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.