Woah. Life.

We were warned.  Coming out of retreat can be a charged experience.  Megan, one of our genius instructors, shared that she had bawled in many an airport.  We were instructed not to make any rash decisions in the first week...not to look too closely at our partners, our jobs, our lives.  Spending a lot of time internally heightens your sensitivity.  You notice subtle shifts in your body, hear each gurgle as your stomach (and your neighbor's) settles after a meal, feel each heart flutter and chest compression from momentary anxieties, and smell the lavender and cypress lightly wafting through the air.  In the context of a hilly retreat center in northern California, shared with 90 people who have similar intentions, this can feel expansive and profound.  There, even coffee, a staple in my daily existence, began to feel too intense.  I had to sit with my pounding heartbeat after drinking it with breakfast, and found myself cutting down on intake.  I truly felt like someone had given me a new glasses prescription, as each yellowing blade of dried grass and clump of green Spanish moss stood out so crisply for me to consider.

But that level of atunement has a shadow side. When I had to go through security a second time in the airport on my flight out, after forgetting to dump out my water bottle, the embarrassment and annoyance nearly broke me.  I felt my chest swell and throat tighten.  Thoughts of the injustice, "Seriously, do I look like a terrorist?  And I really have to go back around again!" and humiliation, "I ALWAYS remember to do this.  Now I have to cut the line on the other side, and other people will be annoyed with me for bumping them back for my carelessness," flooded my mind.  It was like all the safeguards against these sorts of slights were temporarily unavailable to me, and I felt all of the emotions in vivid technicolor.   I pulled myself together and made it to the other side without further incident, my first introduction back into the real world in my semi-altered state having been a less than ideal experience.

You can imagine what coming back into the city was like.  There are moments of potential stress loaded into every second outside of the door.  Grown men yelling at each other across the square, bus horns honking, cars drifting dangerously close to my fragile body on two wheels.  I had formerly built up defense mechanisms to manage this, so much so that I didn't even recognize them.  Until my forcefield was gone.  There is a low grade stress tolerance that we all must learn to live with in order to survive without breaking down at each corner.   And that doesn't even begin to touch on the bigger life experiences that dominate many waking hours. Relationship woes, job pressures, money matters, etc. Everything I felt so deeply.  So intensely.

I felt like a kid who had gone into a one week intensive ninja training.  I emerged with all the skills that I had honed so carefully in the safe haven of ninja training camp, but then had no idea how to apply them to my life.  When I would try to sit with my emotions, to breath, to notice, I was finding myself knocked over by the force of it all.  Too many enemies attacking all at once.  Not just a dummy trainer with soft fists. It was all I could do not to curl into a fetal position for that first day back in the city.

The first night, completely overwhelmed by an emotionally hyper-charged day, I did not attend the sangha sit that I had promised myself I would attend from the safety of ninja training camp.  Instead, I drank two gin and tonics while playing french fry jenga at a local dive bar.  I sat in the company of close friends and laughed until my sides hurt.  I didn't try to sit with the experience, I just had it.  And it was blissful and normalizing.

Part of the skill, I think, is going to be finding the ebb and flow.  The times for discipline, and the times to relax about it.  When I finally let go of the idea that I HAD to sit Sunday night, I felt a wave of relief wash over my entire body.  Sometimes I sit with my pain, and sometimes I drink my gin and tonic and give it all some space to air out.  Until I reach true Ninja Master status, this is going to have to be The Way.

Shut up and dig in.

2 1/2 days of silence was not intimidating to me.  As an introvert, it actually was a relief to take some time to not perform, to avert my gaze rather than engage, and to not worry about how others perceived me.  BUT.   2 1/2 days of intentionally noticing my thoughts and emotions.  Without distraction of the internet, reading, journaling, music-making, or even offering a "god bless you" to a nearby sneeze.  That was the beast.  It turned out that even a fairly happy well-adjusted person as I have considered myself to be, at least up until this point, has quite a beast lurking.  And it's not thrilled about being poked and prodded with awareness.

I am 1/2 way through a one week retreat with Mindful Schools in Petaluma, CA, which I thought would look a lot more like training on techniques and a lot less meticulous examination of my inner world.  It turns out (duh), to be good at this stuff, to be REALLY good at this stuff, you've got to excavate your own inner workings and give them a good hard look.  Blech.

For 2 1/2 days in silence, we alternated between a seated and walking meditation, for 1/2 hour to 45 minutes at a time.  We broke for meals, which good already, were made especially out of this world by virtue of the fact that it was our only external stimulus for that period of time.  I found myself in bed for after lunch breaks and immediately after my evening sit at 9pm, in part to escape the dreaded experience of sitting in the chaos of my mind.

I wish I could report out all the profound revelations I had during this time.  The trippy mind-blowing experiences.  In reality, I spent the majority of the first morning thinking about how bad my feet smelled, wondering if the woman next to me had brought lavender back from a walk to ward off the stench, and noting how piercing the pain was running up the right side of my body.  I spent the rest of the day in a mental war with the Erratic Walkers, who had he audacity to show up and walk perpendicular to and in my space despite EXPLICIT instructions to maintain distance and walk 15 paces back and forth.  I constructed elaborate responses, ranging from gently reminding them to "get the 'f***' out if my space" to writing a post-it note to our teachers to get them to chide my foot trafficking enemies.  It is astounding how many times one can come back to such thoughts. How many different minute variations one can have on the same thought when there is nothing else to grab on to.

Slowly I was able to disentangle some of those thoughts, long enough to connect with the promised stillness.  It wasn't anything particularly profound...Every now and then could really feel the earth under my feet, or notice the way I was pulling my breath up through my chest.  I could connect with the space between the noise, and it was so sweet.  

Day 2, I continued to struggle, but there were greater moments of relaxation between mind clutter.  In the afternoon when some real hurt from my recent breakup surfaced, I was able to hold it and feel the waves of sadness crash over me without drowning in them.

Simultaneously, I noticed the gentle breeze in my face and breath ebbing and flowing.  It felt good to release the emotion rather than wrenching.  I was anchored enough In this world that I could handle the tumult happening inside.  And then, an amazing thing happened.  It subsided. 

Because all emotions are fleeting.  Evenmy rage at the inconsiderate walkers died down when I turned my attention to it.  Even my excruciating back pain morphed and softened.  It was when I stopped fueling these experiences with stories about my pain, and turned a nonjudgmental compassionate gaze in their direction, that I was able to find the space around them.  To take the edges off.

When I finally was allowed to journal, and then speak of my experience, on Day 3, I cried.  Nay, a monsoon explode from my eyeballs.  I was so overwhelmed by how much there had been to feel.  I couldn't, and still can't, believe that I live every day with so much emotional interplay with the world.  I am just not usually so tuned into it.  There are too many episodes of House of Cards to watch and promotional emails to delete.  

The retreat model eases us back into the world, and we are still sitting up to 2 hours a day and walking up to an hour.  I am checking my phone once a day, though I see many of my contemporaries with them glued back onto their hip belts.

 I hope they are more skillful than I at noticing how they use their devices as distraction from life's discomforts.  Apparently, at least in my world, there are many.  But there are also joys.  Deep joy from the birds at the fountain I didn't notice until we stopped yapping at all our meals.  Or the insane coloration of the evening sky.  Or the rustling of the tall grasses from the winds.  

I'm not yet sure what this all means for when I return in a few days time.  Being able to soften around my humanity felt compelling enough to keep doing the work, as did connecting to the small beauties in life, though I can't yet imagine what that practice will look like in the comfort of my home.  Until then, I'll enjoy the support I have to remain here now.