7 Days of Silent Awareness

I finally had the opportunity to attend a silent meditation retreat last week, organized by the Mid-America Dharma organization in Kansas. It was a transformative experience that initiated a daily practice I've been yearning for. Insight and mindfulness meditation have played a crucial role in my journey from suffering while in the downs of life shifts, to achieving a sense of wholeness and completeness.

The retreat was everything I imagined and nothing that I had imagined. I had read and heard from others that your first retreat is usually difficult and I had already decided before I went that my body wouldn’t be able to take all the sitting.

However, my hips and knees really didn’t bother me much at all. It was my upper back, shoulder, chest area and neck on the right side of my body where I experienced the most discomfort. Interestingly, on the sixth day of this week-long retreat I became aware that I was turning my face towards the direction of the sun! Hence the pain 🙂 I was a sunflower!

At one point I noticed a sense of boredom, which was interesting because I looked forward to getting up every morning and sitting. I also found that I could sit for longer periods of time in the morning, so I made it a point to try to sit for as long as I could, which got to be about an hour and a half.  I know I could have sat longer but my mind eventually won.

You see we’d sit before breakfast and when the bell rang to end our 45 min session most people left to get breakfast, and the vegetarian food at the retreat was simple but delicious! I recall this one morning when I was sitting there after everyone left thinking, “Oh, I hope there’s food for me when I'm done sitting. I bet everyone will eat it all since it’s so good and then I will l have to eat cereal.”  This went on for a while until I finally decided that I better go eat. 

I went down to the kitchen to partake in this wonderful food and was so surprised when I saw that I had sat for 90 minutes! I looked towards where the food was laid out and ugh! It was just leftover oatmeal and quinoa from the day before, not even cocoa or maple quinoa at that. No special, wonderful food. I broke my meditation for this! It was at that moment that I saw how the mind had convinced me that a future event would be better than the experience of peace that I was having in the present moment.

The morning of the last day was clear and beautiful, and as I was preparing to leave, I was surprised that I had become very attached to these people that I hadn't spoken to during the week I was at the retreat! I didn’t know anything about them, and would probably never see them again.

I realized that I had developed a deep connection with people by just sitting in meditation and eating together in silence for the past 7 days; connections that are already present in our life.  It was an amazing moment of clarity for me.  It’s Aloha. We are connection regardless of who we are, where we are, or what the conditions are in our lives.

The day before the retreat ended, I noticed that some anxiety had returned, and my mind was super busy in meditation but when I returned home, I was very much at peace.  Maybe that last bit of agitation needed to surface so it could be cleared before I left.  I don’t know.  I’m still learning.  What I do know is that I want to experience this process of allowing and releasing through silent meditation, something I now am able to do at home. But it’s not the same. I do hope I can get to another silent retreat soon.