7 Days of Silent Awareness

I was finally able to attend a silent meditation retreat this past week put on by the MId-America Dharma organization, located in Kansas.  It was life changing and got me started on a daily practice that I have been longing for.  Insight and mindfulness meditation has been instrumental in my growth from suffering individual to whole and complete personhood.

The retreat experience was a mixture of a lot of things.  It was everything I imagined and nothing I had imagined. I had read and heard that your first is usually difficult and I had notions 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. Funny thing, 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 am a sunflower!

At one point I started feeling a little bored, which was interesting because I really 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 I’ve got to say the vegetarian food at the retreat was simple but completely 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 get done. 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 the cocoa and maple quinoa at that. No special, wonderful food. “I broke my meditation for this!” It was quite transforming for me to see 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 quite surprised to notice that I had become very attached to these people that I’d never spoken to, didn’t know anything about, and would probably never see again. I realized that I had developed a deep connection just by sitting and eating together every day for the past 7 days; these same connections that are already present every day of our life.  It was an amazing moment of clarity for me.  It’s a way of living that I try to live (Aloha) wherever I am no matter what the conditions are.

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 agitation just needs to surface so it can clear.  I don’t know.  I’m still learning.  I do know that I want more and hope to get to another silent retreat soon.