more about this another time. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s pretty embarrassing to talk about.

Anyway, so. August 2020, I feel like I’m understanding more about the Universe and maybe even How Things Work.

I’m feeling pretty puffed up about this, if I’m being honest. Like, “Ooh, like at me. I’m all spiritual and whatnot.”

Are you picking up the unsubtle foreshadowing I’m putting down here? 

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

Retreat time.

I turn off all media, drape a scarf over my television, and settle into silence.

Day three. I’m starting to think maybe this will be just a not-much-happens, but-still-very-good-to-do-for-a-reset, retreat.

I’m reading Teresa of Avila on my back porch. Chilling. Then: BAM.

Out of nowhere, something hits the top of my head.

It feels like an egg has dropped from the sky onto my head, except instead of goopy yolk and egg white trickling into my hair, a crack jolts down my vertebrae. A straight shot from crown to tailbone.

It feels like when I got an epidural and they wiggled the needle wrong and it lit up my nerves like electricity.

Like that. ZAP.

And then: nothing.

No. Not nothing: nothingness. 

Blank, total, nothingness. 

I can still see everything around me, my vision isn’t gone, but I also see only bleak, blank void.

Again, that overlay of two —equally real— things at once.

And then the bottom falls out of the world.

It’s cold and scary and I immediately know: Holy shit. None of it matters.

None of it matters.

None of everything I’m puffed up about - reiki, being all spiritual, energy, research, books, education, significant experiences - none of it matters.

Nothing is real. Nothing is real.

I stand up from my hammock chair. The floor is solid beneath me. I haven’t really slipped into a void.

How long does the physical feeling of cold and spinal jolt last? Half a second, realistically. It feels longer. But it fades. The void, though: it sticks. Nothing is real. Nothing is real.

I feel hollow, empty, and deeply unsettled.

Honestly, scared.

I mean. How do you function in a world where nothing is real?

It does not compute.

I can’t make sense of it because it doesn’t make sense.

And yet it’s happened, and I know it’s important.

It throws me off kilter. Way off. If nothing is real, does that mean nothing matters?

What about the people I love? Are they real? Surely they are real.

What about the love I feel for them? That’s real. Surely it’s real.

But I can’t shake the feeling. Everything, every moment, is suddenly up for grabs.

Shit. Is this burrito real? Are these chickens real? The chair I’m sitting in? This book? 

Let me tell you: it gets difficult to live your life and be chill and walk your dog through the neighborhood when you have a pervasive sense that nothing is real.

It’s profoundly destabilizing.

So I do what I do: I hit the books.

But I can’t find or think of anywhere I’ve read about this from Christian mystics. Is this Saint John’s “Dark Night of the Soul”? That doesn’t seem to quite fit.

My other “spiritual” experiences and visions made sense. This one… just … doesn’t.

WTAF am I supposed to DO with this experience? There’s no pocket to put this in. Pockets are an illusion. Jeans are an illusion. Even illusions are an illusion?

Husband and Teen come home a few days later. That helps.

It’s difficult to maintain a spiritual and /or existential crisis (if that’s what this is) when people are around and you simply need to get stuff done: wash the dishes, do the laundry, go back to work, walk the dog, drive Teen somewhere, check in with your mom, listen to how your husband’s day was, get some more work done. 

Little by little, I come back into some semblance of kilter. I go to Quaker Meeting on Zoom. I read. I read some more.

Six months later, I’m functioning pretty well, but still rolling off-camber.

I schedule a Zoom visit with a Buddhist I respect.

She listens to my story. It feels so enormously good to get it off my chest. (I haven’t told anyone. Not even Husband, who I usually debrief with after retreats.)

This Buddhist? She nods like she totally understands what I’m talking about. Like it makes total sense. No problemo. 

“Jen. Have you read about the Buddha?”

“A little. Not as much as I’d like.” 

“If you read a little more, you’ll find that the Buddha said, ’Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.’”

Okaaaay. I wait for this to make sense.

“What you felt was the emptiness,” she says. 

“Oh.” 

“It’s neat that you’re a Quaker and don’t know any of this stuff, and yet you still had this experience.” She makes it seem like what happened was a known Buddhist thing.

“It was scary,” I tell her. “And cold. My other spiritual experiences were warm. They’ve always been warm.”

“Mm. Yes. It felt cold because it’s clean. It’s just … clean. Like a knife going into a cake and coming out clean. It was scary because it’s vast.”

“I felt like a speck of dust, or less.”

She nods. “Mm-hm.”

Silence.

“It worries me to think things aren’t real. I’m worried I’ll become one of those weird new-agey vaccine-deniers who think COVID isn’t real.

I swallow and continue, “I’m worried because what if I think I can ignore people’s suffering because I had this experience of nothing being real? So I start to think … oppression isn’t real?”

There. I said my biggest worry. It’s out.

She smiles with kindness. “No,” she says gently. “No. I don’t worry about that with you. That’s spiritual bypassing. It’s an excuse to ignore suffering, to ignore the call to serve. Suffering is real because people really experience suffering.”

Am I less confused? I don’t know.

“Oh Okay. So … but … what do I do now?”

She shrugged, but not in a dismissive way. “Give yourself time to integrate it. What else is there to do? There is a Zen saying: ‘Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.’”

“Ha. Enlightenment. That is not me. I worry all the time. Enlightened people don’t worry.”

“That’s okay. Chop wood, carry water.”

“So, walk the dog, do the laundry?”

“That sounds right.”

That was nearly four years ago.

The Great Cosmic Echidna knows I’m not an Arhat. Still, and likely always, nowhere close to enlightenment.

I’m a petty, messy little thing.

But I won’t dismiss or diminished what I’ve experienced.

I’ve learned from reading mystics. Widely. Hinduism, reading and rereading the Upanishads and Vedanta teachings. I pore through more and more Buddhist perspectives. The Jesus movement and Quaker abolitionists. And back to Buddha.

I find comfort in the shared concept of maya: the illusory nature of the physical world.

Maybe an egg of maya plopped me on the noodle for half a second.

It’s so easy to forget when I’m caught up in things.

But even now the floor goes out from under me sometimes. It’s a reminder. (Or an inner ear problem. Who can say?)

Even easier than forgetting is second- guessing myself. Doubting my experiences. Life has trained me to do that.

But these things, and more, happened. Happen. And they change me, every time.

They’ve taught me that it’s all very simple and it’s all a big, giant mess of contradictions.

Maybe, just maybe, the point is to be able to hold both of those things, and so much more, at the same time, in the same heart.

Just notice it. Take note.

Let it live in my heart.

And then: walk the dog, do the laundry.

Love to each and every one of you. Thanks for reading.

XOXO