Part 7: Silent Meditation Retreat: So What Was the Lesson Learned?

I originally ended this reflection with these words:  

"I take away from the weekend the word "surrender". I hope I never forget it. The feel of it and what it means. Silent Meditation Retreat. No longer a challenge to be feared, but a safe and structured place in which to bravely attempt to find the gate. To be the gate. 

"Just this. Just this.""

Now, with more perspective, I can sound less like an inspirational text and a lot more honest. So what was the weekend all about? Does it end with naughty words and raucous laughter and we go on our merry way, with a little sanctimonious bit about "surrender", otherwise life as usual, as if it had never happened? Of course not. 

Deep breath. Here is what I learned: 

While my tile idea was a 'thought', it is still the closest I have yet come to being able to follow the breath, stay with it and not get lost in thought. At least for a little while! So a good thing. The realization of impermanence, the changing of everything moment by moment, was and remains awful. Literally, 'awe-ful' and awful, both. Having the shadowy little girl wrapped all over and around and through this realization makes it hard to separate what are her deep fears of abandonment from what is the Buddha's dictum: 'life is suffering, life is impermanent.' Though perhaps they needn't be separated, perhaps she is the specific who illustrates the general. The relative truth mirroring, for once, the Absolute Truth. 

The core fear is the fear of death. The child who trembled in her boarding school bed that night has been clinging on grimly ever since. "I will not die!" she vowed. And she hasn't. She hides her resolve with a happy face and winning ways. She is very good at getting what she wants which is basically everyone's love and approval. She is so frightened of death, she will do anything to keep the wolves far, far away from her door. The glimpse on the cushion of the moment by moment dissolution of life was enough to scare the hell out of her. Victor's talk : if you are your thoughts, and your thoughts are not real, where does that leave "you"? Further scary. Now her experience is being corroborated from the outside, from the trusted source, the teacher. No wonder Sunday Alison fell to pieces. Who was left to hold her together? In the miracle of life's endless cycles of death and rebirth, the child did rise again, reasserting herself as crudely as possible in that sacred setting, figuratively spitting at death. (And boarding school too for good measure).

The real gift of the weekend was bringing the child squarely into the light, for all to see, but especially me, to whom she has been hidden for so long, in true shadow form. The thing that everybody sees so clearly - 65% child and nobody disagrees! - and I remained oblivious. To see that Tran's assessment is based on evidence that I myself present, whoever "I myself" might be. 

Finally, that "I" and the child are one and the same!! This is huge for me, and a big yawn to everybody else. The child is not all bad: she is actually pretty great, with her enthusiasm and her energy, her big heart, her generosity, her courage, her ability to see wonders in just about anything. The child however suffers terribly. She is alert to any hint of falling out of favor, of being shut out, she desperately wants to be "good" in order to be accepted and safe, at whatever the cost to her own self.  She can sabotage the whole edifice of Alison all unknowing, and bring her down. 

Who is writing this reflection? Who holds the pen? The 5% adult chiefly functions as editor. Wise woman seems only interested in the big picture, the synthesis of worlds, inner and outer. Her voice is low and appears only when the child is written out. She comes and goes. Perhaps it is she who helps the child notice the miracles in the mundane. For sure it is she who is able to hold the child with compassion. But this leaves the child in charge! Manning the helm of the leaking canoe called self, in the treacherous and very adult waters of life. How did this happen?

And so back to "surrender". Child must feel safe enough to surrender to the other two; untried adult must step up and then surrender to wise woman; who must in turn surrender to impermanence; Life must surrender to Death. Surrender really is the key. Don't fight - embrace. What else can we possibly do?

Is this spiritual claptrap? 

Perhaps the most honest thing to say in the end is simply:

"I don't know. I don't know."

Part 4: Silent Meditation Retreat: Abandonment at Boarding School Revisited.

The little girl summarily dismissed with that perfunctory "Oh poor darling", I did sleep, like the dead. The bell next morning jarred me awake. I had to rush to my cushion for the first sit at 6:00 a.m.. Eyes barely closed, the tears began to fall. They continued through the walking meditation and back on the cushion throughout the next sit. I didn't imagine this had anything to do with the little girl. I still thought these were the tears of that general "sorrow".  My thoughts returned to my tile imagery of the first night and I found it shattering. How often had I heard life is impermanent, life is suffering; nodded and thought complacently, yes, of course. Makes total sense. And now here, crying on my cushion, I understood that until an intellectual concept is actively felt in the body, it is not truly understood. 

I skipped breakfast, went back to my room after the sit and exploded into sobs on my hard little bed, wracked with the sense that every moment, every breath: none of it will pass this way again. Good times too - irrevocably gone, moment by moment by moment. I had only ever experienced anything remotely like this when my mother died suddenly: it seemed that one moment, life stretched out before me, a wide sunny path; the next, it revealed itself to be a razor's edge, our hold on it perilous to say the least, great chasms dropping off to either side. There is a terrible clarity that comes with death: the things that don't matter fall away in sheets. But death is still a vast experience: this was microscopic. Breath by breath by breath. All changes. Nothing lasts. Nothing. 

Funny that I compared this to death early on in the writing of this reflection, unaware until much later, days after the fact, that it was death itself, MY specific death, that lay at the root of those tears. This was far closer to home than the axiom, "Life is suffering." My little girl, felt in the tight heart of the night before, was the one who was shattered. After spending an entire, excruciating year clawing her way into the light, now she is dismissed, and told she is "only a thought?" Oh no! This was a plunge back into darkest pit. This was that terrible night at boarding school all over again. What a place of nightmare for a child! Haunted country house of Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, a Gothic pile of turrets and cupolas and secrets, up on a lonely hill in the south of England. The little girl, eleven years old, lying in her bed with the thin mattress worn to the shape of countless other little bodies before hers, listening to the other nine little girls breathe in the cold room with the high ceilings and blue velvet curtains that were never drawn, and the moonlight playing over the sleeping figures, everyone asleep except me, my voice quaking, "Aren't we going to talk?" and somebody saying sleepily, "We're too tired." And the realization that this was it, this was my life now, Jane Eyre in her orphanage, no waking up from this one, I was awake and still the nightmare continued, no getting up and padding off to find my mother, she was on the other side of the world. My crying disturbed the others so much, one of them went to fetch Mother Glendon, our dormitory mistress, who in turn went to fetch my sister, five years older, who was somewhere on the other side of the building in her own senior quarters. And when she arrived at my bedside with her friend and a packet of Smarties, and I sat up and reached for my dressing gown, so happy to see her, so sure all would be better now, swinging my legs out of bed, searching for my slippers, it was so cold, we had come from the tropics, and this English school was so cold, and my sister saying, "What are you doing?" "Coming with you," I said. "You can't!" Oh! And that was almost worse than anything - to imagine you are saved and no, sorry, you still have to face the monsters under the bed all by yourself, you must live through this night alone. No reprieve. I think I died right there, clutching my Smarties, eating the little chocolates one at a time, the only good thing about that dreadful night, so starting a weight problem that would continue from then on. I survived of course, that worst night of my life until my mother died. Next morning I vowed I would never cry like that again, and I didn't until Mum died thirty years later, and then I couldn't stop.