Retreat: Be Fearless

This weekend I attended a three-day Vipassana retreat at Camp Child, nestled high in the Rocky Mountains 20 miles west of Helena, Montana. For those of you who meditate – do a retreat. Thirty minutes or an hour here and there, even a regular practice, will be infinitely overshadowed in spiritual depth by an extended period of silence and contemplation. I still feel the reverberations of the 10-day retreat I did nearly four years ago.

This retreat was titled, “Conscious Living, Conscious Dying” and was led by an incredible teacher, Ginny Morgan, herself sitting with terminal cancer. Her stories of humor and courage kept us laughing and feeling ever so deeply for her that our own struggles seemed oh so small.

Yet struggle I did. This was the first retreat in my life that I did not feel ‘blissed out’ about half of the time. In fact, this time I struggled to even hold a very short focus on my breath or other meditative object. My mind instead was flooded with thoughts, as it surely has been for some time (my meditative practice has been shabby at best for about 9 months). I could spend entire meditations just thinking, playing out conversations in my head – how they went, how they should have gone, or future conversations I might have. In the midst of this, even the briefest moments of clarity, awareness, and presence came as such blessings.

In a break for a teacher interview I spoke of my recent experiences and the gnawing ache in my heart, saying that I just wanted to cry and get it all out. Ginny, in her warm Missouri drawl said,

“you want, but you can’t have. You just have to sit and let what is happening happen. You are in a place of grief; just allow it as you can. You cannot force it.”

So I sat. Comforted by this truth yet still plagued by mental activity.

The next morning I again sat, and sat some more. The hours of silence, pierced only by the birdsong outside the windows, slowly cut through the busy mind. Beyond all my stories, beyond all my conversations lie some Truth, just waiting for the mind to shut up to show itself. And show up it did. Just minutes into a walking meditation before lunch it hit me, not in the head but in the heart and stomach. It stopped me in my tracks, an emptiness so heavy that for a moment I could not breathe.

Thinking, “this is it,” I made my way to my cabin and lay in my bunk, silently waiting. And it hit again. This time I let it flow, gripping and twisting my body, tears streaming. It was fear, not grief, but fear.

“I am afraid,” I realized from the deepest pits of my existence.

And then it ended, just as suddenly as it had begun. “I am Not Afraid,” said my heart as the last upheaval settled. I am released. I have let go. I have loss, and yet I have freedom.

And yet I knew then that what I really had was merely a glimpse of freedom. Ginny had told a story of an old Zen master who saw students hit by sudden satori, but that after that, he said, the real work begins. And so with me: I was hit by a sudden freedom, but I know that the real work of fearlessness is still ahead of me, perhaps a life-long journey.

Upon leaving the retreat, after many laughs, hugs, and stories, we shared some dark chocolate. Here is what I found in mine:

And they say there are no coincidences.